Health Care

It's been over a month since Lobby Day. So, what was Lobby Day all about?

Lobby Day was held to support the health care bill (SB840) that Senator Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) hopes to pass. Not all of us present that day necessarily believe that a Single Payer Universal Health Care system is the way to go about achieving affordable health care in CA or the U.S. But all of us know that the current system has to change.

I could quote a bunch of facts about health care, but all the argument over facts won't change the opinions of someone whose basic values are different from mine. As a doctor-wannabe, I may be a sucker for suffering and death, but I think health care should be a right. If one is sick, one is not free to pursue liberty or happiness or much of anything else. But some people think health care isn't a right. They think it's just fine for us to attack the rest of the world, tooting our righteous horns about democracy and liberty, while we stand by and let our own people die of simple, treatable diseases in our own streets. People recoil in horror and stick their noses in the air when they see a photo of a dead Afghan/Kenyan/Brazilian kid on the side of the road, and think, "Oh my God, how barbaric! How indecent! I'm glad *I* live in a civilized country!" And the kid in their own town dying of athsma? Not a thought about that. It's not catchy news. The Republican Senator (or Assemblyman?) for North San Diego told our med students he flat-out thought health care isn't a right. If you are poor, stupid, lazy, unfortunate or old enough to get sick, then gosh darn it, you better pick yourself up by your bootstraps and get a job to pay for your medical bills. Otherwise you don't deserve health care, and can die in a gutter for all he cares. And guess who's paying HIS ample medical insurance bills? WE are! The taxpayers! Irony knows no bounds. I wonder what he would think if a person who was refused medical care, due to his politics, coughed on him at the neighborhood Starbucks and gave him drug-resistant, incurable tuberculosis. You think he might have wished he'd invested a little of his politics into helping others be healthy?

So even if you think people should earn things in life (which I generally agree with), it still makes sense to cover everyone so they don't spread disease around or drain the rest of our pockets by getting very high cost emergency care as their only form of health care. Prevention is so much more economical than reactionary interventions, but as a nation, we're not getting it. Cutting insurance companies out of the picture is the only solution. They are only in it to make a profit, and they make profits by denying care. Single Payer Universal Health Care makes the most sense because it does just the opposite - it replaces all insurance companies with a government agency that reimburses private doctors and private hospitals. This is not Socialized Medicine that everyone is so afraid of. Even if it were (and it's NOT), let's think about the effects of a socialized agency. We currently have socialized firefighters, police officers, highways, EPA, Medicare, schools, and libraries, to name a few "Scary Socialized Institutions." They aren't so scary. But I digress. Single Payer Health Care ISN'T socialized medicine; doctors and hospitals would still remain private. Single Payer health care would simply cut out insurance companies, because corporate greed just has to go.

Coming soon:
1) For you business types to mull over and comment on - why the "free market" won't improve the American health care system.
2) Some facts about the state of health care in the U.S.