The need for universal health care

The need for universal health care becomes clear with the answers to these questions. However, the answers involve some understanding of the problem of uninsurance, underinsurance (inadequate coverage) and how these problems affect us all. That’s why several of the answers from this first section lead to other sections of our FAQ.

Question: Does the uninsured problem materially affect those of us who are insured?

The problem of the uninsured most definitely affects all of us materially (leaving aside morality, justice and compassion). The great number of public hospitals running deeper and deeper into the red, closing up or shutting down their Emergency Room operations is one example of the material harm done to all, because there is no rational system to serve all the people. Closed ERs in one area of a state will mean that no one living or passing through there will have services available, no matter what their insurance status. A search of our news archives will yield dozens of articles on hospital closings.

Another important consideration is the greater social productivity (and worker productivity for employers) of the country resulting from a healthy, alert and energetic workforce. Another set of considerations are the public health considerations of effective control of contagious diseases. Also how under our market-driven system primary care medicine has become the big loser, even though it might be the key to strong national health.

Other important considerations is how we are virtually all under-insured and how low the quality of US health care is becoming because we are married to “market-driven solutions” (solutions based on how kindly they affect the major industrial sectors of insurance and pharmaceuticals mainly).

Question: Why should anyone other than those who don’t have insurance be in favor of universal health insurance and the costs it will involve?

Covering everyone in the country would not have to cost us any more in health care expenditure than we are spending today (2001) – GoTo financing questions. There are the important precedents and arguments for considering health care a civil right like voting, or primary school education – GoTo Health Care as a Right questions. Also see the material benefits to all of us from universal Health Care.

If thinking about better health and health care security for the whole population is too abstract to deal with, then think about these for your neighbors, your children, your nieces and nephews, your coworkers or the children of your friends at work. Even if you have very good health insurance yourself, you don’t know what situation your child might find themself in twenty or thirty years from now – perhaps caught between jobs without employer-based insurance with a pre-existing medical condition or with a such a condition for a sick child (it could be your grandchild ! ). There is no way you can be certain of their ability to get needed and technically available health care.

If you insist on looking at your own individual payoff for having universal insurance, then issue number one for you might be America’s deteriorated Emergency Care system. There is one system throughout the country pretty much and you might need it anywhere you travel and through -and it is barely the shadow of what it used to be. Capacity has decreased 14% in the last 12 years while usage has skyrocketed (from uninsured having nowhere else to go).

Question: But all this is just theoretical. In point of fact Americans are just not seriously concerned or willing to fund health care for all, are they?

Well there has been apathy in past generations and ignorance about the perils to all working people from the “sleeping giant” of underinsurance. But now in 2008 it has become crystal clear that people are in fact clamoring for a new system in which health access for all is guaranteed. This will happen in America without doubt, but how much suffering and waiting will there be prior to beginning this commitment? That’s the only question. Don’t believe it? Did you know that87% of young adults are in support of guaranteed access to care, even if it means a permanent increase in their taxes? FAQ section on financing.

And what is it exactly that Americans are “seriously concerned with”? Are they concerned that while paying about twice what their Canadians are paying for health care, the care at home is deteriorating year by year? Or that some CEO’s continue to make staggering multi-million dollar annual salaries while coverage shrinks for plan holders? Or that Americans who work hard and were fully insured find themselves without benefits anyway following serious illness? Or that one of the new solutions is to let Americans travel outside the USA to fulfill critical health care needs? None of this is of any concern either?

Also we have to ask, “which Americans” are these who are not concerned? True many of the most privileged and successful Americans are relatively unconcerned with the fate and hardships of the broad middle-class (or foremerly middle-class). But most Americans in 2009 after the severe recession of 2008-9 are very concerned with having to take jobs without health benefits and how they will protect their families.

Question: Leaders of American business and American society are never going to embrace universal health care, so isn’t it politically unfeasible?

The clearest business leadership evidence comes from the recent years of large US plants moving to Canada. Clearly, the USA is failing to compete with Canada in large part due to excessive per worker health care costs in the USA. Business leaders understand this well enough to move their plants. Do they not understand it well enough to call for change in the US system? or are they just not patriotic enough (they and the elected officials they pay off)? You might also want to read the discussion in the FAQ section on financing. Also, if you are interested where leadership is heading in this country as of 2005 – 2015, you should consider comments about young adults (and linked data) in the answer about “serious concern”.

Question: Why has it taken this long for our country to begin thinking about UHC if it is such a great idea and is 120 years old in some of Europe?

We began thinking about national health insurance in the early years of 20th century. Theodore Roosevelt had national health insurance in his party platform in 1912 when he ran for the Progressive Party and he wasn’t the first individual with the idea. As to why it hasn’t happened yet, that’s a bit more complicated since there have been at least 6 different attempts to bring UHC to this country. Also think about current trends in health care spending and what a hole it’s eating in the national budget these days. Also consider that between 2000 and 2007 the percentage of US companies offering NO health benefits to employees rose from 24% to 30% (a 25% rise, at that rate in 2014 about 37% would offer no health benefit). There definitely is something special about the USA though, we admit that.

Question: But would health care services improve for most of us in any way if we had universal acces to care in the USA?

Well in many ways by giving up on a market-driven system where access, services are designed and funded primarily according to their profitability to the major industrial players, we could design a system according to the health care needs of the nation. We would have a much greater emphasis on public health, especially public health education, which saves vast sums of money in producing better health outcomes. We would also surely have a system which would favor regular primary care and a system of “medical homes” for all Americans. Instead we are rapidly eroding away the remnants of our primary care system as we approach 2010.

Question: What is the basis for arguing that Health Care is a “right”?

There are both precedents in U.S. history and legal precedents for considering health care a right for all Americans. The core of the argument is the value of life and what it means to live as a civilized society, which has been continually argued and advanced since our nation’s founding. You know there’s that old-fashioned belief in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in that old rag -the US Constitution ? EINO wishes more Americans would ask themselves why it is that we are willing to spend twice per capita on health care what other nations spend, even though we’re ranked 37th in quality and even though only we don’t provide access to everyone? Maybe it might have something to do with the racial divide in this nation? And maybe such anti-democratic legacies will only be overcome once we recognize the human rights aspect of the stuggle for universal access to care?

Question: Isn’t this “need” just another attempt by the far-left and liberals in this country to try and burden those who have struggled harder to accumulate wealth, especially targeting Republicans?

No longer a liberal issue. Rocky White is an unlikely radical. A Nebraska-bred country boy, a Republican-voting, ranch-owning, small-town doctor, he hardly fits the profile of a wild-eyed revolutionary. But White and a handful of cohorts are, in fact, trying to foment upheaval. The revolution they are proposing: a national health-insurance program. Nothing short of that will fix what White calls “our god-awful broken system.” … it may be that this valley, like other rural areas, is getting hit hard first. That the forces driving doctors and insurance companies out, squeezing hospitals to the breaking point in rural Colorado, are simply foreshadowing what is in store for metro areas. And that’s without considering our dilapidated Emergency Care system which threatens us all.

And some suggest that by wrestling with those problems now, small communities are in the vanguard, and the solutions they craft may offer road maps for the rest of the country. … the problems faced by rural medicine are daunting, complicated and growing worse. That is what drove White to join forces with Dr. Gladys Richardson, an unabashed liberal, a woman who could hardly be more different from White. In August, they invited virtually every health care provider in the five-county valley to hear their pitch for national health insurance. The response was so huge they had to move the evening meeting from White’s office to the largest conference room in the largest hotel in Alamosa. They came last August and listened as White stood at a podium, his laptop in hand.