How long are the waiting lines with U.S. health care?
The answer of course is “we don’t have a clue”. Whose waiting lines? Those under which of the thousands of insurance plans and sub-plans? Or under which of the many taxpayer-funded plans that fill the gaps for the “bad customers” shunned by for profit insurers?
A recent study conducted by Harvard researchers offered a tentative answer: it showed that at least 45, 000 Americans each year (or 123 per day, or 5 per hour) do not even show up in the lines — they have no health insurance, and die for that reason. Of course now the “debate” has become how “accurate” these numbers are. But even a few hundred, or even a few thousand, less than that is still too many! And so are the 900,000 individuals per year (or 2,465 per day, 1,850 among whom had health insurance) who file for bankruptcy for medical reasons.
And yet, as I have argued elsewhere, the uninsured are not the “disease”, but the “symptom” of a truly, truly sick system built on the idea of a “competitive marketplace” that offers “choice of plans” (which of course offers no true competition or meaningful choice to millions of Americans who are stuck with what they get through their jobs, if they get anything at all).
Europeans, Canadians and Taiwanese scratch their head in disbelief. But for some reasons our legislators do not (maybe they are ‘health care secure”, courtesy of taxpayer-subsidized policies? Maybe the answer lies in the very generous campaign contributions received from interested parties, particularly if they are sitting in the Senate Finance Committee).
To the point that the proposals coming out of Washington suggest that they will fix the mess with ‘more of the same’, that is, forcing us to buy a product (and making it illegal not to do so) that has repeatedly shown to be defective (for profit health insurance policies). And this product will be sold in a system built on the false assumption that health care behaves like a market commodity, no different from shoes or cell phone plans. (And, can you imagine a system of fire departments where “for profit fire-workers” competed for “clients” against “government-financed” fire-workers, or even “co-ops” of fire-workers…? The bad thinking knows no limit…).
But some legislative battles have been won (Kucinich and Weiner amendments). And we can still advocate for Medicare for All. The perfect public-private partnership, publicly-financed, privately delivered health care, built upon what works, here and elsewhere.
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