Small Town Wren

The December issue of Harper’s has a great piece on health care reform in their Notebook section.  Luke Mitchell’s Understanding Obamacare looks at the more subtle aspects behind the politics of reform.  As some of you know, health care reform is very near and dear to my heart because I am one of the millions of Americans who are uninsurable in the individual policy market.

Mitchell points out that it’s not really about “red” vs. “blue” America. Instead it is about keeping privilege, power, and wealth with those who already have it and keeping it from those who don’t. You don’t have to be one side or the other to carry favor and advantage.

The debate in Washington this fall ought to have been about why the United States has the worst health-care system in the developed world, why Americans pay twice the Western average to maintain that system, and what fundamental changes are needed to make the system better serve us. But Democrats rendered those questions academic when they decided the first principle of reform would be, as Barack Obama has so often explained, that “nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.”

This is what I find so frustrating. Our system is fundamentally broken. By refusing to rebuild it from the ground up, it keeps that fundamental sickness in the administration. As someone who has taken a lot of antibiotics knows, you don’t stop taking the pills when you start to feel better. Doing so is dangerous because it can breed resistant strains.

We are at a turning point where we as a nation can take a stand on profit vs. ethics. Unfortunately, it seems we are taking the route of profit, even when we know better. The universal mandate without a public option simply delivers 47 million new customers to a system that doesn’t actually do anything. The health insurance companies don’t actually provide a necessary service. They don’t help sick people. They are bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake. One could argue a public option would be more of the same, but at least it wouldn’t be a for-profit bureaucracy.

This is unethical. The health insurance system is unethical because it is privately profitable. When you mix profit with human life the only outcome is violence. We are all victims of that violence, even if we don’t recognize it readily. I, for one, am ready for a less violent system yesterday. Denying sick people the care they need is a violent act. It’s disgusting that our manipulated sympathies with corporate entities has made that immediately unrecognizable.

We need change, and this is one case where we need to change everything. If we let any portion of the old system survive, the inherent violence in it is going to fester and one day we will be back to where we are today. We should be working to end this violence against our citizenry, to end private profit on human life at the expense of the individual. We’ve been hoodwinked into thinking about individual needs as academic questions while corporate needs are economic. This is, on the most basic level, backwards.