'Yes' to Socialized Healthcare, Part 2

Note to my faithful reader(s): I wrote part 1 of this 2-part series as a response to a debate prompt on helium.com, an online writers' community. Imagine my shock when, the very next morning, I saw a new prompt on that same site asking whether further privatization and deregulation of the healthcare system would solve the problem. I was forced to chime in on this, and the following was the result:

Many Americans believe that the solution to our healthcare dilemma is to further privatize and deregulate the system. If we free up the healthcare market, there is some reason to believe that it will behave like other free markets - costs will go down, allowing more people to get insurance, and quality will go up. This is the basis behind most Democrats' plans for what they call universal healthcare. However, this notion fails to take into consideration a few basic aspects of the healthcare system that make further privatization and deregulation a bad idea.

Firstly, the limited market. Let's say you're in the business of selling cars. It can reasonably be assumed that cars will never go out of style, and that, as more and more people around the world reap the benefits of industrialization, one of the things they will buy with their newfound money will be cars. Therefore, in this day and age, the automotive industry has a virtually unlimited market. This causes car companies to compete with each other for the constant stream of new customers. This is one of the prerequisites to a truly successful and beneficial free market: If there is not a growing market, a good deal of the helpful competition simply does not happen. If you've been buying Ford cars your whole life, you're less likely to go out and buy a Chevy, almost entirely regardless of the corporate competition going on. On the other hand, someone who is a first time car buyer reaps the full benefits of capitalism - Ford and Chevy both want them, so they'll both lower their prices and increase the quality of their products to win them over.

Healthcare doesn't work this way. There are a limited number of people in the United States (with a yearly population growth of less than .9%), and an even smaller number of people who are not already insured. Once all of those 40 million or so people got coverage, the burst of corporate competition that brought that about would immediately come to a halt. And after that point, there would be virtually NO market growth, and very limited competition, and corporations would be free to hike up their prices as much as they see fit. If the only two car companies in America were Ford and Chevy, and neither company had any new customers to entice, what's to stop them from both, little by little, increasing their prices?

This leads me nicely toward the second reason further deregulation of healthcare is unfeasible: the obvious greed of the conglomerates which currently have control over the system. If, as in the aforementioned scenario, they became able to raise their prices, they absolutely would. These corporations clearly do not hold themselves to very high moral standards - just watch "Sicko", or ask any of the millions of people who have struggled with their health insurance providers. Corporations that make money based on not giving people healthcare would have no qualms about raising prices, if it was a feasible business practice, which it is now and still would be under a further deregulated system. Even though the initial burst in competition would probably allow many of the currently uninsured people to become insured, eventually corporations would raise their prices again, once again excluding more and more people from the system while keeping corporate profits intact, and even growing.

Even if further deregulation and privatization of healthcare worked, and managed to permanently extend insurance coverage to all Americans, there still exist fundamental flaws in ANY privatized healthcare system. HMOs profit, and the system survives, based on how much healthcare they can deny their customers. This proposed plan would only give that same crappy coverage to everyone. That's like having an automotive industry in which Ford increases its sales and profits by building cars that break down beyond repair at 5,000 miles. And it's even worse, because we're not talking about a luxury, but a basic human right.

Clearly, this proposal is not the right way to handle the healthcare crisis. The best answer to our healthcare woes is not further "freeing up the market", but changing the entire system to a universal, single-payer, and yes, socialized plan.

'Yes' to Socialized Healthcare

When a nation's institutions are insufficient to meet the needs of the people, it is the government's responsibility to change national policy and fix those institutions. When every other industrialized nation in the world has adopted a different system, and it is clear that that system works far better than the one that we have, this makes the government's job in reforming the broken institution simple.

Such is the case with healthcare in America. The system is clearly broken - that's not even really up for debate. Insurance companies make money by not giving care. 31 cents on every dollar of healthcare spending goes to maintaining the conglomerates that have a stranglehold on it. Over 40 million Americans are uninsured, and even those who are insured must pay high premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, just to get insurance coverage that is clearly sub-par.

