Author: Ben Dalgetty
Since its inception at the turn of the 20th century, America’s experiment with a free-market privately provided health care system has been doomed to failure. To be clear, what follows is not an endorsement or call for socialism – I fundamentally believe in the free market and capitalism – but, as education, parks and roads, police and other public services have shown, some services need to be provided by the government. The goal of any corporation is profit, that is their reality, and the health of our citizens clearly cannot be trusted to private industry any longer.
The cost of standard health-care coverage for a family of four rose to $13,000 in 2008, a 119 percent cost increase over the past decade, according to a 2008 Kaiser Foundation study. Even more troubling, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that if nothing changes by 2018, costs will rise to $25,000 for a family of four, and families will be responsible for 30 percent of those costs. These skyrocketing medical costs caused an estimated 62 percent of all bankruptcies filed in 2007, despite the fact that 80 percent of those families had health insurance, according to a 2009 American Journal of Medicine article.
Looking at the dismal statistics about the current state of health insurance, the need for reform is evident. Even Republicans who long defended the system concede the need for change. However, the change proposed by Republicans and many of the blue-dog Democrats does nothing to address the institutional problems and focuses instead primarily on offering tax-breaks to prop up a system that is clearly broken. States and cities like Massachusetts and San Francisco are mandating universal coverage, and all states already pay into the Sick Children’s Health Insurance Plan. Money is just being applied haphazardly to fix a system which is breaking at the seams. We have a chance to rework the entire system, and by centralizing funding, efficiency can be dramatically improved.
To be sure, there is legitimacy in the claim that government run health care will result in substantial government costs and will in the short run increase our already bloated federal deficit. But the key fact left out by deficit hawks is that universal coverage will not suddenly result in money being spent that wasn’t spent elsewhere before. Health care costs are currently crippling both the small businesses and large corporations Republicans claim to champion. At the current rate, $834 billion will be lost in small business wages over the next ten years and the inability of American automakers to compete with Honda, Toyota and others is due in no small part to their insurance obligations to autoworker unions. Health care spending is currently spread around and ultimately less effective than a centralized system.
I am a firm believer in American exceptionalism, we were the world’s first great democracy and we still have the potential to serve as a shining beacon throughout the world, but this does not mean we can’t learn from others. Every other wealthy industrial nation, from Canada and Brazil to China and India to Germany and England, has a universal government run health care system. Can they all be wrong? Is it purely a coincidence that the United States spent nearly $650 billion (out of a total $2.1 trillion) more than it should based on costs in other countries according to a McKinsey and Company study? Or that in 2007 the Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey found 34 percent of Americans thought health care needed to be completely rebuilt compared to an average 16 percent in European countries with universal coverage?
The need for reform is evident. The success of universal health care across the globe is evident. Why Americans are so resistant to reform is a mystery. Everyone has heard the alleged complaints about Canadian wait times, yet a 2008 government report found that 85.2 percent of Canadians were satisfied or very satisfied with their health care. Some wait times are to be expected for non-essential procedures, having open equipment and services means they are not being used efficiently.
Conservatives and industrial lobbyists are engaged in a tactical campaign of misinformation on the costs and benefits of universal health care which we need desperately to move beyond.
I think the best case scenario is if the House and Senate are able to pass a bill based on United States National Health Care Act, H.R. 676, which is an institutionalization of universal coverage similar to what is in place in England and Canada. If they are only able to pass reforms based on America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, H.R. 3200 and create a non-subsidized public-option with pricing based on industry averages it is still a much needed step forward. I think that without universal coverage or a public option this round of health-care reform will be a failure, although at this point any reform is better than nothing. I do understand President Obama’s willingness to sign legislation without either of these options, just for the sake of getting legislation through, but I hope this will not prove necessary. On a side note, I think that nothing has energized and galvanized progressives health-care advocates more than his willingness to drop the public option, and that could ultimately prove helpful to the cause.
Ben Dalgetty is a senior Politics major. He can be reached at bdalgetty@oxy.edu.
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