For years we have faced a terrible health care crisis. The cost of health care has skyrocketed, and families have gone bankrupt due to medical bills. One statistic I encountered (though I cannot vouch for its veracity) is 62% of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical bills, and of those, ¾ had medical insurance. Hospitals have become for-profit ventures, and investigations have turned up gross overcharging time and again. Horror stories about our horribly broken health care system abound. One-third of Go Fund Me campaigns are to help families pay mounting expenses. Just recently, a woman in Georgia was charged $700 just for sitting in an ER even though no doctor ever examined her.
We pay insurance companies to cover our medical bills, but they are notorious for jerking around their customers. They have a long, long list of “pre-existing conditions” that they use to blow off nearly anybody requesting that a bill be covered, and use various weasel words to avoid covering various items. People have sat on hold for hours and hours without hearing a live human voice. Forget a lawsuit – each company has a large army of lawyers who can drag out the case until the one suing runs out of money. A class-action lawsuit, in which a bunch of little fish gang up on the big fish? Sorry, now allowed these days.
Meanwhile, in numerous other countries, people have access to affordable health care. Nobody goes bankrupt, nor are taxes bleeding everybody white. Medicines and prescriptions are inexpensive, if not free. Activists are hollering for a similar system here, marching and protesting, signing petitions and post cards, contacting their representatives by phone and e-mail and text and twitter. Up against this crusade is the powerful medical insurance lobby, as well as conservative pundits ready with propaganda about extreme expense or asking if this means that every wino gets a free liver transplant. Those who howl about Medicare for All being costly are strangely silent about how much we squander on “defense” and tax breaks for big corporations and the ultra-wealthy.
People in the U.S. who have the means and opportunity regularly travel to Mexico or Canada for the medications they need. Many patients have resorted to “medical tourism,” traveling to distant lands to receive treatment they can’t get here due to the great expense or unavailability. The rich, of course, always have this option; those of modest means may have to scrimp and save for months, maybe years.
Practitioners of alternative medicine appeal to the desperate, promising miracles that they cannot deliver. When traditional Western medicine sucks patients dry and cannot save everyone, naturally shady practices become attractive. They can always send a paid-off shill to claim that such-and-such cured them of cancer, ALS, etc., and those who have lost their patience with our messed-up system often listen.
To cure this country’s malady we need the right people in charge. And who better to run health care than doctors? Also, we need to put more emphasis on prevention. Here is a perfect example of an ounce of prevention being better than a pound of cure. Perhaps everybody gets basic care – yearly checkups, flu shots, certain screenings – for free. Other suggestions include putting public assistance programs such as Medicaid on a sliding scale, instead of having a sharp cutoff; and offering “gapcare,” low-cost coverage for those people who don’t qualify for Medicaid/Medicare but can’t afford regular health insurance or COBRA. In a certain sense, Obamacare is gapcare; but it still puts big insurance companies in charge of who gets what – if anything.
Meanwhile, we have to start by accepting responsibility for our own well-being. We have no business demanding a better health care system when we eat like elephants and exercise like sloths, when we shovel all manner of unhealthful swill into our mouths. Unfortunately, you can scream and scream and scream in American ears until you drop from asphyxiation, you can shove all sorts of posters and videos extolling a healthful lifestyle in their faces, you can hold guns to their heads, nail their eyes open, wallop their enormous arses with bullwhips – but the instant the seductive smell of greasy, trans-fat laden French fries or chocolate cake full of simple carbohydrates hits their nostrils, all the lecturing is forgotten. The only way to get some people to eat anything healthful, it seems, is to chain them to chairs and prop their mouths open. All the preaching about eating right is drowned out by the obnoxious jingles of restaurants touting vile garbage they have the temerity to call food. We sit at desks all day at work, and loll on the couch in front of the TV all evening. We seek magic-bullet solutions to our expanding waist lines, hoping that we can get drastic weight loss in a pill or just 10 minutes a day of diddling with the latest as-seen-on-TV gadget. We mewl for a royal road to radiant health and chase after every fad diet rather than making a reasonable effort to get in shape and stay in shape. It is all part of our becoming lazy, not just physically but also intellectually and ethically.
Thus, better health care is a two-way street. We can holler for a health care system that doesn’t result in hundreds of thousands of personal bankruptcies a year, but we also have to take care of our own bodies.
4 Responses to “SOUND OFF! 11/6/21 The Next Gandhi? Part 7 – Sick and Tired of It”
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I’m not sure I waould label our coondition as “becoming lazy” – humans have always valued rest, and any kind of work is tiring (some in different ways.) But for centuries all work was physical work (just one example – being a knight for yout feudal lord had a lot of perks compared to a farm hand, but the practice you needed to do to keep in training was extremely physical). First the industrial age, and now the digital age, have changed that. Now we mostly work with out brains to survive … and our brain-body connection feels it as much as physical work, but it doesn’t burn any calories. Our bodies have not caught up to our brains yet – if that is even possible.
And that may actually be the best reason we need universal health coverage, which is most efficiently done through government. And which, as you point out, every other civilized country on earth already has. We never evolved to, nor were ever created to, live in the world we now have. Our bodies are not made for it, and our brains aren’t either. It’s not really surprising when you think about it that we are not equipped to handle it.
Having lived in two countries with what Americans would call universal health coverage, I can tell you it isn’t as universal as it is said to be and far from inexpensive. But nobody goes bankrupt for getting healthcare in Europe or in Australia, that is a fact. And while private hospitals, medical staff – and notably specialists – and insurance companies are making profits, there is some regulation in place to keep that in check.
But universal healthcare doesn’t prevent bad lifestyles; money does. The less money people have to spend, the worse their eating and exercise habits are. A good diet and regular exercise comes at a cost and also isn’t a question of choice as long as companies are allowed to add anything to their products to make them as cheap AND addictive as possible, from high salt, sugar and fat content in food and drink to hundreds of chemicals in cigarettes and vapes. And I haven’t even started on the role of advertising in public health.
What is needed is both universal healthcare and government health regulation with regards to healthy products and disease prevention.
Thanks Freya–one of our western states even has their health plan for State employees require them to fly to Mexico for their prescriptions because paying for that travel on top of those RX costs is less expensive than them using a U.S. pharmacy.
The problem began when Nixon allowed health care to be provided by for-profit entities, instead of the prior non-profit requirements, which ironically began because Henry Kaiser wanted to provide his employees with health care via his own clinics and hospital(s) and thus was born HMOs where the legislation addressed both changes.
I have had Kaiser for more than 50 yrs. with its excellent history on prevention and being the historically lowest cost full care option for my region (both in terms of premiums and costs to members). I am changing at the first of the year–their pharmacy changed from being a health care model to being a maximizing profit model and has been nothing but problems for me ever since. I also have found they may be practicing what research says is among the most common sources of Medicare fraud and that they may be the only plan in the area where the plan still makes those on Medicare pay office visit co-pays. The other plans also pay a higher amount more frequently for hearing aids. For the care I have needed every year my out of pocket should be half what it has been with Kaiser and I will be able to fill prescriptions when I am in other states.
With Biden being opposed to going to a universal health care system, I am thankful to be seeing lots of movement towards CA enacting their own.