People in countries with universal health care live
longer and healthier lives than people in the
United States
. Their infant mortality rates are lower. No one goes bankrupt or loses
their home because of unpaid medical bills. No one has to make a choice
between food and medicine or between rent and health insurance payments.
No one has to put off going to the doctor because it’s too expensive.
Changing jobs doesn’t mean losing or changing medical coverage. Losing a
job doesn’t mean losing medical coverage.
Universal health care even mitigates the costs of
malpractice insurance: a big chunk of many malpractice awards goes toward
future medical costs, and with universal health care, those costs are
already covered.
So what’s the down side? Opponents of universal
health care will tell you about waiting lists and inferior medical
services. They’ll bring up the spectre of “socialised medicine,”
which is meant to make you think of some faceless Soviet-style bureaucrat
ordering you to see some poorly-trained doctor in some bleak clinic.
They’ll tell you that the “free market,” the
system under which profits depend in part on withholding medical services
from participants or refusing participation to people with the greatest
needs, is the best way to ensure that everyone gets the care they need.
They’ll tell you this with a straight face, in the
face of 50 million uninsured Americans, in the face of life expectancies
three years shorter than those in other developed countries (and
Cuba
), in the face of infant mortality rates anywhere from 20-50% higher than
those in other developed countries.
They’ll tell you that the U.S. has the finest
health care system in the world; something which, if true, would mean that
Americans are simply physically inferior to those longer-lived and
healthier Canadians and French and Cubans.
It’s almost true: the
U.S.
has the finest health care infrastructure in the world, with the best
equipment and a plentiful supply of well-trained doctors and other medical
personnel. It’s just that many Americans can’t afford to get in the
door.
Polls consistently show that a large majority of
Americans support the idea of taxpayer-supported universal health care
even if it means higher taxes — anywhere from 60%-80%, depending upon
how the question is
phrased. So why don’t we have it?
We don’t have it because a very small minority of
people pay our elected officials a very large amount of money to kill any
attempt at implementing a sane national health care policy.
I say “a very large amount of money,” but in
reality it’s just a fraction of what the health care industry receives
in return for their investment: they spend a few hundred million on
campaign contributions and lobbying, and they get tens of billions in
return, from tax breaks, subsidies and the opportunity to continue racking
up very tidy profits at the expense of consumers, both the ones they serve
and the ones they don’t.
Michael Moore’s Sicko, a film about health care,
premiers tomorrow.
Moore
intends the film as a call to action. The representatives and
beneficiaries of the system he attacks will be pushing back, hard. But if
some significant number of that majority of Americans who support national
health care push back in their own turn, Moore will have started a fight
that we can win.
During the next few days we’ll be taking a look at
some of the realities of national health care in other countries, and how
and why the U.S. can both emulate and surpass those systems, and we’ll
be taking a closer look at some of the issues raised in Moore’s film,
which go beyond the purely medical impact of national health care.
Meanwhile, go catch Sicko when it opens near
you.
