The recent talk of health-care reform has drawn an exceptionally visceral reaction from Americans who apparently do not realize how much the government has already done for them. Comically sobering quotes such as “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” have become the symbol of an argument made unwinnable by one side’s not possessing the knowledge (or honesty) it takes to lose a reasoned debate. It seems that education reform may be a political prerequisite for health-care reform.
The health-care debate is vividly emotional — much to the chagrin of a few dedicated reformists — but that is exactly as we should expect. We certainly don’t want our health care system to be coldly logical, so our health care politics shouldn’t be either.
The major fear of government health care so far has been that it would be “rationed” to cut costs. There are only two costs in health care: the cost of the treatment itself and the profit paid to the health-care industry. The latter cannot be touched as long as we still want to be a capitalist economy, so reducing the amount of medical care given may be the only politically practical way to decrease costs.
But that idea bothers us, and it should. The idea of leaving certain patients to die because there is no money to treat them should horrify any person with a shred of humanity, regardless of the economics behind the decision.
Government deficits and health industry profits may be important, but they are merely numbers. The elderly or chronically ill patients who now fear for their lives, however, are real people, and we naturally identify with them.
The focus of the health-care debate, then, has been wrong all along. The objective of our health-care reform must not be to cut costs in health care, but rather to pay for those costs by harnessing the entire power of our economy.
The federal government currently spends only about 20 percent of its budget on health care, so there is plenty of room for American voters to instruct their representatives to value our people’s health more highly.
If we truly believe that every life is valuable, as the founding document of our nation suggests, then we should be proud to pay whatever it takes to give every citizen as much health care as he or she needs.
As a nation, we can afford costs that might overwhelm individual citizens, but this is the essence of good citizenship.
The federal government should subsidize the entire market price of unlimited health care and accept the even more astronomical costs that would feed the profits of the health-care industry and power the national economy. The profits would enrich thousands of top executives and investors, who could then afford the high income taxes needed to support the nation’s health spending and close the cycle.
The result would be peace of mind, high quality private health care for every American, and a collective satisfaction at having done our part to solve America’s greatest public policy problem.
Reach the reporter at kenneth.lan@asu.edu.
