Heartbreak & Health Care

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Health care in the US is the only kind that most Americans (most US natives, anyway) know: you pay a certain amount of money to a company; if you get sick, they try to get you well; if you stay healthy, they keep the money.  In the past, of course, most insurance companies could invest your money in the fabulous Stock Market, and make a lot of money, while they waited for you to get sick.  This is how they could afford to sit around arranging for your health care; after all, they were in it for the profits, and we did not hold that against them.

Health care in some other countries are paid for out of taxes; in other words, the government got to hold your money instead of private insurance companies, while the government waited for you to get sick.  In the US, of course, we hate the idea of the government holding onto money, and we would like to avoid it if possible.  I don't know why this is; surely we don't believe that the US government is more corrupt than say, the Canadian government.

Or maybe it's a matter of efficiency.  Maybe we feel that it would be better to let a private company handle health care rather than the government.  Like roads, for instance.  Oh, wait; roads are handled by the government!  Oops.  Maybe if we asked Blue Cross to keep the roads in shape, the roads would be in a heckuva lot better shape than they are now.  (But we would pay a lot more for the satisfaction.  And we could sue them if there were potholes.  And we could sue them if there was a traffic jam just when we wanted to get to the hospital in a hurry!  There are lots of strange pluses to farming out jobs to the private sector.)

The more left-leaning folks in government are more sensitive to the fact that people losing jobs are losing their health insurance.  At least some of these folks probably have family members who are sick just when they're handed a pink slip.  For anyone who doesn't completely avoid listening to media sources that are sympathetic to the plight of the unemployed, it is heartbreaking to listen to the horror stories of people who are unable to get health insurance.  The fiscal conservatives had a good platform when unemployment was low.  When unemployment is high, they really don't have a plan to look after the indigent.  I sometimes wonder what the doctrinaire conservatives really think about the plight of the working class.  Perhaps it is something like: well, someday they'll be well off, too; it's just a matter of time.  And they will thank us for making sure that the wealthy don't have to subsidize the subsistence of those close to the poverty line.  It is amazing that so many Americans of very limited means tend to vote in sympathy with really affluent people.  They do not realize that the problems of the ultra-affluent and the problems of the merely modestly well-off are very, very different. 

There are horror stories about the heartbreak of foreigners who got screwed by their health system, e.g. Brits who could not get decent health care, and Canadians who supposedly had to wait for months and months for health care.  Well, each case has to be examined on its own merits, and we must not only satisfy ourselves about the facts of each case, but also whether the British or the Canadian system, as the case may be, made changes in order to respond to that particular problem.  In the US, insurance companies do respond slowly to pressure from customers.  But they're ultimately responsible to their greedy stockholders, not their patients.

Conservatives in this country tend to respond more to the heartbreak of the insurance companies.  Compared to the large profits they've made in the past, their profits in more recent times must be slimmer, simply because the Stock Market is in trouble.  But a visit to the corporate headquarters of any major insurance company should cure anyone of a suspicion that all their resources are focused on keeping their customers well for a reasonable cost.  The health insurance industry is very high on the food chain, and the worse the unemployment situation gets, the more afraid they should be that Congress will make it very hard for them to keep swindling the consumers on an ongoing basis.

Many so-called "moderate Democrats" are afraid of being called names such as "Socialist" or "Communist" or the accusation of being a blind follower of the President.  All sorts of vicious name-calling has blossomed in response to the irrational reactions of the conservatives, and the influence of the health-insurance lobby.

Nobody is more aware of heartbreak in health care than doctors and nurses.  Many doctors and nurses no doubt went into the profession as a means for gaining power and a certain degree of affluence.  But an amazing proportion of them seem to be in favor of major changes in health care practice, and within the health insurance industry.  In the last analysis, perhaps it is self-evident that without a degree of altruism, one simply cannot be a physician or a surgeon, even if this suspicion seems at odds with our feelings when we get their bills!!!  Whatever the true facts are, doctors have come out in favor of health care reform, though perhaps not as radical reform as would make most Americans really happy once the reform is actually here.  Though it is possible that plans that work in other countries will not work here (because Americans are particularly prone to rip off the system?), the chances are that there is a plan that could work.  The difficulty is to find a plan that (1) can work well, (2) can be adjusted if it needs to be, in small ways, and (3) which cannot be subverted by the conservatives and Big Health in the future.  Because, rest assured, some of the best minds in the country may be trying to get us all better health care, but some good minds are working even now to sabotage the whole thing.

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