Healthcare Reform: Get it done!

Pass major healthcare reform now! Carpe diem!

It is hard to keep this debate civil, and I only have a couple minutes to let months of double, double toil and trouble overflow with some semblance of sanity.

1. It is much easier to get your voice heard when you say I OBJECT or YOU LIE, but much more difficult when you just want your legislators to get major healthcare reform passed. All they have to go on from the public is stupid polls asking loaded questions such as “are you happy with your current healthcare?” – So, are you happy with the way costs keep going up and coverage keeps going down? Are you happy with the unpredictability of coverage? These questions are not covered by these simple-minded polls. I have very good medical insurance and I am not happy with it because of these factors. But if you ask me if I’m happy about my healthcare, how can I say no? You’ve heard about the three kinds of lies according to Mark Twain and Disraeli?

2. One of the biggest lies going around is that America has the best healthcare “system” in the world. This claim confuses the concept of technology with the concept of system. We might have the best technology overall (or perhaps some other component is claimed by those who make it?); but study after study shows that we do not have the best system by most counts. We spend more per person on healthcare for less benefit, and we allow far too many people to fall out of the healthcare system considering our great wealth. There is both a cost-benefit case against our system and a social justice case against our system. On these two broadly-inclusive measures it cannot accurately be claimed that we have the best healthcare system in the world.

3. Almost totally ignored in the current debate is the desirability of enabling American workers to become more competitive. Currently just about all social policies tie workers down to specific communities. If they lose their jobs, they cannot explore average paying jobs in other states or beyond their commuting range. Going past that limit would remove them from important social benefits including the most important one for families—healthcare. With healthcare tied only to jobs, workers with families are limited to jobs in their locale. In the past undocumented immigrants who had a home to go to if caught by the IRS were able to take the jobs these workers might have taken if something resembling universal healthcare had provided a security blanket. Who knows what changes are currently happening.