Kara & Michael’s Blog

The cost of health care in this country is staggering. According to Johns Hopkins University, the United States’s per capita healthcare spending, public and private, in 2002 was $5,267. Expanded to the entire population this amount represents almost 15 percent of the gross domestic product for the same year. But beyond that, it is twice as much money as is spent by most other industrialized nations. When I read this statistic, I felt I had to get to the bottom of the matter. Why do we spend so much money on health care, and inevitably experience a lower quality of life because of it?

It’s probably not because our health care is much better than other countries’. I’ve heard plenty of people in the United States claim that Canada’s system of nationalized health insurance provides for lower quality care, but I’ve been curiously unable to find many Canadians who are willing to make the same complaint. Proponents of our current health care system claim that the competition it fosters brings in more competent doctors, more medical innovations, and more extensive drug research. But the ultimate indicator of national health has got to be the national average life expectancy, right? The United States currently ranks 49th on that list, behind the vast majority of the countries that spend half what we do on health care. So, for whatever reason, we’re really not that much better off.

I’m pretty sure that the real cause of our huge health care bill is the system we’ve chosen to implement. To quote a Wikipedia article on the subject: “Health care in the United States is provided by many separate legal entities in a complicated scheme that may bewilder visitors.” Perhaps a slightly slanted statement, but basically correct. The scheme is complicated, and it’s going to have to change. My fear is that the consensus will be that we need to further privatize health care. It seems likely, given the rightward leanings of the country at present.

In a true libertarian system, one that consisted of pure capitalism, a person with no money who was stricken with a disease would have two choices: he could find privately-funded charity, or he could die. The convoluted, broken system we have today is the result of our attemps to modify this system to be a little less horrible to people. It requires hospitals to stabilize emergency room patients even if they can’t pay, but provides no funding for doing so. It has created private insurance companies, who can’t possibly serve the public interest and make money at the same time. Basically, we are so afraid of socialized medicine that we have created an insanely complex system that costs billions of dollars every year in upkeep alone, just to preserve the appearance of capitalism. And the current system totally fails to meet the needs of the people. You have to be pretty blind to believe that people aren’t currently dying for economic reasons in this country.

So my question becomes: Why don’t we just have socialized medicine then? Are all social programs really so inherently disgusting that we should reject them out of hand? We know that pure capitalism cannot meet the health care needs of the populace. To support further privatization of the health care system in this country borders on sociopathy in my opinion, but I know a lot of people either support further privatization or think the current system is acceptable. Of course the argument is never, “I want poor people to die.” The argument is, “Why should I have to sacrifice what I have achieved to help someone who has achieved nothing?” And that’s a good argument, and one that I tend to agree with, except for two really important points:

1. Wealth does not equal achievement. Period. There are plenty of rich idiots and plenty of people who have nothing but know a lot. Our system does not tend to pay people based on their contribution to the country, and that’s a flaw of capitalism that I’m willing to accept, but we must be willing to recognize it as a flaw. If I make $65,000 per year processing medical claims, and you make $25,000 per year growing and selling corn, who’s really of greater benefit to the country? It’s not me; I don’t actually heal anybody. You feed people. But even disregarding this entirely:

2. You should be forced to sacrifice a portion of your income to provide health care to everyone. So should I, and so should everyone else, free market be damned. Allow me to quote a man who gave us many of the ideas about freedom that we hold most dear:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Basically, these are the ground rules of the United States of America. You can sort out everything else in any way you like, but there are three little things that are sacred to us, and have always been so: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. These things are unalienable; nobody, us included, is allowed to take them from us. And Life comes before Liberty. Are you really prepared to argue that there are some among us who do not deserve to live simply because they have less money than you? Will you suggest that those people are deserving of a lower quality of life, deserving of lower quality medical care, deserving of a little suffering, because they haven’t scored as many points in our economic game? This is the inevitable conclusion of support for private health care — acquiescence to more or less random death. I don’t think that’s overstepping the truth.

We have socialized liberty. Everyone is guaranteed freedom through law, and that legal system is funded by the people. We have socialized the pursuit of happiness. Our publicly-funded education system does all it can to teach children to achieve all they can and to become whatever they want. For our country to continue in its path without making an effort to socialize access to life itself is nothing short of deplorable.

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