Iraq War Costs Americans in Health Care Tradeoff
“People have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.” — George W. Bush
That’s right, Mr. President. And thanks for pointing out what’s wrong with a status quo you’ve done almost nothing to alter. Welcome to the ER. It is America’s answer to a phony debate. Health care: Is it a right? Of course it is.
Were it not, ERs would bar their doors to the uninsured. People would expire on the curb. Bodies would bloat in the streets.
They don’t. Because without saying as much, we know that health care is not your business or my business, it’s our business. Like education. Like highways. Like waterways.
Unfortunately in our consumerist society, consumerist appeals win the day when policy is made (”Defend freedom — go shopping”). We treat health care like we might pastry or perfume. ‘Twould be nice that everyone had either, but …
But, to reiterate what Bush says: Everyone has health access, in the ER. Just be prepared as a society to pay emergency-room costs. Imagine instead more people seeing doctors in advance of cataclysm, more children healthy and in school more days.
The other day I was stunned by the vitriol in a critique of Congress and Bush regarding health care. What was stunning was that it came from William W. Hinchey, president of the Texas Medical Association.
For half a century this nation’s medical establishment has been reliably and comfortably pro-status quo.
Hinchey writes that his “Irish blood is boiling” as federal budget pressures cause more and more physicians to deny treatment to Medicare recipients. This relates to a freeze on Medicare reimbursement rates going back to 2001.
The association’s “Texas Medicare Manifesto” demands reimbursement rates that keep up with the cost of providing services. The National Governors Association sounds just as furious. It has denounced Medicaid regulations proposed by the Bush administration to shift billions of dollars in costs to the states. Where states don’t pick up the slack, hospitals and ERs will.
That’s how everyone ends up paying for the uninsured. Stop assuming that the free market will resolve this. All the free market does is provide for those who can afford pastry and perfume.
In addition to being a referendum on the war, this year’s presidential election will be a referendum on health care.
On the Republican side the trust will be placed in the free market, and the supposed magic of “health care spending accounts” or tax credits that fritter around the edges. In the Democratic primary Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both have proposals that would change the equation more dramatically than ever since the creation of Medicare.
Clinton would require health insurance for all Americans and provide subsidies to help residents cover the cost. Obama would expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program to cover all uninsured children and expand Medicaid eligibility to cover more adults. You ask how they intend to pay for this. Both would, at minimum, revoke the Bush tax cuts for America’s wealthiest.
But when it comes to the cost of national coverage, statists’ concerns about the price tag are disingenuous. We already pay for the uninsured through hospital costs and insurance rates. If more had health insurance, with real preventive care and health maintenance, we would have a healthier country with fewer pressures on hospitals and health-care costs.
Does America lack resources? You decide. Right now we are spending $475 million a day occupying Iraq. Sixty percent of discretionary federal spending is on our military.
How much health insurance would $4,100 purchase? In addition to the devastation that has visited the homes of 3,248 U.S. war dead, that — $4,100 — is what Iraq has cost every American family. See www.costofwar.com. America has resources. See them at your emergency room and in Iraq.
John Young writes for the Waco Tribune-Herald. E-mail: jyoung@wacotrib.com.
©1996-2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
But nationalising the medical insurance industry is still not on the table. Until that is done, you’ll not have national health care, you’ll continue to lose your homes to catastrophic health costs.
Actually, you won’t lose your house if you don’t pay your medical bills. Have it homesteaded, where much of the equity is protected from lawsuit and lien. In Arizona, $200,000 0f equity is protected from lien by creditors, except contractors and tax liens. I haven’t paid thousands of dollars in copayments over the past 20 years. I have a long list of medical collections. But I still got a fixed rate prime mortgage last year! Collection agencies have never sued me, and after 7 years, they disappear from the record. Do not ever declare bankruptcy over medical bills. Just don’t pay them. Put your money offshore if you have to. And mortgage your house so your equity does not exceed $200,000. Then let the bastards try to get money out of you.
My philosophy is that medical providers can accept what insurance pays, and nothing more. We need national, single payer health insurance now, as in the rest of the industrialized world. I was in France, and had to go to the ER, and then obtain nursing services every day I was there. The ER was free. The nursing care cost 4 euro a day and the nurse came to the house! Had I been a French citizen, the nursing would have been free.
