It’s time for the culture to have the argument about whether healthcare is a right or a privilege in this country. We’re going to have to have this argument—and make no mistake: this is going to be a gloves-off doozy—sooner or later and the sooner this is resolved, the better for everyone. This issue should have been resolved five years ago, but better late than never, I guess. Like it or not, the healthcare issue is going to be one of the core components of the 2004 election cycle.
The American healthcare system is irreparably broken. That much there’s no denying.
America’s corporate media is beginning to finally awaken to the issue. At the end of 2003, The New York Times published a Milt Freudenheim article, “Some Doctors Letting Patients Skip Co-Payments,” reporting that some medical providers interpret the bureaucracy of managed-care networks as damage and routing around them by refusing to join and accepting the insurer’s out-of-network payment for their services, forgiving patients’ co-payments and deductibles.
Two days later, the San Francisco Chronicle published “Time for single payer?” by Ruth Rosen, acknowledging that the time may be right for the American citizenry to decide that a single-payer system is the best solution for everyone involved. Rosen sees a convergence of patients, providers, businesses, and unions all reaching common ground and simultaneously exerting pressure for a single-payer solution. Rosen reports that even the wealthy are coming around:
“Why? Because one of the best kept secrets in the United States, according to the American Hospital Association, is that 80 percent of our emergency rooms are overcrowded and the average wait is four hours. The poor, of course, already know this. But when middle class and wealthy Americans with heart attacks or serious injuries discover that they, too, may be diverted from one hospital to another, they may reconsider the value of their “excellent” medical insurance.”
For the conservative bean-counters who bemoan a single-payer healthcare system as yet another facet of the nanny state, consider the administrative cost savings alone that have already been realized through the single-payer system already in place in America: Medicare. Medicare’s administrative overhead costs are 2 percent. Private insurance spends about 25 percent on administrative overhead.
That’s still not enough to pay for universal healthcare, so we’re going to have to make a laundry list. I suggest starting with the Peace Dividend. Remember the Peace Dividend? Oh, of course you do. At the end of the Bush I presidency, the cold war came tumbling down around his ears with the simultaneous fall of the Berlin Wall and disintegration of the Soviet “evil empire.” Without a Cold War to fight, thoughts of what to do with the surplus Pentagon budget filled the minds of just about everyone. At the time—only about a decade or so ago—the annual Pentagon budget was around US$270 billion. The big idea was that we’d take US$100 billion of that to do Good Work here at home. The Pentagon contractors made sure that didn’t happen and today the annual Pentagon budget is around US$400 billion before any preemptive adventures take place.
US$400 billion plus and all we get is Saddam extracted from a hole.
It’s time that we start doing the right things. A single-payer, universal healthcare system is a fine start.
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