Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Some Not So Fun facts for Firefighters....

...Or ANYONE concerned about rising healthcare costs, as the costs of treating people who do jobs like these is staggering and growing larger every day.

The odds of a fulltime, paid firefighter, in the USA, getting cancer are 1 in 2. A firefighter’s chance of getting asbestosis is an astounding 80%!

How so?

Because asbestos is found in so many of the things that firefighters routinely encounter – the insulation found in older tenements, brake linings in cars, etc.

Both gasoline and diesel fuel contain benzenes, which are a highly carcinogenic group of hydrocarbons. Carcinogenic compounds increase your risks of getting cancer tremendously.

Smoking, for instance, increases one’s chances of getting lung cancer by some 25 times. Paid urban firefighting increases one’s chances of getting lung cancer by almost 120 times!

At car fires, battery acid can be aerosolized and those corrosive gases breathed in. Plastics and many other common polymers break down into highly toxic by-products, like various cyanides (ie. hydrogen cyanide is a very common by-product of plastics combustion). PCBs are also a very common carcinogenic substance, found in the breakdown of many various plastics.

I’ve been a paid firefighter in New York City for over two decades and I pay extra for cancer-related health insurance, even though New York State has the “Cancer Bill,” that presumes the cause of many cancers that most impact firefighters to be “job related.”

Advocates of Universal Healthcare have increasingly moved away from touting England’s and Canada’s flawed systems and taken to admiring the Dutch and Swiss systems, which are largely private insurance driven models.

According to Regina E. Herzlinger, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, “The Swiss and Dutch systems share one terrific feature - universal coverage. Americans increasingly want this. Both achieve universal coverage using private sector insurers, at far lower cost than the U.S. - 12% of GDP for Switzerland and 10% for the Dutch, versus a staggering 15% for the U.S. in 2003. They also have far better health outcomes than the U.S., even when Switzerland is compared to socio-demographically similar U.S. states such as Connecticut and Massachusetts.

The Swiss are required to buy health insurance themselves, using their own money -- they account for 65% of health care expenditures. If individuals cannot afford it, most Cantons transfer funds to them. There are neither employer nor government health-insurance programs for the poor or elderly. The Swiss government accounts for only a quarter of the health-care spending versus nearly 50% for the U.S.

The Swiss system is consumer-driven because consumers themselves pay for their purchases. The Dutch government, in contrast, funds consumers to purchase their own health insurance to a much greater extent -- five million people in the country are on some sort of government dole. Thus, when the Dutch buy their insurance, they may think they are using other people's money.

“The results? The Swiss have lower health-care inflation - 2.8% versus 4.1% for the Dutch and the U.S. from 1996-2003 -- and substantially more in the way of health-care resources. And Switzerland tops the world in most measures of user satisfaction.”

I'd think that the Swiss system is by far the best and most efficient healthcare delivery system out there. It is consumer-driven and almost entirely privately operated via competing private insurers. It's a systems Americans could live with, apparently free from the healthcare and procedural rationing that plagues most government-run systems.

1 comment:

johnsmith said...

Firefighters quickly placed the blaze under control. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.One firefighter suffered minor injuries after something fell on his foot, but he was able to finish his shift.


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