Our Current System just Doesn't Work
 The private health care system in this country doesn’t
work like it’s supposed to. America spends more – about
15% of our Gross Domestic Product – on healthcare than any
other nation. This kind of money should produce comparable results,
but the
life expectancy of an American child born today is lower than that
of a child born in France, Sweden, Switzerland, or any of 42 other
countries - including Bosnia and Herzegovina, a war-torn Balkan state
with an annual average per capita income of $7,700.
46 million Americans don’t have health insurance, a travesty
that ensures those people receive a lower standard of care. Medical
costs are the single highest
reason for bankruptcy in this country. Because those costs, the uninsured
are much less likely to receive regular physicals, to be screened
for cancer, and
to get checked when they experience worrying symptoms, such as chest pain.
Many of these people die of conditions that, had they been insured,
could have been
prevented with quick, simple treatments
.
Proponents of the free market system seem to believe that, if left alone
for a while, the economy will fix healthcare by itself. This is akin to Social
Darwinism: the belief that the poor and the downtrodden don’t deserve
to survive, which is exactly what will happen if we sit on our hands and
wait for capitalism
to repair the healthcare system.
Insurance companies today refuse to cover pre-existing medical conditions;
if a person who has cancer tries to buy health insurance, her requests will
be denied.
From the standpoint of business this makes sense – it would cost more
to treat the cancer patient than the income from her premiums. It is cheaper
for
her to die; cheaper to cover those who probably will never need extensive
medical treatment. For this reason, healthcare should not be the province
of the market;
instead, quality healthcare should be considered the birthright of every
American citizen.
Those who question reforming the healthcare system often throw out the word “socialized
medicine” like the name of some evil monster. Yet this very system provides
the people of every other industrialized nation in the world with reliable coverage
of medical problems. In the 21st century, it is shameful that we lag so far behind.
Some things should be left for the market to determine – the price of a
new computer, for example. Healthcare is not one of those things. We are past
the point where temporary fixes and stopgap measures are effective. It is time
for the United States, like Canada, Great Britain, and most of Europe, to switch
to a single-payer system of universal health insurance. The cost of this insurance
should be automatically deducted from a person’s paycheck, like the
payroll tax. This tax would replace the cost of healthcare premiums, on which
Americans
spend an average of about $7,000 per year. Universal healthcare would eliminate
the $15 billion in emergency room costs from the uninsured, who have nowhere
else to go when they fall ill. For most, the cost of healthcare would decrease
significantly.
This is because the private system in place today is ridiculously inefficient.
Health insurance companies spend as much as 30 percent – nearly one-third – of
their revenues on “administrative costs,” twice as much as is spent
in Canada. While the government isn’t exactly associated with efficiency,
there is no reason why America cannot successfully implement the same system
used around the world.
More and more of the money paid to primary care physicians – the people
who deal with everyday medical problems – is taken by the insurance companies
to expand their profit margins. It is time to stop spending precious money providing
insurance company CEOs with bigger mansions and faster corporate jets. By eliminating
the “middle man,” the private health insurance companies that
siphon a large amount of cash from the healthcare process, the cost of providing
health
care would decline.
As Americans, we have a civic duty to look out not only for ourselves, but
for our fellow citizens as well. Nearly one in six people in this country
have no
safety net for when they fall ill, a problem with our system that must quickly
be corrected. Matters of life and death should never be left up to a corporation,
whose primary obligation is to make the largest profit possible. It is time
that we take healthcare away from those corporations and put someone in charge
who
isn’t just trying to make a profit.
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