Try This For A Moral Value: Sick People Should Be Cared For...

I can’t sleep. It’s now 4:30 in the morning. Seems like the perfect time for a rant, eh?

Strangely enough, I don’t talk politics all the time. That’s how I manage to actually have conservative friends, including the best man at my wedding, who is to the right of Genghis Kahn. I normally, don’t see any reason to bore or tick off non-political people. If they bring it up first though, all bets are off. During a recent discussion with one of these conservative friends, he challenged me to put my own positions up on my blog so he could tell me where I was horribly wrong. I’m not sure I’m anywhere near at the top of my intellect at the moment, but I thought I’d take him on the challenge over the next few days. Today’s issue: health care. (I’m too brain-dead to cite sources tonight. I’ll go fill them in later. In the meantime, the numbers come from http://www.pnhp.org or the books Bleeding the Patient and Healthcare Meltdown)

43 million Americans lack health insurance. Say that number again. 43 million Americans. That’s nearly as many people as voted for Bush in 2000. These aren’t people who won’t work. More often than not, these are people who work hard for a company that isn’t large enough to provide health insurance. 50% are employed. 26% are children. Others lack coverage because of a preexisting illness. 50% of bankruptcies occur at least in part because of illness.

Take my mother-in-law for example. Her husband worked for 30 years for GE. She got uterine cancer and had to undergo surgery and radiation. Even now, years later, she is still suffering the effects of the treatments. They were lucky, they had insurance. The problem is their insurance has a lifetime maximum. It will only pay $500,000 in their lifetime. She has already used $400,000 of that maximum. She’s only in her early 50’s. What happens when she uses the rest? What happens if he loses his job? No insurance will ever cover her again.

This is morally wrong. No one should work and not be able to go to the hospital. No one should be denied coverage BECAUSE they are sick. Can we think of a more evil practice? There aren’t many.

But then again, I’m a bleeding heart liberal. This is just the way it has to be. Right? Hardly. Let’s look at the numbers. We are pretty much the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t provide universal health-care. We also spend more than any other country on it. Per capita spending in the US on healthcare is $4270. That’s almost double the next highest spending country Germany at $2400.

But we get better care for our money, right? Wrong. We have worse rates of infant mortality, life expectancy, and a host of other measurements than these countries.

Not only is our system providing worse care, but it’s inefficient as well. We all know the lack of choices being forced on patients and health care providers. Dealing with such a hodge-podge system of insurance coverage is inherently wasteful. Not surprisingly, the number of health care administrators has increased 2348% since 1970. The old argument that “government creates wasteful bureaucracy” is moot here. The current system creates wasteful bureaucracy. Government run systems spend only a fraction on overhead that private systems do. The current system raises costs and risks lives in countless other perverse ways as well. For example, if I have Diabetes and no insurance and cut my foot, I likely won’t go to the doctor. I can’t afford it. Eventually, the cut will worsen to the extent that I am forced to go to the emergency room. I can’t pay, so the hospital and consumers pick up the tab anyways. The tab is now much larger, however, because of the higher cost of emergency care, not to mention any surgeries (I think I might need it amputated), etc. that my lack of care created.

What’s the solution? I’m open to many ideas. My personal favorite is a single-payer health insurance system. Such a system would provide coverage to everyone, replace our inefficient hodge-podge with one plan and one series of paperwork, and give patients choice of their health care provider. I think I should try to sleep again. There are still 2 hours left in the night. If you are interested in more, check out http://www.pnhp.org.

"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane." - Martin Luther King, Jr.


Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.--Wendell Berry