|
IT'S A ZINN TO TELL A LIE |
|
|
America’s in trouble again. That’s the message of a movie called “Sicko” which is showing up in theaters here and there. It seems that Americans are getting a very low level of health care and might as well be living back in the days of bleeding and cupping and purging and all the other things doctors used to do to their patients so that the grave came as a relief to them.
All the same, though, if you ask doctors about these treatments they look at you as if you were disturbed in your mind and treat your questions as a joke. They’re a long way beyond that kind of thing, they’ll tell you, with still more progress to come.
I know about this progress. It’s mostly a matter of hooking you up to tubes that drip medicines into your veins or that meter changes in your bodily functions for the information of your caretakers. Well, I’m good with all that, but I still miss the primeval kind of hospital I encountered many years ago where you were only secured to your bed if you represented a threat to yourself or the other patients.
In spite of this shackling and binding that takes place today, people still fight to get into hospitals on the premise that somehow they will keep you alive when all else has failed. I admit to being one of them, as little as I like being trussed up like a chicken to enable this to be done. It’s a disappointment to find that there really aren’t any miracle cures whereby you could be repaired without being overhauled like a misfiring engine.
The big problem “Sicko” deals with it is the lack of health insurance to cover 40% of the population who don’t have it, or so it is claimed. Not everyone admits that the percentage is this high, but the gap does exist. According to the movie the way to fix this is to enroll everybody in the country in a national health insurance plan which will guarantee payment for every last individual for every variety of medical care he or she needs during a lifetime. Insurance companies are to have nothing to do with this. A government agency will receive all the appropriations necessary to pay the bills, or since there won’t be any bills, the salaries of the hundreds of thousands of caregivers necessary to treat the millions of patients covered by the plan.
This is pretty ambitious. There are three hundred million people in this country now. There never has been a government agency that came in direct contact with all of them at once. Even when the armed services scooped up manpower in World War II, they only took in 11,000,000 men. Now we’re thinking of 27 times that number spread over 3.8 million square miles of territory. No wonder they call it universal health insurance.
If the problem of dispensing care to this teeming multitude seems staggering, the question of paying for it is even more so. This is going to be an egalitarian system; everyone will be treated the same. The productive individual who contributed to the community and took responsibility for his own welfare by doing such things as investing in health insurance for himself and his family will be on the same level as the debauchee who has been poisoning himself all his life without ever thinking of the consequences he may suffer, much less of those befalling people unlucky enough to be his dependents.
Egalitarianism stops here though. When it comes to paying for this humongous system, the usual arrangement will prevail, “Those most able to pay” will carry the load. In most cases they will be the people least in need of the services on offer. Well-to-do people generally take care of themselves. They live sensibly and don’t abuse their bodies. But it won’t matter if the Plan goes through. They will be pillaged to pay for it. They represent the only possible source of the billions needed to operate it. As a special favor, though, they may be permitted to opt out of it to some degree and actually contract with private doctors for treatments not readily available from the Ministry of Health. For this they will be allowed to use any funds they may have left after the government gets through with them.
The costs are going to be astronomical. Throw out today’s figures, such as the income and outgo of the insurance companies. They have no relevance to a situation where the number of people seeking treatment for real or imagined ailments is going to increase a thousandfold. How can it be otherwise when the treatment will be free? But you ask won’t there be a means test to prevent abuse? There’s no mention of it in “Sicko.”
Means test or no means test, the potential for abuse is simply beyond comprehension. There’s a reason why we have so many people who lack health insurance and it’s not always because they don’t have the money for it. Millions of them are just uninsurable. The biggest number of these are the butterballs we see every day ‘strolling up and down Broadway.’ They stand five foot one and weigh 300 pounds. No one in his right mind would insure them. In many cases they’re people who could get insurance if they took some of the money they spend on gluttony and bought a policy with it. The weight reduction resulting from the decreased grocery spending would help them get it. But don’t talk to them about it. They’re completely enslaved to their appetites and they don’t care about anything else.
To these add in the huddled masses of junkies, alcoholics, sex fiends, vagabonds and other fauna and you have a burden that no government in the world can carry without collapsing. I hear, from the kind of people who make movies like “Sicko” that America is guilty of the sins of these people. Just last night a character named Howard Zinn was on television denouncing the society that had brought about homelessness, war, poverty, tax cuts for the “rich,” jails filled to bursting with two million prisoners and oh yes, 40% of the population without health insurance.
All this comes from America’s success, not its failure. Yeah, Sweden and places like that have lower death rates and less homelessness and all the rest. They also have populations where 95% of the people work for a living. This is the only country rich enough to support millions of people who’ve never worked at all and have no intention of ever working in the future. Why should they when Uncle Sam provides so well that their major health problem is obesity? Now, if The Michael Moores and the Howard Zinns get their way, these same people won’t have to bother with waiting on line at the local emergency ward when they feel ill, but will get first-class hospital accommodation when they just think they feel unwell. Which is the way I feel when I think about it. | |