Health care in the USA is atrocious. It’s expensive, and not even up to par with European care.
Why do you think the US lags all other industrial nations (and Cuba)in measures of health, including longevity, infant death rate among others.
Thanks for putting into words what we can already see.
Shame on the Texas Medical Association’s representative for trying to interfere with W’s plan to turn the Us into a third world nation.
How ironic that the people in Congress and in this corrupt, morally bankrupt Administration all have the best healthcare in the country…but hey, let’s send those poor other suckers to the ER…after all, everyone knows they “choose” not to have insurance. It’s just like all the people whose ancestors were not indigenous people who want to keep out “those da** immigrants. I’ve got mine, too bad about you carries the day, I’m afraid. Lo, how the mighty have fallen.
thank-you John Young
Today AOL opened with a topic wherein they are pushing parents to give all children flu vaccines. I am an OPPONENT of most vaccines. Although our bodies have become the toxic waste dumps of the military-chemical-medical industrial complexes, the rising autism rate makes alarm bells go off regarding these mandatory innoculations.
Now if Hillary got her way to FORCE us to BUY insurance I have to wonder what people like myself would do. Those of us who prefer the natural approaches, acupuncture/ chiropractic/massage/herbs and spiritual healing modalities forced to have OTHER where the options we would prefer will likely not be covered? That “plan” is to health care what mafia is to free enterprise. I wish these authoritarians would just collectively buy their own continent and make their war games, try to run others’ lives on turf of their own and let the rest of the world do what was intended: EVOLVE.
“Now if Hillary got her way to FORCE us to BUY insurance I have to wonder what people like myself would do. Those of us who prefer the natural approaches, acupuncture/ chiropractic/massage/herbs and spiritual healing modalities forced to have OTHER where the options we would prefer will likely not be covered?”
As an employee of a certain federal agancy, I have access to the health care that Sen. Clinton refers to in her plan. I pay $36.00 a month and it’s a really good system. (I believe that we should have Single Payer, but we don’t.)
I think that her plan is the superior offer on the table from any of the current playerz in the upcoming election, even if I don’t support her overall in the race.
Yes, everyone should and would have to be “in” and pay their share. Do you receive an exemption on your property taxes just because you don’t want to pay for education, or don’t have any school aged children?
SLIMSHADY: My point is that the way medicine is practice d in the US in my view is a lot like the way the military goes about “fixing” things. It is devoid of nurture, its practices are often violent and unless I am hit by a car and need someone other than a tailor to sew me up, I want NO part of it. CANCER is business to this insidious force, and its left brain insistence that science has all the answers demeans and denies the body’s NATURAL capacities to heal. Of course when food has become anything but that, and when chemicals are PART of our water and soil, we human guinea pigs are losing the build-in mechanisms that WOULD heal us; but that is another argument, story, etc.
I pay property tax and my kids are healthy because they have learned to eat right, were breast fed, and don’t suppress their feelings to fit in with authoritarian robots cum human beings.
“and unless I am hit by a car and need someone other than a tailor to sew me up”
That is exactly WHY…
oh- and don’t get me wrong, Souixrose. I greatly admire your posts and way of thinking, in general.
On the Republican side the trust will be placed in the free market, and the supposed magic of “health care spending accounts” …
Clinton would require health insurance for all Americans…. Obama would expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program… Both would, at minimum, revoke the Bush tax cuts for America’s wealthiest.
Repuks want to preserve the healthcare crisis-as-usual and add yet another “surge” of healthcare cost/waste inflation with new revenue from tax deductible individual healthcare accounts. Divide-and-conquer-as-usual will continue with the middle classes paying for the poor’s health catastrophes and the rich will get richer-as-usual.
Demoks want to preserve the healthcare crisis-as-usual, steamroll over the culture of nutrition/prevention, and tax the rich to pay for the poor . This presumably relieves premiums for the middle class but the rich will respond by raising wages instead of paying the taxes. This redistributes to middle class, then insurance raises premiums to pay for the poor. This system theoretically redistributes from rich to poor but is highly convoluted, and is still twice as expensive as in other countries and could go triple.
Progressives direct the public sector to provide healthcare at the same value as in other countries, with emphasis on nutrition/prevention. People will gravitate toward the better market value and the capitalists will be forced to adjust or die.
Which policy do you prefer?
Single Payer.