In the interests of full disclosure and fairness, I should point out that I am currently an employee of HealthPartners and that any views expressed here on this blog are my own and do not in any way reflect on or represent the views of the company I work for. These are just my thoughts, nobody elses.
That said, I want to talk health care for a moment.
So, it finally happened. The Democrats finally accomplished something towards taking some of the worst parts of the insane killing machine known as the United States health care system and bringing them under control. According to the bean counters at the Congressional Budget Office, they’ve also managed to help rein in the deficit a bit too, which is nice. Health care was murdering the government and now it won’t be. For most everybody, this should result in very little change in their lives. They’ll have the same insurance they do now, maybe have a few more choices, which is good, and they’ll be able to keep their insurance if they get sick. All of this is, in my opinion, bare minimum type stuff that should have been there all along. I mean, if you’re going to have a system in which corporations are incentivized not to provide people health care, the system we currently have, then you’re going to need a regulation or two in order to make sure anybody anywhere gets any care at all.
The company I work for is a non-profit cooperative, owned and operated by members. We don’t have a profit motive to avoid giving people care. There are no big CEO bonuses or stockholder dividends to pay out. This is, IMO, a very very good thing and if I didn’t feel that way I wouldn’t work for them no matter what they paid me. They’re doing the best that you can do in a completely absurd system like the one we have.
The profit motive, however, messes up health care. It is fundamentally wrong. Immoral even. I lost my brother because of the lack of affordable health care in this country. If we lived in France, he would still be alive, and his wife and child would still have a husband and father. But no, we live here, where the profit is in not helping people, not caring for them, and it makes health care a luxury instead of a right. It makes getting medical treatment something you avoid because you can’t afford it instead of something that is just fundamentally part of your life. Would you avoid calling the fire department when your house is on fire? No, because the fire department is a social service and a basic necessity of life and we’ve decided as a culture that it’s not something you should have to subscribe to or pay for. It’s just there when you need it. That is exactly what health care should be, but no, it’s a luxury commodity, somehow mysteriously available as an benefit of having a particular job or else really damn expensive. Again, imagine if the only way the police would show up at your home to investigate a robbery is if they were hired by your employer or if the only teachers who would educate your children were hired by your employer? Who the hell would be OK with that? Nobody. Nobody would. Why, oh why, should an employer have that sort of control over your life? They don’t control your children’s education, why they do they control your child’s access to health care? It doesn’t make any sense and if it hadn’t developed in the completely random, accidental, unplanned way that it did, nobody would ever have designed a system like ours because it is completely backwards and bizarre.
So, we now have a small step and it’s being treated like it’s the Civil Rights movement. Well, it’s not. It’s nice, it’s a step, but it’s nowhere near enough. Tens of thousands of lives will be saved, and that is good, and I am all in favor. But we can, and should, do more. If there is any sort of advantage in banding together in community it’s strength in numbers. Government is a bad solution for many problems that the free market handles very well. The free market is a bad solution for certain problems that the government handles well. Medical care is analogous to police, roadways, plumbing, schools, libraries, and fire departments as being the sort of thing that allows us to be stronger working together than we are alone.
I don’t really have a great point. It is late and I am tired and I am glad some people will now live who would have died and I want to thank everybody who helped make that happen. That’s all.
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