Recently I received a forward from a dear reader of this blog (well, or more like forced reader, since I send all of you an email everytime I crank this crap out), from a co-worker who sent her an article on how some social security checks were sent out to dead people--the original sender (not my lovely reader of course) then made a comment to the tune of "so you want our government running health care?"
There is a sentiment throughout our society that government cannot run things efficiently--ever--and that this fact alone means that we should never let the government do anything, because it will be...ah yes, inefficient. This is dumb. And though it would be perhaps foolish of me to do it given that some of my dear, forced readers believe this as well--oh what the hell--people that believe this are dumb. Dummies, morons, fools, and extremely easily tricked and manipulated. At the very least, they are undereducated, and lack intellectual curiosity.
A couple of points in response if I may:
1) If private corporations are more efficient and make less mistakes than the government, why did the banking industry fail and why are we currently in the biggest recession in about 50 years? What about GM, Chrysler, or any other private corporation that has filed bankruptcy etc? Not too terribly efficient are they--so yes, though the government makes mistakes, there is nothing about running a business that is somehow a saving grace against screw ups--its called human fallability.
2) Using one example of a screw up does not damn an entire system. People make this mistake all the time. They think that just because they know someone who has done this, or done that, or something that somehow magically defies conventional wisdom, that this means that it always happens and is true and logical--I've heard so many outright lies of this nature, because someone was unwilling to concede an argument. Again, giving one provincial example to prove a point that is related to hundreds of thousands of people or a tremendously complex system is a drop in the bucket, and without thousands of similar examples, should be completely disregarded. Your buddy may well have an uncle in the Ozarks that cured his lung cancer by drinking bathtub gin, but that doesn't mean the Mayo clinic is going to start offering the Cletus Cocktail to cure its patients.
3) The government run health care system already operates more efficiently than private health care. Medicare (though it is running out of money because it caters to people who need an unbelieveable amount of care--oldsters), is administrated at a cost of about 2%, depending on where you get your data, and most HMO's operate at a cost of 9%.
4) When competition cannot produce a better product at a lower price, it doesn't do anyone any good to have it (on a side note, this is why we allow public monopolies, such as PGE, or the water or sewage company--it would be silly to build more than one electric grid, water, or sewage system--inefficient, more precisely), especially when you consider that it is not as if you can pick and choose whether or not you get treatment. If you break a leg, you don't wait for the price to go down, or go to the cheapest doctor--you go to a doctor you are comfortable with, and get a cast, or go to the emergency room.
This is the reason that health care costs have gone up tremendously in the last few years...people can't very well just not go to the doctor if they are seriously ill, and the HMO's make a higher profit by DENYING these people treatment and making it as difficult to access their health care as possible. In any private industry, corporations are going to seek to increase their market share as much as possible (as they should), and that is exactly what has happened with the health care industry.
Consider these facts:
-About 45 million Americans do not have health insurance, including 9 million children.
-We currently spend about $2.2 trillion on health care every year. That amounts to $7,421 per person!
-If the current rate growth in the health care industry continues, 1 out of every $4 in the U.S. economy will be tied up for this purpose by 2025.
-Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have doubled in the last 9 years, a rate 3 times faster than cumulative wage increases.
-Americans spend more money on health care than on food or housing.
Now, think of insurance as an umbrella--the more people under that umbrella, the larger the umbrella needs to be, and the more efficient it becomes. You need less material to cover 20 people with one giant umbrella than you would need if every single person had an individual umbrella. Additionally, most of the people are in no danger of getting wet (healthy) with one umbrella--it would only be the people on the outside that were in any danger (sick); whereas if everyone has a small, individual umbrella, they are all in danger of being outside of their coverage.
In other words, since there are many, many more people that are healthy at any one time, than are sick, the larger the insurance pool is, the lower the cost of coverage. So putting every American under the same umbrella would save us a lot of money (single payer health care).
5) Things are getting pretty bad in this country and we need to change the way we do things. Arguing, as the Republicans do, against change of any kind is not maintaining the status quo, because things are already getting worse, so arguing against change to fix these problems is actively harming the general American public. There is no reason that we can't make government run effectively and efficiently to make it do the things we want it to do, and one of those things it can and needs to run is health care.
6) Many people somehow think that changing to a public health care system will cost us money--it won't! THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT OF CHANGING TO GOV. HEALTHCARE DUMMIES! Going to a single payer system will have a number of benefits: a) employers will no longer have to provide health care for their employees, making their profit margins larger, which means that they can either pay their employees more, take more home for themselves, or both; b) we will drastically reduce the number of people that are not covered and have to use the emergency room to get care, which is tremendously more expensive than regular visits to the doctor; and c) because we will all be in the same system, public pressure to keep it efficient will be tremendous, giving each American much more leverage than they currently enjoy with their soulless HMO.
Look, we can all sit here and listen to the wolves baying outside our door, but they're picking people off every so often, and pretty soon their gonna find us and kill us, and being too scared to confront and kill them isn't going to solve our problems. Yes, change is scary, but I would rather face that fear than piss the bed like a little kid because I'm too scared to get up and go to the bathroom. This is the difference between adults and children. Adults use facts, knowledge, and confront their problems in a rational way by finding solutions. Children beg mommy to make it better.
Be an adult.
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