These same problems, or versions thereof, plagued every other industrialized nation as well. But while the American government has refused to address the issue, all these other nations have faced the problems, and fixed them. Socialized medicine has worked incredibly well for these nations - and it would work for us too.
One of the major arguments against socialized healthcare is that under such a system, it is necessary to ration care. A socialist system, in other words, would not be able to pay for everything for everyone. This is a sad truth. But it is a sad truth shared by ANY healthcare system. In the current healthcare system of the United States, over 40 MILLION people do not have insurance - that's one out of every seven Americans being "rationed" out of EVERY type of healthcare. Doesn't it make more sense to base the necessary rationing on the importance of different medicines and procedures, rather than on the patient's ability to pay?

Some people are still resistant to the concept of socialized medicine because of communism anxiety leftover from the Cold War. We cannot socialize our vital national institutions, they say, because that puts us on the path toward communism! While I agree that communism is the last thing this nation needs, the fact of the matter is that having a few socialized institutions does not make a country communist. For example: Since the beginning of the public education system in America, it has been a socialist institution - it is run and paid for by the government. Then there's our police, our firefighters, our infrastructure, and our military - all socialist. Yet no one would argue that America is a communist nation. Why, then, are we afraid of making one more of our vital institutions socialist, for the good of the people?

It's time to break free of the hold that unbridled capitalism has on the basic human right to healthcare. We consider ourselves to be the wealthiest, most advanced nation in the world, so we should work on having the best healthcare. Let's get on board the system that has worked for every other industrialized nation in the world.

A Fitting Title

Sicko, Michael Moore's latest documentary film, is funny, sad, and maddening all at the same time. But above all, it's simply sickening.

If you don't know already, it's a documentary about the healthcare industry. It starts off by examining a few stories about America's not-so-secret dirty little secret: The nearly 50 million of us who are uninsured. There's certainly enough there to make as much sickening film as Michael Moore could possibly dream of. But that wouldn't be ambitious. That wouldn't be Michael Moore. No, Moore's style lies in biting off what seems to be more than he can chew about the topic he's covering, and then proceeding to rip it to shreds.

So he dismisses the 50 million uninsured American's by nonchalantly saying, "But this story isn't about them." And that's when he dives head-first into the real dirty little secret: That even if you are fully insured, the healthcare industry is still a nightmare. And Moore makes that fact seem even more sickening than the fact that a sixth of us are uninsured.

Insurance companies, it turns out, have a system of denying care that one former HMO employee rightly described as "labyrinthine." There's a list of pre-existing conditions a mile long that automatically make you ineligible. If your body mass index is too low or too high (in other words, if you're too fat or too skinny) you're denied. There are mountains of paperwork for even the simplest of claims. And if they fail to weed you out with all of that and end up paying for your care, they can continue looking for ways to retroactively deny you and reverse the payment. They have teams of people that scour medical records for anything that can be used to retroactively deny care (this was done to one woman, for example, because she had once had a yeast infection and hadn't reported it as a past "serious ailment" on her application). This system is held in place because the industry has four lobbyists for every member of Congress, and they have consistently been able to pay off every politician that goes to Capitol Hill, including their old rival, Hillary Clinton, who was a crusader for universal healthcare during her husband's presidency, but who is now #2 on the Senate payroll from healthcare groups. Sickening, yes?

But still, Moore's ambition is not sated. In order to really drive the point home to Americans, he knows he must not only show them that their system is broken, but that there are others that are better. And so, throughout the film, he profiles the universal healthcare systems of Canada, England, and France, which turn out to be so much better than ours that you absolutely have to see it to believe it.

And even then, he's still not done. The last portion of the film uproots whatever is left of your conviction that America's healthcare system works. If I were to say anything about it at all, it would spoil it for you. I wouldn't do that.

Suffice it to say that every minute of the film Sicko makes you more and more deeply convinced that America's healthcare system simply sucks. But all hope, Moore says, is not lost. It's a problem that we can fix. After all, we're America. If other nations have nailed down this concept, surely the birthplace of modern democracy, the wealthiest nation on Earth, can do it. The first step, as AA might say, is admitting we have a problem - which this film doesn't simply speculate on, but proves. That's why I implore anyone who reads this to watch Sicko.

(As an aside, don't believe the mainstream Democratic candidates when they say they have a plan for "universal healthcare" because, sadly, their plans are just to make sure everyone has insurance, and don't address the real problem revealed by Sicko - that that insurance system is crap. Dennis Kucinich is the only candidate who seems to actually have a universal healthcare plan, and that's one of many reasons why I think he's the best.)