I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Going to Take It Anymore!: Health Care Edition

If one wanted to enjoy one's Friday evening with one's sweetie and one's dogs, say, reading a little here and there, unhurriedly rasslin' and ticklin' (the pups), leisurely enjoying one's meal, and overall marvelling at the gorgeous afternoon light and the quiet calm of the end of the day, then one would not want to read this article by Malcolm Gladwell in the new NY'er.

Honestly, people, I'm going to need some of y'all smarties to help me to understand why in the bejeezus it is that the majority of the electorate has an attitude of, "Affordable health care? No, thanks, not for me. I say let's give tax cuts to Halliburton instead!"

[Note: paragraph breaks are of my own making. This cut-n-paste job gave me one big, unreadable blob, and I'm trying to save eyeballs here, since many of us are, you know, without insurance.]

The New Yorker: Fact.

One of the great mysteries of political life in the United States is why Americans are so devoted to their health-care system. Six times in the past century—during the First World War, during the Depression, during the Truman and Johnson Administrations, in the Senate in the nineteen-seventies, and during the Clinton years—efforts have been made to introduce some kind of universal health insurance, and each time the efforts have been rejected.

Instead, the United States has opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What does that extra spending buy us?

Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan, Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita.

Nor is our system more efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year—or close to four hundred billion dollars—on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. And, of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any insurance.

A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy—a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper—has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.

It just seems so damn obvious to me. Where is the political will? Or maybe that is not the question to be asking. In that case, what are the questions we should be asking? And of whom? And how do we do it loudly w/ the expectation that they'll be met w/ results?

Comments

[WillR]

US Health System = Largest, slow transfer of wealth from generally the least wealthy to the mega-corps in history
US-Iraq War = Largest, fastest transfer of wealth from the US citizen to the mega-corps in history

[Pacian]

Let me quote Chomsky to you:

[O]verwhelming majorities of the [US] public favor expansion of domestic programs: primarily health care (80%), but also aid to education and Social Security. Similar results have long been found in these studies (CCFR). Other mainstream polls report that 80% favor guaranteed health care even if it would raise taxes [...] Public opinion has been similar for a long time, with numbers varying depending on how questions are asked. The facts are sometimes discussed in the press, with public preferences noted but dismissed as “politically impossible.” [Chomsky here quotes the NY Times saying that healthcare expansions have] “[too] little political support,” meaning that the insurance companies, HMOs, pharmaceutical industries, Wall Street, etc., are opposed.

It is notable that such views are held by people in virtual isolation. They rarely hear them, and it is not unlikely that respondents regard their own views as idiosyncratic. Their preferences do not enter into the political campaigns, and only marginally receive some reinforcement in articulate opinion in media and journals.

Find that here. Sorry for the text-dump, but it just struck me the way that you (and Malcolm Gladwell) assumed that most Americans don't want universal healthcare - that your view was an 'idiosyncratic' one. ;)

[ae]

WillR, that is the saddest comparison I've seen in a while. A war on people any way you cut it. If this is the legacy of "civilization," it is a sad time in history.

Thanks, Pacian! I asked for the smarties to weigh in and they did. Of course it makes sense that people want this! I know, on the one hand, that over 50% of personal bankruptcies are a result of medical debt, but I see, on the other hand, all this b.s. electoral jibba-jabba, and, more importantly, vote casting, that does not prioritize this most important of policy issues. So my questions at the end of the post are what confuse me now. Where is the political will? Why does this overwhelming desire for universal health care not translate into votes or accountability (by the politicians)?