Health care, a free market too far

The president and others (mostly rich) often refer to the United States glowingly as a "market democracy." Capitalism and competition have made our nation great. Other nations are less great in proportion to how much their governments subvert this God-given natural system of free enterprise.

So far America’s main exemptions from this corporate competitive model are the Post Office, schools, fire, police and the military. But even these traditional public services are now losing ground to UPS, Fed Ex, private academies and Halliburton. We presently have more contractors in Iraq than we do soldiers.

Against this backdrop of rampant capitalism, what chance do mere citizens have of bringing our turbulent health insurance system under regulated government control? Not much. The fact that all other industrial nations place government in charge of assuring medical access seems of little account.

Nor does our current blatantly wasteful arrangement of relying on hundreds of competing, conflicting, and conniving insurance companies to deliver care seem to place much pressure on Congress for change.

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So deeply ingrained in us is this health system from Hell that candidates for president who propose fundamental reform are generally even denied press coverage. The Medical-Industrial Complex is just too big a media sponsor. Outlets can’t risk offending it by reporting on proposals to turn their advertisers’ whole industry over to Medicare. Too many billions are at stake.

The obvious cure for these ills is to treat health care as we do Social Security: workers would contribute a percentage of their pay, while employers would contribute a percentage of their payroll. As happened with Medicare, waste would be slashed and we would save countless billions every year. Likewise those countless doctors and nurses now working for our parasitic insurance companies and HMOs would be freed up to actually minister to patients. No wonder reform is such a dreaded nightmare.

In support of this reform some cheeky nurses’ organizations have suggested that what Americans really need is Cheneycare. The reference is to the vice president’s latest bout with irregular heartbeat. Many without his ready access to unparalleled attention die each year. The nurses are not yet suggesting that reduced care might be a good idea for him, but rather that everyone else ought to get a decent shot at survival, too.

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Here in Connecticut’s "capitalism heartland," such inequity gushes like a river. Stamford Hospital is seeking to open a clinic in Norwalk to siphon off some of Norwalk Hospital’s well-heeled patients. Simultaneously, Norwalk Hospital is seeking permission to get into the angioplasty business to siphon off heart patients from St. Vincent’s in Bridgeport, where they specialize in such things.

Competition among hospitals for insured patients is fierce, as is the competition to avoid serving the uninsured. This bitter conflict mirrors the battle underway among insurance companies, and the somewhat more genteel struggle among doctors to serve the rich and to stiff the poor.

In a way you can’t fault such self-serving behavior. Everybody has to eat. It’s our pernicious funding system that forces each player to act in this dog-eat-dog manner. People who are otherwise nice and Godly end up playing roles that would not score well with a celestial judgment panel. And praises be to the ones who don’t play the game that way at all.

The bottom line is that many tens of millions of Americans suffer needless pain and death for want of an easily created decent insurance system. And yes, government-run plans in other countries, despite industry propaganda, really do work better and cheaper than ours.