Murder is immoral and a crime punishable by prison and execution. But … wow wee, Americans have taken to making public their stories of being screwed (excuse me), er, treated very badly by their health insurance companies. And all us Americans understand exactly the extreme anger expressed in millions of social posts responding to the intentional shooting death of a major healthcare provider CEO. If we haven’t experienced a screwing (excuse me), er, a very bad experience whereby we who are insured still end up paying thousands and tens of thousands of dollars for required medical treatment and hospitalizations, we all know someone who has.
So in this country, being angry about our medical healthcare insurance is well known going back to the days of TV’s Donahue. The story goes there was a golden moment shortly after World War II when our nation considered going the way of Western Europe and other modern nations like war-torn and totally defeated Japan by creating universal healthcare. Since then, all their citizens never have to choose between life-saving prescriptions and surgery or like many of us living in the U.S.: pass on medication and treatments because we can’t afford it. That is our common story, our peculiar unique frustrating lives whenever we get sick: What to do and how to pay for it?
Instead the good old boys of the 1940s representing us in the U.S. Congress decided to keep health insurance tied to employment. The rich and powerful have always believed NOT in the decent, hard-working American. No, they must come from families who no doubt had at least one lazy good-for-nothing uncle who would rather not work for a living. The bottom line was keeping health insurance as a benefit for only the employed. Make that the gainfully employed. Part-timers don’t count along with the unfortunate unemployed. Yeah, life’s tough. Get a job.
Earlier this century, President Obama’s priority for universal healthcare was due to the national finding that catastrophic illness is the number one reason why Americans lose their homes. But we know how extremely, and unnecessarily, controversial that whole universal healthcare debate was. The President had to go to the Supreme Court time and again to pass what amounted to the Republicans’ counter healthcare revisions now known as Obamacare. And still Americans are unhappy with their healthcare coverage (still tied to our jobs), the increasing deductibles over a career of working, the fear of losing their life savings due to chronic medical illness or injuries from, say, a car crash.
Work and pray
There are tales about the 1960s when congressional Republicans fought tooth and nail against Medicare (universal healthcare for old people) and Medicaid (universal healthcare for poor people). But the measures passed anyway thanks to LBJ. In the 1990s, universal healthcare was a top priority of President Clinton but couldn’t be passed—not with feuding among every sector of the healthcare industry (doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and insurance providers) blaming each other and refusing to … compromise. Yeah, that’s how things get done in government. And why would healthcare providers want to compromise? Follow the money.
A big compromise discussed was salaries and in this country money paid by healthcare providers in lawsuits and lawsuit insurance coverage. In the early 1990s, a national study on earnings of professionals in the healthcare industry (doctors, hospital administrators, pharmaceutical CEOs, research scientists, and insurers) was made public as well as suggested reduced salaries that would make healthcare more affordable. The figure for physician earnings was $400,000, compared to the study’s suggested annual salary of $200,000. That was a long time ago, the 1990s. In this country, people that go into healthcare, the number one industry this century, don’t choose it because they love people. Money, big money, salaries that 99 percent of us would never dream of, is a factor. We get it. Perfectly understandable. We’re all Americans here. Money’s our thing. The rest of the world sees us as people who care more about money than anything else. Are they wrong?
Then we hear about how healthcare works in other modern nations like Canada, Great Britain and Japan. First, doctors there do not earn anywhere near what their counterparts earn in the U.S. Nowadays we can investigate online instead of asking someone who lived or lives in nations with universal healthcare. The Michael Moore movie Sicko, about our convoluted and broken healthcare system compared to the better managed systems in France and England, was enlightening … and infuriating … and by now forgotten by Americans today. In those countries, people didn’t pay for the birth of a baby, life-saving brain surgery, cancer treatments, even home healthcare for elderly and temporarily disabled people.
At the heart of the nations across our world that long ago opted for universal healthcare is their value of human life. Those countries think a human should be saved if at all possible, that every person has worth in their societies, that everybody has the right to be healthy physically and emotionally and therefore productive, that the human masses do not exist for the benefit of the nation or corporations but just the opposite: corporations and nations exist for the benefit of citizens.
These are big lofty ideals, called idealistic by fiscal conservatives, called freeloading by the crass who don’t want to take the time and energy to fix our healthcare system—that nobody likes no how.
But universal healthcare, which I’ve always believed in because it exists all around us in nations an ocean away and even within our shared hemisphere, is as important as life itself. Is it not? How to make it work in the U.S.? It’s possible. It’s always been.