Healthcare Awesomeness
This was a response from Kristen Rengren (retroknit, one of the mods on the Knitters for Obama board on Ravelry) in regards to a huge-ass long thread in the Remnangst Remnants board over there. It’s beautiful, and she’s one of my new favorite people. Thank you, Kristen, for taking the time to put this all together. You seriously rock, good and hard.
Okay, I’m 16 pages late to this party, but here go some simple facts:
- The American health care system is already all about rationing. It, quite simply put, rations care based on the ability to pay.
- For those who don’t think that their private insurance rations their care, think again. Rationing of care to the already insured is rampant in coverage gaps and limitations as well as annual or lifetime benefit limits. It is also rationed in the form of refusal of coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.
- Even if (like me) you are one of the lucky few that has “good” private insurance, and even if you are lucky enough not to lose your job, you may still be dropped by your insurance company if you get too sick (otherwise known as ”recission of care.”)
- If the above points don’t move you, consider this: YOU ARE ALREADY PAYING for health benefits that you don’t even enjoy.
- Because at least 50% of foreclosures are due to sickness and medical bills, you are paying for it in the form of lowered property values – not to mention in the form of bank bailouts.
- Because 60%+ of all bankruptcies are due to sickness and medical bills, you are paying for it in the form of higher credit rates, and bigger fees on your credit cards.
- Because astonishingly large numbers of mentally ill people are forced out onto the streets without adequate medical care, you pay for it in the form of other social services, as well as in the form of increased need for the criminal justice system (which by many accounts is a giant warehouse for the untreated mentally ill.) And those people (most of whom could hold down a job if treated) take a bite out of the GNP, too.
- Because when the uninsured and the underinsured do go to the emergency room where they cannot be turned away, costing thousands more per visit than if they had insurance coverage, you are paying for it in the form of higher hospital bills for those who do have insurance, which are (make no mistake) passed on to you in the form of higher insurance premiums.
And that’s just the beginning. If you want me to go on, I can… or you can read this well-researched document, or the many well-researched documents it cites. (And if that’s not good enough for you, there’s more.)
But in the end, for me, it’s not just that I pay more in direct healthcare costs for coverage than anyone else in the industrialized world, or that in exchange I get crappier healthcare than anyone else in the industrialized world. It’s not just that my coverage by “good” health insurance is precarious at best, and that even if I did manage to keep upon becoming sick, it might not pony up the way I thought it would. And it’s not just that I’m already paying through the nose for the indirect costs of the healthcare system in America, either. …It’s not even that the insurance industry spends millions and millions of dollars that they scraped off the top of MY premiums every year, just lobbying Congress to keep the status quo.
To me, the salient point is that it’s wrong that my family can go to the doctor but the family who lives next door to me can’t. I don’t care if it’s because they’re too sick or because they’re too poor or because they have a pre-existing condition or because their coverage dropped them or because their employer can’t afford it anymore or because they don’t make enough at their job to pay for it or because they don’t work enough hours or even because they have no job at all. They deserve to be just as healthy as I do. Plain and simple.
And if somebody wants toto cry “ZOMG THAT’S SOCIALISM” from underneath their tinfoil hat, then let ‘em rip… for now. Because remember – it’s only socialism until you’re the one holding the denial of coverage letter.
