Commentary —

Health Care On Life Support

By William A. Collins

Health insurance,

Saves the day;

But it eats up,

Half my pay.

News articles and commentaries often describe America’s health care system as broken, sick, unjust, or decaying. On that last point these accounts are largely mistaken. But that’s only because “decaying” suggests that we once had a fundamentally good system. Not so. Ours has always been immensely uneven.

It just seemed better in yesteryear because so little attention was then paid to folks who were without it. And during and after those heady days of World War II a very high percentage of citizens did indeed work for companies that took care of them. It was all very patriotic.

Today it’s profits that are patriotic. If our loyal corporations are to successfully compete with Asia and Latin America —where employees are expendable —then we must make American employees expendable too. Raise their contribution rates, reduce their coverage, and increase the barriers to their being covered at all.

Fortunately the press has finally gotten wind of this scheme and at least we now read far more about the plight of uncovered workers than we ever did in the “good old days.” Reform groups have also sprung up calling for universal coverage, and Michael Moore has focused his considerable comedic talents on what by now has become yet another embarrassing shortcoming of the World’s Greatest Democracy.

The reason we are once again held up for such world ridicule is that all the other rich (and not so rich) nations already boast universal insurance. Only the US still stoutly applies capitalist principles to caring for the sick. Devil take the hindmost, if you will. And our press, which so diligently dredges up individual hardship cases, treats systemic comparisons with other countries like bird flu. Not to be touched.

Take Connecticut. A move for universal insurance in the legislature this year died quickly when the price tag came in at $17 billion. That’s the size of the whole state budget. Less touted was the estimate that we’re already spending $22 billion under our present cockamamie arrangement.

Media and legislative aversion to discussing such disquieting comparisons are easy to understand. Money. Lots of folks are reaping plenty of it off our chaotic health care crisis as it stands today. So much so that they pour buckets of their corporate earnings into campaign contributions and lobbying in order to keep things going just the way they are. They also advertise their businesses like crazy in the press, a source of tasty revenue that newspapers and TV stations are loathe to endanger by agitating for universal government-sponsored coverage. That means not even hinting that there might be merit in a Medicare-like plan or in emulating, say, the Canadian or French systems.

Such uneven health care as we now endure also offers the financial benefit of winnowing out the poor. On average, since they receive less effective treatment, they die younger, thus relieving the rest of us of a portion of that late life social cost which we might otherwise have to allocate to their maintenance.

Nonetheless, as every other industrial nation has already shown, converting our health mess to something like Medicare or Social Security would be much cheaper overall. Only the rapacious insurance companies would suffer, and maybe the press. That seems like a modest enough sacrifice to bring economical and universal health care to the rest of us.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)