SpearsofTruth

We Need Universal Health Care

We have a problem growing in this country. A BIG PROBLEM. Health care costs are skyrocketing out of control. Many strikes are over benefit cuts. Families who have to cover their own health insurance premiums are getting hammered with prices like $11,000 per year. GM is drowning in red ink for a myriad of reasons, but one is massive health care cost for employees and their pensioners. Small business is stifled because they can't expand due to high health benefits for new workers. We are living in the greatest, most powerful country in the world and over 43 million of our citizens do not have health insurance

Now those on the right will come up with the standard reasons why the government should not be in the health country.
1: The government cannot be trusted with efficiently spending your tax dollars to take care of your health. Horse puckie. Medicare spends only 2% of what it takes in on administrative costs. Private insurance companies look at 15-20% spent on paperwork or more likely they just put that money in their pockets. Hey they are there to make money, which is fine, but they do it at our expense. The government isn't looking for profits, just to provide services.
2: All you'll see is lines and end up waiting on service. While this is a possibility I would rather have to wait for non-emergency medical care, than not get any care at all. If anything, a single payer system should eliminate many of the paperwork hassles of having to deal with your private heal care provider and Medicare.
3: You'll have no incentive for innovation because there's no profits to be made. Many of the medicines we have were created because a company saw a product that would make them a pretty penny. To an extent, this argument may hold some water, but a lot of government grants go to researchers who then patent or sell their intellectual property to a big drug company. I think many scientists create drugs for the reason any scientist any scientist does anything, to discover something new. To prove they can expand the knowledge base and maybe make history.
(Here's a little sidebar, which is a note to candidates for president for 2008, I'd like to see someone run on a platform of "A Quest for a Healthy America and World". I thought about a War on Disease, but we don't need another “war.” We need exploration and innovation just like what came out of the space program in the 1960s. With the mapping of the human genome, the government could pour massive amounts of money into creating cures for ailments which before we couldn't touch. We, the United States, would own these cures and could share them with the rest of the world (and maybe make a few dollars too.) If you want use the "war" analogy, you can, but this is a war in which nobody gets hurts and in fact all involved get better. We could be the leaders in curing the world. Mr. Presidential Candidate, come on, this is a no brainer. It would create jobs that couldn't be outsourced. Everybody wins. Go for it!)

I do have one argument against national health insurance and that's when I point at Bush's re-vamping of Medicare. The problem here is the Bush administration let the drug companies write the legislation to benefit them. The U.S. government cannot bargain for the prices of drugs even though we are the biggest volume buyers of said drugs. If the CEO of say Wal-Mart put together a deal like this I guarantee there would be a shareholder revolt that would see that CEO out in the street before he knew what hit him. That said, we need smart legislation. It will take time, honesty and people are willing to buck the system that enriches the big medical companies and instead puts making people better over making buck.

Too many of our citizens go through their days with no health insurance and worry about being bankrupted by an accident or illness. Even those with insurance worry that if some catastrophic illness or that their insurance company will not cover some life saving procedures. It's time for America to take charge of its health care system and not be at the mercy of big corporations.

I believe it is a sin that one person can have a certain amount of health care and another person cannot. As it is now, because the poor cannot afford insurance, they use expensive emergency services instead of regular doctor visits. They get very little preventive medicine which is costly later in life when something that could have been prevented with a few dollars of pills or simple procedures ends up cost thousands of dollars for involved, lifesaving care.

It just makes sense in so many ways and so does a Quest for Health. More jobs in the U.S. Better health for all the people of the world. What could be more compassionate than a Quest for Health?

posted by Scott @ 1:28 PM