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Stones & Bones / health care / volume 12 number 2, February 2010 DOSE OF REALITY Back in the 1950s before Alaska achieved statehood, my father was assistant director of the Fairbanks federal prison and then director of the Nome federal prison. In those capacities he saw many people with problems that they sometimes surmounted but often did not. That experience led him to believe that a person headed downward had to hit a floor before bouncing back upward to put his life back in order. I recall him saying of one of his prisoners, “That guy has not hit bottom yet; his life will get worse until he gets there, then maybe he can rebound up to where he can live a decent life.” It seems to me that this is where the American public now is on health care reform: things are bad but they are going to have to get a lot worse before the public finally rebels against the insane for-profit health care system that it has allowed to come into existence. The United States is now the only modern country that allows millions of its citizens to go without health care and permits the financial security of many millions of families to be destroyed when a member gets sick. The situation is deplorable, but not until it gets much worse and enough more millions of Americans get savaged by the system will the public finally decide that it has hit a bottom from which it must rebound. This past year Congress has spent much time considering health care reform, but at the end of January 2010 it is not clear if much or any reform will result. From what we read in the press it seems that the American public was rather strongly in favor of reform at the beginning of the year, but as the year has progressed public support waned. The word now is that the people are most concerned with job losses, deficit spending, and irritation with continuing high bonuses to banking executives despite their failures that have led to industry bailouts. I get the impression that the majority of the public doesn’t really care one way or the other about health care reform right now. The public knows the health care situation is bad and getting worse, but the issue is sliding off to the back burner. Like the prisoner my dad talked about, the situation has not yet hit the bottom that will cause the public to rebel and demand that Congress and the president enact serious health care reform. That is too bad, because one reason for both our currently high poverty level and jobless rate in this country is the high cost of health care. This cost makes it difficult for American workers to compete with those in all the other countries having comparatively cheap universal health care systems. It would be in the self-interest of Americans just for this reason alone to demand that we establish a government-operated universal health care system in this country. (For government, read we the people—because, to paraphrase Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly, the government is us.) Yet Americans appear unwilling to go that route, in part because of mindless antipathy toward government, and partly because the American public is growing less educated and literate by the year and therefore less able to understand why and how badly it is being had by the currently unregulated health insurance, pharmaceutical, and related industries. Traditionally independent, or so they claim, Americans tend to look to themselves for solutions to problems that might be better solved by collective action. They might well take this individual action course if we fail to enact meaningful health care reform this year. If failure occurs, I predict that people will act on their own in several ways. We likely will see increasing travel overseas to obtain health care at vastly reduced cost. More people will move into the ranks of the uninsured, either by their own choice or because they are refused affordable insurance because of pre-existing conditions. We will probably see increasing pressure on community health centers and we might even see the formation of nonprofit health care cooperatives that can help spread the cost of health care over memberships without involving for-profit insurance companies in any manner. It’s a tough way to go, and a poor substitute for the concerted collective action we can take through government. Some of the consequences will be unfortunate. We will see a worsening of some already bad, uniquely American statistics:
As the old saying goes: In America the healthy get unhealthier, the unhealthy get poorer, the rich get richer, and Congress fiddles while the populace gets burned. Neil Davis is a retired geophysicist and author of several fiction and nonfiction books. His most recent book is Mired in the Health Care Morass. More on health care issues can be found at his blog, http://healthcaremorass.blogspot.com. Neil can be contacted at neildavs@mosquitonet.com. | ||
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