The Only Option That Makes Sense
Recently, both the House of Representatives and the Senate released details of their health care reform plans, and thankfully they have included, among other things, a government-run health care option. And you know what that means: It’s time for some Republican fearmongering!
It’s socialized medicine!
A bureaucrat will be in charge of your healthcare!
Higher taxes!
Lions!
Tigers!
Bears!
House Minority Leader and spray tan enthusiast John Boehner even went so far as to claim that the new plan will ruin the best health care in the world.
Really? The best health care in the world? On what grounds could the opponents of health care base this claim?
It’s certainly not the best health care in the world for my dad, who was denied coverage after he was hospitalized for meningitis, a condition that is fatal if not treated. It isn’t the best health care for my friend, Chelsea, whose insurance won’t cover many of the numerous tests she needs as a result of MRKH Syndrome, posing a great financial burden to her family. Nor is it the best health care in the world for my friend from high school, Adrian, who visited the doctor because of a pain in his testicle. His doctor informed him that it could be acute testicular torsion, and that he needed a test to figure out if that was the case. The problem is, he doesn’t have health insurance, and he can’t afford the test. So, he must choose between $2000 dollars he doesn’t have, or wait and find out if his testicle shrivels up and dies.
Cases such as these would never happen to any of my family on my father’s side. They live in Australia, where everyone has government-run health insurance from the moment they are conceived. My cousin has never had to pay for any tests or any medical treatment in her life, and neither has anyone else in my family. Our grandmother just had a stroke, and she was immediately treated without any cost to her. While there are problems, such as lack of funding during Conservative governments and waiting lists for non-essential treatment, my cousin is quite satisfied with the quality of her health care and would not want to see it resemble ours in the slightest.
So who does Boehner think he’s fooling?
Here’s the truth about our health care system: We have the poorest quality and most expensive health care system in the Western world. This is not my opinion—this is a fact substantiated by mountains of evidence. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that more than 50 million people in the U.S. are without health insurance, and 18,000 will die every year due to this lack of coverage. Even during the current economic crisis, the number one cause of bankruptcy in this country is still health care emergencies, as it has been for decades. The World Health Organization, the UN agency that coordinates international public health, ranked our health care system 37th in overall performance in its World Health Report, right in between Costa Rica and Slovenia. The CIA’s World Factbook places us 30th in life expectancy, just behind Bosnia and just ahead of Cyprus, and 35th in infant mortality, behind Cuba and ahead of Croatia.
And how much do we pay for this god-awful health care system? 15.3% of our gross domestic product, the highest percentage in the world. That’s $7,000 per capita, nearly double the average of every other Western nation! Meanwhile, all of the countries ahead of us in these rankings guarantee free health care to all their citizens, spend far less than us, and get much better results than we do.
Unlike every other Western country and much of the rest of the world, health care in America is a for-profit business rather than a service to the public. This prevents millions of people from receiving health care at the first sign of a problem. This also causes hospitals and insurance companies to put profits before care, denying care to millions of people for reasons that other nations would consider fraudulent. Eliminating the issue of cost would lead individuals to seek treatment earlier and more often, lowering overall cost in the long run and producing a healthier population.
Some things are done best when the private sector is involved, and some things simply aren’t, like education, mail, firefighting, the highway system, Social Security, and going to the Moon. There are some services that are too important to not have the government provide them. A government-run health care option is the best way to improve the health of this nation, and it’s about time that our lawmakers got to work on it.
9 Responses to “The Only Option That Makes Sense”
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You’re right, ever since the government’s been involved with things like education, highway systems, and social security, we’ve been in great hands. Oh, and check out http://spacex.com if you think that NASA is the only way to shoot shit into space.
Considering that you likely use the highway system on a daily basis, will get Social Security checks when you retire, and likely go to a state school (since you are posting on this website), then yes, I think all of us are in much better hands with the government involved in these things. And while SpaceX does sound interesting, they did happen to leave out the number of lunar landings they’ve made… oh that’s right, they haven’t made any, because it wouldn’t make them any money. Which is my point in the first place: private companies are concerned with one thing: profit. While this happens to work to our benefit in many areas, it clearly does not work to most people’s benefit in healthcare, based on all the statistics I gave in the article.
Personally, I like the signs along the freeway that say “Your Tax Dollars At Work: Measure X, 1996.” Now that’s efficiency and timeliness.
As for the other three:
1. If you’re going to tell me Social Security is solid, solvent, sustainable, and viable for OUR future, we have nothing left to discuss.
2. Public education. Again. Have you been living with your head in a hole for your entire life? Private education is far superior to public education. And for the record, I’ve been in both, though I do attend this low-budget University you blog for.
