Today, the conservative Illinois Review urged readers to watch a recent CAN-TV interview (full video after the jump) with 11th District GOP congressional candidate Marty Ozinga, asserting: "[Y]ou'll be impressed and encouraged to learn more about this exceptional quality candidate." The interview is an hour long and the first 35 minutes or so are spent discussing Ozinga's concrete business and personal background. The final 20 minutes are devoted to policy matters. And Marty's comments on health care are ... pretty unimpressive.
For instance, here Ozinga minimizes the health care crisis in American by asserting that everyone has access to "health service" -- via emergency rooms:
FRANK AVILA (host): Now what can be done about all the uninsured people and the under-insured people?
OZINGA: There are very few people nowadays that have no health service at all. Almost anybody -- I don't care who you are -- you go to the hospital and you get taken care of.
Marty is clearly taking his cues from President Bush, who made this statement in July 2007:
"I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room."
So Ozinga -- like Bush -- thinks that access to emergency rooms represents adequate health care for the 47 million Americans without insurance? Has he checked out the state of our ERs lately? Back in 2006, the Institute of Medicine released these findings:
The report found that 114 million people, including 30 million children, visited emergency rooms in 2003, compared with 90 million visits a decade ago. In that same period, the number of U.S. hospitals decreased by 703, the number of emergency rooms decreased by 425, and the total number of hospital beds dropped by 198,000, mainly because of the trend toward cheaper outpatient care, according to the report.
And things have only gotten worse in the years since. The recent deaths of Esmin Green and Edith Isabel Rodriguez -- on the floors of their local emergency rooms -- have provoked numerous reports on our overflowing and understaffed hospitals.
But apparently Marty hasn't been paying much attention to those types of stories. Indeed, he repeatedly touts the quality of U.S. health care during the interview while railing against government-run systems:
OZINGA: What I am opposed to is the government actually setting the rates and setting the standards that define what healthcare is and what it costs: where you go to the governent to say, "I need a doctor," or "I need this procedure," and the government tells you where to go and when it's going to take place and all of these sorts of things. That's a bad system. Most places in the world that have this kind of coverage wish they didn't. Lots of those folks come here to get the quality and the service they need.
I believe that we have probably got the best health care on the planet in terms of quality and service. But we have costs associated with that that are getting out of hand and running away.
Cross-national comparisons of health care quality and coverage are notoriously sticky, so it's a bit difficult to address Ozinga's claim about planetary health care (though feel free to give it a shot in the comments section). But it's worth noting that the sector of the American public most satisfied with the U.S. health system are the elderly. And who provides most of the elderly with their coverage? The government does.
Here's the full video of the interview:
