Health Care: Let's Stop Being Assholes
Our health care system sucks. If you don't have health insurance, and sometimes even if you do, getting sick can bankrupt you, or even kill you. Let me think about the number of people who I know personally who at some point had no health insurance coverage. Let's see..me, for one. My mother, for two. I don't think I'll keep counting, because if either of those parties had gotten sick or had an accident at inopportune moments, they could really screwed right now, and I happen to care about both of them a great deal.
It's just fucking immoral. Now, there are plenty of technical problems with our system that certainly compound this fundamental moral failure, and it's certainly not our only moral failure as a country. But it IS a moral failure.
Which is actually a good tie-in to my recent posts about market failure. Even when markets function well, they only guarantee an efficient outcome. And when markets fail from an efficiency standpoint, government can sometimes intervene to improve efficiency (i.e., to create a socially optimal level of supply for a good). But, efficiency is not morality! To be more precise, efficiency is ONE criteria out of a large universe of ethical principles that one can adopt. And it's not a bad one, by any means. Given two identical outcomes, the efficient path to that outcome is certainly preferable to the less efficient one. But markets make no claim to the promotion of equity.
Markets do not make an allowance for the needy or the disadvantaged or the sick. Markets simply say, "well, sorry...you were given fewer resources by chance, and you therefore have less power to achieve your desires within the market system. Sorry bout ya!" That outcome may be perfectly efficient; many people (myself included) do not consider it moral.
So, if we want a system where getting sick (a more or less random phenonmenon) does not carry the danger of utter financial and physical ruin, government needs to be involved. Period. End of story.
There certainly is an argument for health care reform on efficiency and effectiveness grounds, and those are important too. But for me, the heart of the matter has always been about equity and basic decency. Guaranteeing health care for all will not automatically make us a saintly nation, but it's a step in the right direction.
posted by Joe @ 11:08 AM
5 Comments:
Not even all that random.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/national/class/HEALTH-FINAL.html
According to the WHO if you are unexpectedly sick or have an accident there is no better place on earth than the US. No other country spends more on emergency care and no other country has the capacity to treat complex conditions in a timely manner.
The Nobel Prizes in medicine and physiology have been awarded to more Americans than to researchers in all other countries combined. Eight of the 10 top-selling drugs in the world were developed by U.S. companies. The U.S. has some of the highest breast, colon and prostate cancer survival rates in the world. And our country ranks first or second in the world in kidney transplants, liver transplants, heart transplants, total knee replacements, coronary artery bypass, and percutaneous coronary interventions.
We have the shortest waiting time for nonemergency surgery in the world; England has one of the longest. In Canada, a country of 35 million citizens, 1 million patients now wait for surgery and another million wait to see specialists.
So yes, if you are basically healthy but want someone else to pay for your doctor visit the next time you get a cold the health care bill will be great. Otherwise you're just one more poor soul subject to the whims of an uncaring, inefficient bureaucracy. The only way government bureaucracies innovate is finding novel ways to do less with more. But should we be subject to one I suppose we can all take comfort in knowing our health-care is as terrible as our non-federal government employee neighbors.
Why not just get catastrophic coverage for $100 a month and contribute to an HSA. It would be a heck of a lot cheaper than the mandated coverage Obama is going to force everyone that is uninsured to buy should a new parliamentary gimmick be employed.
Both Canada and England are democracies and could easily do away with their horrible government run health care if they wanted to.
As I said, there is nothing at all wrong with either countries heath care system if you happen to be basically healthy (except of English dentistry. They're absolute savages) and most people tend to be basically healthy. Even in the US when your body gets outside the warranty period we have socialized medicine. However if the matter was left to the non-elderly sick I'm pretty sure they'd have something more like the system we already have now.
Actually Canada considering making a move towards private health-care.
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/27/nation/na-healthcare-canada27
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2510700
Even their prime minister doesn't trust his ticker to the antique methods the canucks are forced to employ.
And riddle me this...where are doctors going to come from when this bill puts downward pressure on their wages? Do you expect them to have no life, live in poverty for nearly a decade and build up $300k in debt at high interest rates from academia in order to get paid like a school teacher?
http://www.nejmjobs.org/rpt/health-reform-may-reduce-physician-workforce.aspx
“nearly one-third of physicians responding to the survey indicated that they will want to leave medical practice after health reform is implemented.”
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