Call to Support Justice and Fairness in Heath Care

It's been a while since I've posted--summertime laziness (soon to come to an end) and a workshop I taught last week got in the way. There are, as always, several things worth blogging about. But today, the most important one worth mentioning is National Health Care Call-In Day. The AFL-CIO and Health Care for America Now have set up a toll-free call line--at 877-264-4226--that will allow you to connect with the offices of your Congressional Representatives and Senators, and leave a message in support of national health care reform. Even if you live in a state where such calls are practically guaranteed to not make a difference in their votes--as I almost certainly do--helping to put hundreds, hopefully thousands, perhaps millions, of message of support out there just might make a difference in the views of some Blue Dog Democrats or liberal Republicans on the fence in the House and the Senate, if only by making clear, beyond the noise of the spin machine, that a lot of Americans really would like a more just and fair health care system.

Do the various bills, proposals, and amendments being hashed out in Congress as we speak really promise that? No--but they promise something much closer to it than anything else on the horizon, and certainly they promise something closer to it than what the status quo offers us. Look, my own perverse mix of populist and localist and socialist and traditionalist ideas don't provide me with any brilliant insights into how to provide health care to all who need it. What I do know, though, can be summed up in these seven basic claims:

1) Satisfying the health needs of yourself and your family is of crucial importance to a good life.

2) Depending upon every individual on their own to satisfy said needs, especially in an environment where the costs of medicine and medical care continually increase, will result in massive unfairness in who receives care, and when, and how.

3) In every modern democratic industrialized nation, that unfairness gets addressed, one way or another, either poorly or effectively.

4) In every other modern democratic industrialized nation besides the United States, the way they do it is by providing some sort of minimal health guarantees to every person, whether by having a single-payer (that is, government-funded) system, as in Canada, or having a national health insurance system, as in Great Britain, or some mixture of these and other systems.

5) In the United States, the way we do it is by allowing those without insurance, without family doctors, with pharmacy accounts, to go to hospital emergency rooms and get treatment, the costs of for which are passed along to the hospitals' insurance companies, which they then pass along to all the rest of us, in the form a higher premiums, higher co-pays, and less coverage.

6) This is really a stupid way to go about addressing the needs of those who can't afford proper medical care.

7) The plans coming through the House and Senate, whatever their faults--and, let's be clear on this, they have many--will at least make sure this foolish, humiliating, expensive practice comes to an end, period.

If you agree with, or at least acknowledge the general point of, those seven claims, then you have no good reason whatsoever not to pick up the phone and spend 10 minutes of your time expressing your support for House Resolution 3200, and your support for continuing efforts to get a bill written and moving forward in the Senate. Will you like the bills which will finally--after much compromising and horse-trading and whatnot--escape conference committee and be voted on and be sent to President Obama to sign? Maybe not. There are so many ways this promise can go wrong. They took the single-payer option (surely the most straightforward of all universal coverage systems) off the table without any serious discussion. (Remind your friends who are gnashing their teeth about "government-run health care" that that isn't even being contemplated by the House and Senate.) They are quibbling over the amount of money to spend. (Obviously, there will be costs associated with this in the beginning--it's only to going to require that insurance be offered to 47 million people who currently don't have it, whether through a "public option" which the government would directly provide to poor individuals, or through subsidies to families and businesses. Those costs will be recovered--and overall health care expenditures will decline--once the abuse of our emergency rooms come to an end...but that won't happen overnight.) And of course, there are all the looming questions about America's habits--as both medical providers and as consumers of health care--and how they contribute to an unsustainable health care system which lay behind all these debates: relentless overtesting, obesity and irresponsible eating, the perverse incentives of fee-for-service payment plans, an obsession with staying young and independent at all costs, etc. Any truly long-lasting movements towards more justice and fairness in health care will have to look at these.

But first, you have to do something to address the broken, wasteful, unfair structure which supports all of the above. And that's what Congress right now, after so many failed attempts over the years, is trying to make happen. We can't vote in Congressional committees or on the floor of the House or Senate, but we can make a phone call. So do so. I just did, and it was worth it.