With the upcoming medical challenges Carolyn is going to be facing, I have been thinking about health care a lot lately (for those who don’t know, Steve’s mother Carolyn has been diagnosed with stomach cancer – you can see updates on Steve’s father’s blog at too-old-to-know-better.blogspot.com). Arriving home early from work, I caught the end of an Oprah show today about health care in America, primarily talking about Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko.”
A question posed by the movie and show that I find to be an interesting intellectual exercise is: what are our fundamental rights as human beings? Where is the line between basic right and luxury privilege? Our society has determined many things to be basic rights beyond that which is covered in the Bill of Rights. We have determined that people deserve firefighters, police, education through high school and the like regardless of their economic status. The government provides these things. Of course you can argue that the quality of these services vary widely and may correlate with the wealth of the surrounding area, but I’m looking at an overview of ideals here.
It seems that, as the preamble to the U.S. Constitution indicates, that we should be interested in promoting the general welfare of our people. It’s extremely scary to think that if any of us became seriously ill and were not insured or under-insured that we could end up drowning in debt. I heard a statistic that half of bankruptcy filings are due to medical bills. That’s a frightening thought. That all you worked for could be taken away by a freak disease or injury.
A Canadian they spoke to on the Oprah show said that their system is not perfect by any stretch, but since she married an American and moved to the U.S. she feels a general sense of unease, a fear that if something happened that her American insurance doesn’t completely cover that she would be in a dire situation. At least in Canada, she said, she knows that if something happened to her, she’d be covered.
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I was privileged to take a tour of English hospitals in 1980 as part of an international study group. The group was primarily hospital administrators like me from about 40 countries. At the beginning of the tour, I had been convinced that America had the best healthcare system in the world. At the end of the two-week tour, I was not so confident.
Those of us with easy access to healthcare see the triumphs of American medicine because for enough money our doctors can do more and practice better medicine and surgery than any other country. But when more than half our population has no insurance we fall woefully short of promoting the general good.
I found it difficult to discuss our system with the administrators from other countries. They couldn't imagine restricting access to healthcare the way we do. Their people would revolt. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that Americans don't revolt.
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