One our biggest issues is healthcare. It’s no big secret that America’s health care system is broken. At any given time 10% or more of the population is without health insurance; a greater number have substandard insurance. All it takes is one fractured wrist to put a waiter out of work for 6 weeks sending him into a financial tailspin.
The problem with the 10% figure mentioned above is that we’re never talking about the same 10% of people. As jobs are obtained and lost, it’s a different pool of people playing insurance Russian roulette. Furthermore, we have too many insurance systems spinning the wheel to see who’s going to pay. Heaven help you if you have a car accident and bump your head, get dizzy at work a week later, fall down and dislocate your shoulder at a job without health insurance. Workers’ comp could point at the dizziness arising from the auto accident and decline to pay; the auto insurance would say the injured shoulder occurred a week after the accident and decline to pay, and there you are with your arm in a sling, an emergency room trying to collect from you and arguing with two different claims departments. This is America, home of the world’s best management and business schools. This is the best we can come up with?
We have to ask ourselves “What is the goal of our insurance system?” Is it not to get you healed from your car accident and dislocated shoulder and back to work?
Scandinavia and most of Western Europe have national health care where the entire population is covered. Every time someone starts talking about a national health care system here, the right wing starts screeching “SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!” I think these people are inherently anti-social.
We already have taxpayer funded healthcare in this country, but we funnel through 6 or 7 different bureaucracies. We have the VA paying for veterans, Medicare paying for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor, taxes covering Federal Employees, State Employees, Public School Employees. Other systems like Workers’ Comp for those injured at work have coverage costs passed onto us as consumers. All of this comes out of our pocket ANYWAY! Funneling it through these mazes so that every hospital and doctor’s office must employ a staff to handle insurance billing and paperwork is no way to run a healthcare administration.
If you aren’t in one of the above mentioned groups: poor, retired, veterans, that have their taxpayer funded healthcare provided for them, then you have to rely on employer sponsored benefits to get our insurance coverage or try to get an individual policy on your own. Obtaining an individual healthcare policy can be very expensive, especially for a small business owner (hairdresser, decorator, florist, massage therapist, etc. Hey! All these stereotypes are independent business owners. Way to go!)
Just as homeowners and auto insurance rates go up when you make claims, individuals unfortunate enough to have a chronic condition (diabetes, depression requiring meds, HIV, hypertension), could find themselves dropped from their insurers. A form of age discrimination applies for those in their 40s and up where the cholesterol and other ongoing meds become needed. Taxpaying citizens can find themselves unable to obtain coverage out in the free market. How many jobs were just lost in the Gulf? How many people will lose their health insurance coverage and be unable to pay for their own? I’m not talking about the worst case refugees we’re seeing now; I’m referring to the working class folks who have just lost everything and may not be able to find work for 6-8 months.
The free market is not the answer to all problems and to those on the right who say that it is, I say “When you’ve only got a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail. And every problem isn’t a nail.”
If we had a national single-payer healthcare system in place for everyone overall healthcare costs would decrease, because the uninsured we have now would not be putting off doctor appointments as long as they do before seeking care; minor health problems that could be treated with a quick antibiotic or a shot won’t develop into a major illness that requires an overnight hospital stay with IV antibiotics. There will be more, smaller clinics and small outpatient centers without expensive urgent care centers, which would be cheaper to operate because they’re not treating non-urgent cases. Staff would be reduced.
Marriage would no longer play into healthcare. Our entire society is single for some period of time. Why does the married person get a subsidy to start his/her business and a single person doesn’t? One of society’s advances in the 20th century was providing health care. Why are we moving backward?
One of the automakers (I believe Toyota) just placed a new plant in Ontario, Canada instead of the United States, specifically citing health care costs as the deciding factor. A national healthcare plan is not the threat to our market; it could improve it. M