Native Americans no fans of government-run health care

by Bryan Fischer at AFA.net

One of the striking things about the health care debate is that in all the left’s bloviation about the wonders of a government-run system, no one uses a current, U.S. based system as a model. Medicare is going bankrupt, states are worried about the unfunded mandates in Medicaid, and stories emerge every week about substandard care in the VA system.

As Terry Anderson writes in the Wall Street Journal, Native Americans have been on the receiving end of government-run health care for decades. The Indian Health Service (HIS) runs 48 hospitals and 230 clinics on various tribal reservations.

The IHS currently spends about the same per Native American as Finland, Japan, Spain and other countries Obama has said demonstrate that we can spend less and get better outcomes.

So how’s it all working? Well, rates of infant mortality, heart disease, HIV/AIDS, liver cancer, and inflammatory bowel disease are significantly higher, and diabetes-related deaths are four times higher than among non-Hispanic whites.

Life expectancy is four years less among Native Americans than the population as a whole. Rural Indians fare even worse. On one reservation in South Dakota, life expectancy is 58 years while the national average is 77.

The motto on reservations is “don’t get sick after June” – because that’s when the federal dollars usually run out. In addition, fraud, waste and mismanagement is a problem. In 2008, the GAO reported that the IHS lost $15.8 million worth of equipment between 2004 and 2007, and allowed $700,000 worth of computers to be ruined by bat dung.

As a consequence, a number of tribes are moving away from the IHS system and doing tribal contracting, where they provide their own health care with funding from the IHS. They administer their own hospitals and clinics, and as a result wind up with better access and better quality care.

In other words, the nation’s first people are moving away from more government control over health care, based on bitter experience, at the same time the Democrats want to move in just the opposite direction. Here’s a chance for the Dems to show how racially sensitive they are by allowing their Native American brothers to teach them a thing or two about government-run health care.