I don’t usually whip out a blog post in a wave of rage, but I’m coasting on some serious fury right now and I reckon I’m going to channel it into some good old fashioned public ranting. Attention: my filter is officially off.
Hello world! I’m pissed.
Today a Senate panel rejected both proposals for a public option for health care.
As they did so, you could hear the health care industry breathe a collective sigh of perverted relief. It puts those douchebags one step closer to keeping their current business model: providing health care only for the healthy.
Because you know what? No health company will ever make money off my wife. Why? It’s not because she’s made herself unhealthy. She takes excellent care of herself. She exercises regularly. Eats right. Sees a doctor. She does everything right, and has for a long time. But for mysterious reasons no one understands, as a teenager her body stopped producing insulin. And because her body can’t do it for her anymore, she must cut her body open every day to test her blood and then inject an appropriate amount of artificially generated insulin. She does this many times a day, every day. Has done for years. And will do it for, most likely, the rest of her life. It’s not a perfect system, but it lets her live relatively normally. Without modern medicine she would have died long ago.
No company can make money off my wife’s health. Insulin, test strips, needles, insulin pumps, pump supplies, and doctor visits: they cost a lot of fucking money. And a pure free market system will leave her to die.
I mean, let’s not fucking beat around the bush here, right? I know they will leave her to die because I called them and asked. Two years ago I was trying to start working for myself full time. Tried and, initially, failed. Because there exists no private health coverage for someone with type 1 diabetes. After several calls, one nice lady was at least honest enough to put it bluntly: “Honey, no one is going to sell you a plan. No one.”
Shall I pull out that old political phrase everyone likes to use? Shall I? Shall I at least put some English on it? Sure thing. Can do. Here you go:
LET’S BE FUCKING CLEAR.
The free market would kill my wife. And the point of a public health option is that, presumably, we think my wife might actually be a nice person to have around. You don’t even have to love her to think that. She’s a highly educated, productive citizen, and a registered nurse. She works every day to save and care for the lives of others. She’s pretty fucking handy to have around.
When we’re talking about health care, we’re talking about a problem that the free market can’t solve. Can’t do it. Sorry. Can’t.
Do I think the public option is the only solution? No. Thank god, no. We could, for example, set some better ground rules for the private market. We could say:
- You have to accept everyone who applies.
- You have to offer your plans across the entire country.
Or something like that. The point is that those of us who are healthy need to shoulder some of the cost for those of us who are sick. And to all you pure-blooded libertarians out there I say: pack yourself a backpack, move to an unclaimed island, and best of fucking luck to you.
We need to fix health care. I love me my conservative friends, and, seriously, I genuinely respect your discomfort with a large government program. But. The government has got to get involved here. Somehow. The free market doesn’t cut it this time. And if you guys stand for nothing but tweaking the current system, I am telling you now: I take that very, very, personally. And it is not okay.
P.S.: By the way, I was eventually able to start working for myself full time. The result? My company saw massive growth and hired during the recession. It would have been nice to contribute that productivity to the American economy earlier, but hey, I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the profits of the fucking health care companies.
8 Comments
Well said. You may find this shocking (as I’m one of those crazy conservative friends of yours who hates big government), but I’m not happy that they rejected the public option either. This is for two reasons:
1) I think this rejection had less to do with preventing big government and more to do with successful lobbying on the part of the big health care companies. In general, I’m pro-free market, and today I think the biggest opponent to the free market is a big company with politicians in their pocket. This stops the free market from working.
2) I don’t think the free market can solve this problem. I definitely agree that the state of health care in the U.S. is awful and needs fixing. I don’t understand how things got this bad (and I think boiling it down to a single thing like tort is ridiculous), but the system needs to be fixed. I don’t think a government-run health care plan is a good idea, but I don’t have any ideas that I think will work. Sitting on my principles and rejecting everyone else’s ideas won’t solve this problem. I’d rather try some other people’s ideas and let them prove me wrong.
Chad, as always, you are one of my favorite conservative friends to talk to. Level headed even when I am spitting fire.
Strangely enough, I too don’t necessarily think a government-run plan is the best idea. It’s just, as you said, that it appears less evil than the current system. I’m also sensitive to the concern that once the government wades in, it’s hard to disentangle it, but I’d choose that problem over the current alternative.
Anyway, thank you for your thoughts. Thought-provoking as always.
Chris, I take your (& your wife’s) situation example as a good reason while healthcare needs to be reformed and perhaps re-invented. However, and the reason you provide is very one-sided. For every person I have talked to or read about in your situation I have made a concerted effort to read about folks in the same situation under other healthcare plans. You are depicting a very one-sided image of the drawbacks to the current system and the proposed solutions. Have you spoken to people that have experienced both styles of systems?
I have spoken with people sitting on the other side of the fence, in other countries. I’ve spoken with people on waiting lists, people who have had to shuffle their ambulatory children between hospitals in their own vehicles, and people who have had to receive inferior care as a result of their healthcare. Shit, I’ve even spoken with people who were ejected from a hospital when the doctors just “gave up.” How are the proposed solutions going to fix this? By providing an “opt-out” scenario for those that want “better” healthcare? How is that situation better? When someone without healthcare in the US enters an emergency room they receive the top care in the world. You enter the emergency room in other countries only to looked at and kicked out (based on 2nd person accounts only). At the same time I have been with people that received excellent care in other countries, but not for complicated procedures. The “wait list” scenario is fucked up.
And I take offense to you taking my opinion personally. I do not want you or Elizabeth to come to harm regardless of the outcome of these reformation proposals. You have described a *SINGLE* situation involving a chronic illness that may or may not have benefited from reform.
