Great Healthcare Analogy

I am an enthusiastic proponent of a national single-payer healthcare system, like a national medicare. The stats on medicare show it to be a much more cost-effective method of providing basic healthcare than our current hodgepodge of competing insurance companies and healthcare providers. It's no surprise that whenever I raise this issue with one of our indigenous conservatives, their knee-jerk reaction is always always ALWAYS! "socialized medicine -- bleah!" I'm not going to get into how a single-payer system is fundamentally different from socialized medicine. It's simple and you probably already understand it. If you don't, post a snide comment and I'll provide my quick summary.

Monday I read Paul Krugman's column in the NY Times that captured the cognitive dissonance that permeates the Republican position on healthcare reform.

You've heard the Republican talking points against a single-payer healthcare system: It should be left to the free market, I don't want my taxes paying to fix someone who smokes, If I work hard I get better medical care, etc.

What if you substituted K-12 education for healthcare? In order to be consistent with the Republican position on healthcare, I'd have to take the position that since I don't have kids, I shouldn't be required to subsidize the education of someone else's kids. I'd have to advocate creating an open market for education and abolishing public schools entirely. If I earn a lot of money, I should be able get my kids a first-rate education, and if you can't afford it you're simply not working hard enough and will have to settle for a low-budget school. The government shouldn't mandate education -- it should be a matter of individual responsibility. I simply can't agree with any part of that position. Just writing those few sentences made me throw up a little in my mouth.

Honestly, isn't access to healthcare a critical element of a nation's standard of living? (By the way, ours is slipping rapidly.) I know education is considered a key element, as is literacy. Why is access to education mandatory while Americans are thrown to the wolves when it comes to healthcare? If you are sick, you can't go to school, you can't work, and you become a burden to family; not to mention the economic impact when you can't afford to pay for the care you do receive.

Here's what Krugman says:

The truth is that there's no difference in principle between saying every American child is entitled to an education and saying every American child is entitled to adequate health care. It's just a matter of historical accident that we think of access to free K-12 education as a basic right, but consider having the government pay children's medical bills "welfare," with all the negative connotations that go with that term.

And conservative opposition to giving every child in this country access to health care is, in a fundamental sense, un-American.

Here's what I mean: The great majority of Americans believe that everyone is entitled to a chance to make the most of his or her life. Even conservatives usually claim to believe that.

But a child who doesn't receive adequate health care, like a child who doesn't receive an adequate education, doesn't have the same shot - he or she doesn't have the same chances in life as children who get both these things.

And insurance is crucial to receiving adequate health care. The reality is that the nine million children in America who don't have health insurance often have unmet medical or dental needs.

I scored a symbolic victory a while back in a debate with an ultra-conservative cow-orker. We were discussing the issue of the rising cost of healthcare (in the context of an MSNBC article about a woman who was bankrupted by cancer treatment costs in spite of having insurance), and how the problem lay in part with the marketing costs that insurance companies incur competing with one another. As the discussion reached a climax, he said "the bigger the pool of insured, the lower the cost to the insurance company." So, naturally, I suggested that if the pool consisted of the entire population of the US. . . .

That ended the conversation.

Please, God, let us throw them all out in 2008 and start the long, slow march back to sanity. Our standard of living should be IMPROVING, not DETERIORATING! If anyone's getting a free-ride in all this, it's the insurance companies, who have a DUTY to their stockholders to maximize profits. That profit mandate should be completely excised from access to healthcare in this country.