A friend who describes himself as “conservative” and I were talking about the huge role health insurance coverage plays in evaluating potential jobs. “It makes me crazy,” I said, “that of all the world’s industrialized nations, only America fails to provide its citizens with low-cost, comprehensive health care.”
He frowned. “I’ve had first-hand experience with some of those health care systems,” he said. “Trust me — you wouldn’t want the health care Mexico offers for free.”
Mention a national health care plan, and conservatives are quick to trot out horror stories. “Have you heard about Canada? There’s a thirty month wait for CAT scans. Have you heard about the UK? People wait for hours without getting the attention they need.”
Michael Moore’s latest movie, Sicko [official site], does a fine job of showing how these dire tales are pretty much urban legends. It also reveals what life can be like in nations where incoming patients are never asked “Are you insured?” and outgoing patients are never asked for money.
But back to my friend. As a conservative, he’s adamant that America is the greatest nation in the world. (He’s never traveled the world to verify that … but Fox News tells him this, so he knows it must be true.) He loves to wave the flag in the face of his liberal friends, and he’s told me before that people like me — who question the government, who believe our current leaders are criminals, and who are concerned with how other nations see America — should probably move to France. “If America’s so awful,” he says, “why don’t you just leave?”
It strikes me as ironic, then, that someone so ostensibly pro-American — so certain that America is more powerful, more capable, and more clever than any other country on the planet — assumes an American health care system would necessarily incorporate the worst features of other nations’ health care systems.
I mean … we’re America, right? And we’re world leaders, right? We’re the most powerful nation on earth, right? So why wouldn’t America’s national health care system be the best in the world? Why wouldn’t the American national health care system show the rest of the world how it’s done?
Instead of dreaming of how wonderful an American health care system could be, conservatives immediately envision how terrible an American health care system might be.
Now, that’s not very patriotic, is it?
I think it’s time for you to run for office. You’re getting too smart for just blogging.
I think it’s time for you to run for office. You’re getting too smart for just blogging.
Are you kidding me?
“why wouldn’t America’s national health care system be the best in the world?”
How do you think the healthcare in this country devolved into the state it’s in now? Our government is held hostage to big money contributors.
I have lived in the U.K. and Canada. I think my personal HMO/PPO coverage here in the US is better. But that is probably because I HAVE coverage. My friend who works full time without healthcare would be delighted to have any one of those “flawed” systems available to her.
People who think national healthcare is unnecessary are people who already have coverage. And then only because they’ve never had the system tell them “no.”
To be fair, my comments were a bit tongue in cheek. Plainly put, my sentiment can be more literally read this way: “If you’re one of those people who imagine America does everything bigger and better than anyone else, then why wouldn’t you imagine that America’s national health care system to be the best in the world?”
Jim asked, “How do you think the healthcare in this country devolved into the state it’s in now?”
Mark replies: I believe there’s ample evidence to show that it devolved because we’ve approached healthcare from a privately-owned, for-profit business model. It’s a model that discourages health maintenance and encourages patients to avoid health care until a catastrophic illness occurs. And then, because insurance payouts decrease profits, it’s a model that encourages companies to drop customers who actually try to claim the benefits their premiums have supposedly paid for.
Individuals in our government — including Republicans and Democrats alike — have been complicit in this. This will continue until Americans demand a change by whatever means is available to us.
Meanwhile, as other nations have shown, a universal health care plan does not, by definition, have to be a bureaucratic nightmare, and I see no reason why Americans, if we really put our minds to it (and our votes behind it) couldn’t put a fine system in place.
Hi there Mark
this is an interesting article on the subject, published in The Guardian (UK newspaper). Some comments are also worth reading.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/greg_anrig/2007/08/if_its_from_europe_forget_it.html
Keep on blogging and congrats on your move to Atlanta.