I know you are personally tied to this situation. But so are many people in other countries that suffer under the care provided by the proposed systems. So are people in this country that rely on our current high quality healthcare. Presumptuous of me to assume a degradation in the quality of care? Perhaps. You are making similar presumptions on the other side of the fence. Broaden your perspective my friend. Interview those with not only chronic needs, but needs that require rapid attention. The proposed solutions are not appropriate for *exactly* the reasons the legislators are touting. While reform is necessary, while is the path different than solutions we’ve applied to other industries. Perhaps monopolistic practice laws should be applied here (with adjustments).
Sorry, I feel the need to add additional comments. My mother suffers from a degenerative eye disease that will eventually leave her blind. She is 59 and will will be blind within a few years. Her healthcare provider will not pay for experimental treatment that may save her sight. She is a US government employee working for the National Institute of Health. The irony here, the govies at NIH can’t even get experimental treatment, and she runs vaccine testing studies for fuck sake. She manages experimental treatment studies yet can’t obtain them for her own health. Yes I have a vested personal interest in seeing healthcare reformed, no I don’t agree with the proposed solutions. It is about benefiting the larger populous. Individual cases are great for depicting a one-sided benefit, but as for the populous as a whole, I think the reforms will only harm our society in the long run.
Hey Spencer, thank you for taking the time to write the above. I am grateful to hear your thoughts on it.
I agree that my rant does not address all issues at stake in the health care debate.
I agree that a public option may not be the best way to structure health care.
I agree that quality and speed are important issues, not to be taken lightly.
I agree that a public option could lead to lower standards of quality and speed.
I disagree that quality and speed for the healthy and wealthy are the highest priority.
I agree that forces of free market competition should be and can be harnessed to improve the system.
I disagree that the anecdote I describe is isolated or one-sided. It is illustrative of a fundamental failure, probably the fundamental failure, of our current system: an under-regulated free market system will prioritize profits above health.
I disagree that I should not take this debate personally.
I agree that others will take it personally in different ways. I think that’s good. I think we need to know the personal stories on all sides.
“…[P]eople on waiting lists, people who have had to shuffle their ambulatory children between hospitals in their own vehicles, and people who have had to receive inferior care as a result of their healthcare… people who were ejected from a hospital when the doctors just “gave up.” ” –if I hadn’t been reading carefully, I would have thought you were referring to this country. Things like this happen all the time here, with the possible exception of patients being transferred to another hospital by car. If you don’t think that people in this country receive inferior care as a result of their insurance (or lack thereof), please go visit a clinic in a low-income area of Baltimore.
I find it interesting that so many people talk about the high quality of care in this country. Yes, it is true that if you arrive in the emergency room in the middle of a heart attack, your life will probably be saved and you will probably have high tech procedures performed at enormous cost, and that’s all wonderful. If procedures are needed to save your life, you will get them whether you have health insurance or not. However, there are many, many patients that show up in the hospital repeatedly with exacerbations of chronic conditions such as congestive heart failure. If these patients are uninsured, it is highly likely that either a) the condition could have been prevented or delayed in the first place with appropriate primary care or b) the exacerbation could have been prevented if the patient had been able to afford his medications and follow-up appointments. It’s all well and good to say that we have a high quality of health care in this country, but in terms of _keeping people healthy_ in the first place, the quality of care here is very poor. If you’re wealthy, well-educated, and have good health insurance, you’re in luck, but if not, you may only receive treatment when it’s much too late to do much good. A patient with preexisting hypertension cannot buy individual health insurance (I assume), but if he or she were to be uncontrolled for long enough to suffer a stroke and require life-saving intervention or to require a kidney transplant, these procedures could be performed, at enormous cost. And who would pay? Taxpayers, and the patient, who has lost productive, healthy years and years of quality of life only to be “saved” in later life by our “high quality care.”
Does it make more sense to make sure that someone with hypertension or type 1 diabetes can get affordable, decent health insurance to keep him healthy and productive, or to spend who knows how much taxpayer money down the line for disability payments, dialysis 3 times a week, or a $30,000 (preventable) kidney transplant and immunosuppressant drugs for life? People want the government to stay out of health care, but at the end of the day, the government ends up paying the bills for the uninsured one way or another.
I guess it comes down to this: should we prioritize keeping a larger number of people healthy so that they will not need as many complicated treatments and procedures? Or should we prioritize the highest technology treatments at all costs, even if that means that many more people are sick or going without preventive care?
Chris — I agree with you wholeheartedly and without reservation. The free market was never meant to apply to things like healthcare. The irony is that Sarah Palin talks about “death panels” as if, as you already demonstrated in your story, there weren’t already death panels. But we have become so addicted to the idea that profit is more important than morality that we can insist that, in order to be enacted, a public option must solve EVERY problem, which is ridiculous. Furthermore, the anecdotal, secondhand “evidence” mentioned above, as is usually the case with the right wing, elides health insurance with a state run system. While I am in favor of the latter, I don’t think it is ethical to represent anecdotal evidence of one as evidence against the other. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” was put forward with the clear understanding that there would be a strong, moral community that would prevent abuses. Massive corporations are beyond such prevention.
It is absolutely scandalous that our country has to go through this stupid discussion regarding health care. It can only happen in a culture that has been dominated by free market brainwashing for 25 years.
Ooh shoot i just typed a big comment and when i hit post it came up blank! Please tell me it worked properly? I do not want to write it again if i do not have to! Either the blog glitced out or i am just stuipd, the latter doesnt surprise me lol.