3. No, they haven’t gone to the moon. But that’s not their purpose. They are a contractor that currently received money from NASA to build rockets and modules to service the ISS because.. surprisingly.. they can do it for less (yay profit motive!). Isn’t that a good thing?
Privatization is obviously about making money, and that’s the incentive… get companies competing for customers to lower market prices over time. It’s government regulation that begins to mess with the free market, driving prices higher and/or lowering quality. And that’s just what you’ll have under government health care, some non-mutually exclusive combination of higher prices, lower/rationed care, and no one to turn to.
Not too sure about some of the ideas here. Why do we have the worst health care if we spend the most on it? Does all the money fall into the pockets of middle managers in a shadowy bureaucracy?
More than any other country, America spends its money on medical research and development. This isn’t a coincidence; it is a direct result of being privatized. Since WWII the government has provided structure for the private health care system to work in. They invested in academic health centers and specialized medicine, which led to rapid growth in the private sector new innovations and technologies that we now depend on as standards, like MRI, organ transplants and drugs for marginal diseases. In the 70′s medicare changed the game–because it simply hands out a standard sum independent of the actual cost of the medical procedure, the incentive for doctors and researchers is to reduce costs, not give the best care possible. If new technology is invented, it is designed to cut costs. Insurance companies, however, pay for any treatment regardless of cost as long as the doctor thinks it will help the patient. If you’re one of the 250,000,000 Americans who does have health insurance, which would you rather your doctor care about, cutting costs or quality of care? This ability for doctors to help their patients at any cost is what makes them so revered in American society, and for good reason.
Ultimately there is no reason to spend $900 million researching a new pharmaceutical drug unless you think it may give an edge on your competitor, which is eliminated in a socialized health care system. Not only American people rely on these innovations, either; the infinitely sustainable European utopia needs them, too.
It’s easy to look at European countries and dream about living where health care costs are so low. However, very little about the health care system here will suddenly become cheaper overnight. Americans have 10 times as many MRI’s per capita as Canada, for example–even more factoring out the people who cannot realistically use them. This is because doctors here have no limits, and in a country without them it’s hard to fit the ways universal health care would backfire into the dream. If we spent 15% of our GDP on health care and we then start adding more people to the system, it’s not going to be cheaper unless we dramatically reduce quality. Even if it does, every cut cost means a lost job in the middle of a recession that is quickly turning into a deep depression. Also, because it all comes from taxes, this money would be taken directly out of the hands of everyone, and lower and upper classes alike would have even worse financial issues. When it comes down to it, we do have the world’s best health care for some people. It’s just not possible to give everyone here the best.
Well said.
The purpose of government services is provide things that EVERYONE needs and where that need trumps the private level of quality. Will public healthcare under the public option be worse than private healthcare? Perhaps. Will it provide an ENORMOUS relief financially to those who struggle to pay medical bills? No doubt.
Case in point, several years ago my brother caught a strain of antibiotic resistant bacteria. This strain is becoming more resilient and dangerous and has killed young children before. Thankfully I come from an upper-middle class family that can afford to pay for healthcare. Even so we were swamped with fees and ultimately the insurer forced us to drop their policy by raising the rates every 6 months.
You can talk all you want about how the money goes to research and what not but let’s be frank, Europe isn’t exactly a medical wasteland. Furthermore they pay roughly 1/3 to 1/2 less per capita than us.
I can’t see how a public option doesn’t make sense.
The problem with the “pro” statistics given here is that they ignore context. Scale and subgroups matter, and the US is toward the fringe in this: large both in geography and population, very diverse in ethnic makeup, and with substantial dysfunctional subgroups. Compare that to the small, homogeneous European countries beating us in the WHO list… let alone micro-states like Singapore and San Marino!! There is no reason to think we could simply transplant whatever appears to be working for them and have our healthcare problems solved.
Similarly, Chris’ example of Australia ignores something potentially important: their strict health requirements for immigrants, almost matching those of New Zealand. That may well reduce some strain on their system. Care to implement them here?
In any case, this debate is too stark. It’s not as if the only options are status quo or huge nation-wide socialized medical monstrosity. Smaller, targetted programs like S-CHIP, combined with Medicare reform and federal assistance to Medicaid, may do more to improve things than some grand scheme. Given the current economic turmoil, this approach would be more prudent too.
You can see the most recent (2000) World Health Organization rankings here:
http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html
Note that in the top 10, half of the countries are micro-states.
This argument for socialized medicine is filled with more holes than a putt-putt extravaganza. Most excellent is the claim that:
“Some things are done best when the private sector is involved, and some things simply aren’t, like education, mail, firefighting, the highway system, Social Security, and going to the Moon.”
The idea that someone can hold up the government’s record of managing Social Security as an argument FOR socialized medicine is both hilarious and terrifying.