When I was reading the introduction to the NPR series on Health Care, this piece of the article really jumped out at me:
Our reporters and producers said nearly every person they talked to was astonished to learn that in the United States, health care isn’t automatic — or required — and that medical bills are the most common reason for bankruptcy.
“We have in Britain, as in most of Europe actually, health care systems that are based on the principle of social solidarity,” Sir Michael Rawlins told NPR. He runs the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which determines which drugs and treatments will be paid for by the government.
“We look after each other when we’re sick, and that’s very precious to us in Britain and other parts of Europe, too,” he said. “And that’s what we find so difficult to understand about your system — you don’t have that.”
Is there a moral element to this health care debate? Do we have an obligation to our society as a whole to stand together on certain matters?
I believe that there are certain things that should be held apart from the free market as items of great importance to our functioning as a moral society. Education, caring for our elders, caring for orphans, caring for the disabled, caring for the mentally ill, and caring for the sick are things that I place in this category.
In this category of health care, the US currently has structures in place to care for most of the children under 18, the disabled, and most of the people over 65. It is in the between place of 19-64 that we are on our own. I am seeing more and more people who are failing to get the health care that they need because they can’t afford it.
For eduction, we chose as a society to provide a free eduction to all people and then mandated it when we saw that it was a benefit to society to have educated people who would be our workers. One would think that it would be a benefit to society to have people who are healthy in our workforce. One would think it would be so beneficial that it might even become a mandate.
Elizabeth Edwards wrote a very lengthy article in the August 2008 edition of Sojourners magazine. I think that the whole thing is worth a read as she does a wonderful job in describing the pitfalls of a free market health care, but I will pull out a couple of the key paragraphs that I think fits this topic the best.
In the landscape of the health-care debate, two very different paths lie in front of us. Which one we choose will speak volumes about who we are as a nation and what values we hold dear. Our choice will determine what we say to women like Sheila—whether we say, “We are with you. Your challenge is our challenge too, and we will help you face it,” or simply shrug and say, “Sorry, you’re on your own.” That’s the moral choice we face today and which path we walk down is up to us.
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NOW THAT WE understand what is really meant by “individual markets” and “consumer-directed care,” we can ask the larger question before us: Do we, as a nation, believe in insurance or not? The principle behind insurance is risk-sharing—the idea that healthy people with lower risks and lower cost should subsidize care for sick people with higher risks and higher costs.
We do this in part because the reality of life is that while you may be in the healthy category today, you could land in the sick category tomorrow—and because of factors out of your control. You could get hit by a bus or have something else happen that requires urgent care. God forbid that should occur, but if it does, you’ll be really glad others are pitching in to subsidize your costs.
We do this for practical reasons, but we also do it because it’s the right thing to do. Our society is based on the idea that we’re all in this together. If you’re born healthy and disease-free, great. But others are not so lucky, and part of your responsibility as a member of this society is to help them out.
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When we band together, we can make this system work. Right now, it’s not working nearly as well as it should. But our response should not be to abandon our principles—it should be to embrace them even more tightly, and fashion a system that more fully reflects them. Universal health care does just that.
