Sicko, revisted

When I read that the topic of my Women's Health class this week would be focused on the economics of health care, I decided to mentally prepare myself renting and watching the movie, "Sicko," by Michael Moore. I'm still emotionally recovering from it. However, it did the trick. My righteous indignation has been ignited, not to mention a healthy dose of anger about the health care situation in the US.

This is a very difficult subject for me, as I find the polemics involved in the debate over whether the U.S. should go to a universal, single-payor system to be quite disturbing in regards to one significant respect. It is not the squabbles over cost which cause me difficulty, nor is it the arguments over whether such a system should be federally regulated and controlled rather than having state-governed and financed health plans. Neither am I upset over how people are arguing how consumers or doctors would protect their interests against government-mandated initiatives, such as schedules for preventative care. In my opinion, all of these debates raise legitimate concerns which are integral to resolving the crisis which is the U.S. health care system.

One question, however, does most definitely have a negative effect on my equanimity, and that is, "Why should health care be considered a right?" It is a question I have had posed to me in more debates on this issue than I can count, and often, it is posed within the larger context of health care being viewed as a business venture, and therefore subject to the vagaries of corporate investment schemes and the pursuit of personal gain. This concept is mind-boggling to me, but I suppose is no more than the sum result of decades of a powerful trend towards privatization in all sectors of service, as evidenced by such examples as the airline and utilities industries. That movement, combined with skyrocketing costs, obscene profits, and an explosion in the size of corporate growth in medical care, has gifted us with a health care system which considers the healing of a human being to be a commodity first, and a social or ethical imperative second.

How else do we explain how one of the richest, and most powerful countries in the world permits thousands of Americans to die from lack of health care, or insufficient access to the same? According to the Institute of Medicine (as cited by the National Coalition on Health Care, 2008), approximately 18,000 uninsured adults die every year in the U.S. This figure does not even include any deaths of children, a grim prospect considering that 8.5 million children are uninsured (Alexander, La Rosa, Bader, & Garfield, 2007).

Those numbers are shocking, indefensible, especially when considering that we went to war with not one, but two nations over the deaths of about 2,800 people, costing us the lives of thousands more men and women in our armed services, and untold billions of dollars. Why is there no similar outcry and call for action for the tens of thousands fallen due to...lack of access to health care?

But to answer that, I come back to the original question. "Why should health care be a right?" And I answer, "Why should it not be a right?" Should firefighters wait for a third-party authorization before consenting to douse your burning house, or dive in to rescue your screaming children? Should teachers in our public schools wait until you have written your co-pay before allowing your child to register for an education? Should the police man who answers your call at the mall check to see if your policy covers "out-of-network" law enforcement before going after the perp who has just kidnapped your child?

Do these questions sound absurd? They would to most Americans--but only because we already live in a society which takes these services for granted, because we have deemed the cost of not providing them to be too steep to us as individual communities, and to us as a nation. How this attitude of affording each person protection from criminals, rescue from danger, and an education, and so on, would not translate to providing health and protection against disease and financial ruin is beyond me. To me, it should be a given, and in fact, in every other Western, post-industrialized nation, universal health care is the standard. Even Cuba offers its citizens health care, and in fact, not incoincidentally has a lower infant mortality rate than the U.S (CIA, 2008).

We have tried the free market, private sector, every-man-for-himself approach. And we have 18,000+ dead Americans a year to show for it, not to mention one of the most expensive systems in the world (NCHC, 2008). In my opinion, universal health care should not only be a right, but is a necessity. In order to preserve our ideals, and our very way of life, we must achieve universal care. For, a diseased and unhealthy society will ultimately be a short-lived one--in every sense of the word.

Sources:

Alexander, L. L., LaRosa, J. H., Bader, H., & Garfield, S. (2007). New Dimensions in Women's
Health (4th ed.). Sadbury, Massachusetts: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.

Central Intelligence Agency. (2008). [Graph illustration the rank order of infant mortality].
The World Factbook. Retrieved on July 6, 2008 from
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html

National Center for Health Care. (2008). Facts about health care: health care insurance.
Retrieved on July 6, 2008 from http://www.nchc.org/facts/coverage.shtml

Image retrieved from http://community.livejournal.com/politicartoons