COMMENTS (3)

Why we need health care reform

The Daily Advance

Friday, October 30, 2009

According to a recent poll, an average of 14,000 people a day — every day —lose their health insurance. Forty-eight million of us now live without it. That is but the beginning of a very slippery slope for them, health care-wise. At the bottom of that slope, another recent study informs us that statistically, 122 people die as the direct result of having no health insurance each and every day. That is just shy of 45,000 completely preventable deaths a year.

Shame on us. We are a better people than that.

As I have watched, (with more than a sporting interest) the debate about universal health care unfold, I confess to having been bewildered by the array of arguments against it. Most of them seem to center around the notion that universal health care is socialism. Really?

If you boil the whole thing down to gravy, the basic case against it is that any public option will run the private insurance companies out of business, and that the government cannot be trusted. If we let government get its mitts on our health care system, goes the public façade of the argument, it will ruin the efficiency of the current system, with its witch’s brew of cobbled-together, insurance industry infrastructures.

Poppycock.

Is public education socialism? Because it seems to me that the same logic would apply. We in North Carolina, for instance, have one of the best state-run post-secondary education systems in the country. I availed myself of it, as has my son. Private institutions, however, not only remain competitive, they flourish. Duke University, anyone? How about Wake Forest or Davidson? The existence of one form certainly does not preclude the existence of the other. That’s the marketplace at work.

Currently, we put all of our faith in the hands of the insurance companies. That’s all well and good, but can this industry be trusted to look after the average person’s best interests? The short answer is no, it cannot. The reason, you see, is because they are a for-profit industry, and a particularly rapacious one, at that. And while I’m all for capitalism — not at the expense of a loved one.

We have all, recently, heard about the two small children from different parts of the country who were excluded from basic coverage because they didn’t fit some sort of pre-determined actuarial profile. One was too large, and the other too small. I suppose if you’re just right, you may hope for coverage. Shouldn’t our health care system be modeled on a story other than “Goldilocks and the Three Bears?” “Crime and Punishment” is equally wide of the mark.

From a purely personal perspective, I have someone very near and dear to me who will never, ever have private insurance again. Why? Simply because she fought a very valiant struggle against brain cancer — and won. When she subsequently lost her employment — and thereby her insurance — as a result, she became one of the millions of people who exist in a sort of insurance company limbo known as the pre-existing condition. In a very real sense, this is a caste system, with those on the pre-existing condition list as the American equivalent of the “untouchables” of India.

This is the best that we can do? As a society, I mean. Your reward for fighting and beating a life-threatening illness is exclusion from the health care system?

To be ostracized as unfit to take your place among other, presumably more worthy citizens who had the good sense not to get sick?

She is not alone. Depending on the source, somewhere between one and two thirds of all bankruptcies are related to medical bills. Frankly, I don’t think that it matters all that much which figure is accurate. Both are appalling.

The insurance companies have, by some estimates, spent billions — that’s with a “b” — in their effort to defeat health care reform, both in the form of lobbying and in the formation of suspicious citizens groups like the “Tea Baggers.”

What the obstructionist, “just say no” Republicans in Congress are trying to do is thwart a form of social equity whose time has come.

And, unfortunately, they are doing so because of massive campaign contributions and intense lobbying from the insurance companies. In other words, it’s all about the bucks. It is time to ask the question: Do they have our best interests at heart?

And it is past time, my friends, for us as an evolved, civilized people to do the right thing and pass health care reform. The status quo is killing us — literally. None of us are expendable. I know my loved one isn’t.

Bud Wright is a resident of Elizabeth City