Health Care Reform

One of the many difficulties in understanding the issue as a whole involves getting a straight story about health care reform. What needs to be changed is not so much health care as a whole, but access to medical treatment and the insurance with which to pay for it. No one the least bit in their right mind would dispute this. Having members of the public die or become disabled because health care is unaffordable is a very Third World notion. It’s absolutely unacceptable for this to occur in a wealthy nation anywhere on the planet.

Unfortunately the Conservative elitists, all of whom have good jobs and decent health care insurance (provided by the US government in the case of Congress), are scaremongering in a big way. What it comes down to is they are saying essentially ‘We have our insurance and our health care. It doesn’t matter if you do.’ It costs far more to be sick in the US than in most wealthy nations and there are far too many people who cannot afford the price. The Conservatives don’t like any plan they didn’t formulate but to date haven’t come up with workable alternatives themselves.

Reform is needed in the provision of insurance to those who are working but blocked from  affordable options. The technical aspects of American health care don’t need change. If one has the money or enough insurance, one can get perfectly good care. Consider: a large number of home foreclosures and bankruptcies aren’t due to bad spending habits. Rather they are due to a catastrophic or longterm illness for which there was no insurance or insufficient insurance coverage. However that doesn’t make for sensational news headlines.

Those Conservative elitists who whine about the cost of health care reform and go on endlessly about the ‘increased national deficit’ have been strangely silent about the massive deficits run up by the previous Bush administration. Apparently getting involved in two wars for which their greatgrandchildren will be paying is perfectly acceptable. Providing affordable insurance options for millions of their constituents is too expensive. Government-administered health insurance costs would be a tiny drop in a very, very large bucket. One must ask which has greater benefits for the American public in the long term.

One soundbite that occurs frequently is ‘But we don’t want socialised medicine.’ That might conceivably be a fair comment if the ones who parrot that statement actually knew anything about the subject. However the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t know what socialised medicine is and is not. They’ve never been anywhere that has something that could be called socialised medicine and have never experienced it. Buying reduced-priced prescriptions at Canadian pharmacies hardly counts. The drugs are less expensive *because* of the Canadian medical system, not in spite of it.

There is a disturbing aspect to the carefully-orchestrated ‘outrage’ over health care reform at public meetings. The tactics used by the Conservative elitists are frighteningly reminiscent of those used by the Nazis (or Al Qaeda or the Taleban)  to stir up their minions. There is a wealth of mis- or disinformation and specific directions on how to disrupt proceedings (shouting down the opposition, attempting to put the speaker off-balance etc). Is that truly how a free American society should work?  It’s ‘free speech’ only when it’s your side speaking?
 
Something to bear in mind: people who are shrieking at the top of their voices are unable to hear anything but the noise they are making. They certainly aren’t prepared to listen.