Jake's Query for August 2009

[Jake Patterson]

I'm leaving my incessant minimalist view out of this discussion. I'm
mentioning that because I don't want anyone to think that I'm just
going to be annoying.

What does the group think about universal public health care? Do you
think it would be a good thing or not? Since this is a big topic
right now I'd like to bring it up, and hopefully we can have an
informative discussion.

[Scott Nesler]

I don't think a heart attack or cancer should wipe out the life
savings with or without insurance. Competition is an attribute
which is suppose to keeps capitalism in check. I can't proclaim
monopoly with our health care situation, but something producing a
major imbalance for the consumer.

There are many dimensions and solutions that are never discussed.
The two sides thrown in our face are federal intervention and the fear
of federal intervention. I propose a compromise. Several years
ago, before the corporatization of health care, there was small town
hospital in Wood River Illinois. As a child, my parents allowed me
to read the tax bill. Interestingly, along side the public
library, the municipal airport, the fire, and police protection there
was a fee for the Wood River hospital. A subsidy you could call
it. At that time there was no community outrage for hospital
expense. I never heard of individuals loosing there homes because
of illness. I would proclaim that there was something in the local
subsidy that kept the cost in check. I also suggest the
corporatization of hospital and the health has eliminated any checks
and balances to keep cost under control.

Local ownership or representation in hospitals provide safeguards for
the public. Some may call this socialism, I call it democracy.

[Adam Webster]

I believe in Universal Public Healthcare. I just don't think anyone has
found a way to make it doable. I am a believer in capitalism. I really
am, but there are some things that should not be treated as commodities
to be competitively chased and bartered. Survival is one of them.
Complete capitalism, in my mind is Machiavellian and Socially Darwinist
in the worst senses of those terms. Can you imagine a world where your
access to water is controlled by corporate trading and money? There are
places where greed does not belong; a hospital is one of those places.
I think Universal Health Care is a great idea, but it will fail
miserably. We cannot afford it. Does anyone know of a nation that does
not have troubles with their single-payer health care system?

[Jake Patterson]

Well, Adam, that would be in my mind the strongest argument against a
universal healthcare system. Every other country that has it is
struggling or failing, showing mortality rates and access being worse
than countries with private healthcare.

I would love for everybody to get complete healthcare coverage. There
are two big problems that I see, besides the one mentioned above.
Fifty years ago if you got cancer you died. Healthcare went through a
huge evolution and now we can treat cancer and in some cases rid you
of it entirely. But the cost of doing so is phenomenally high. We
want to treat recovery from cancer like feeding the hungry but it is
not. It is a complicated, dangerous, and expensive process, with high
costs in both the product and the human resources administering it.

The second huge problem I see is that we are stuck in an insurance
paradigm. I don't know what the solution is, but I think that society
has some evolving to do before we can really talk about the "best" way
to address healthcare. Insurance is only thirty years old, at least
the way we think of it, and perhaps there are better ways to handle
the costs than our current system, and some major experiments and
brainstorming needs to be underway before we invest in a national
plan.

[Keith Harten]

Hi, everyone. I hope I'm posting this correctly.

As Jake points out, medicine has advanced, but many new advances are
so complicated and expensive that the falling rate of return is
killing the system.

The problem is partly cultural. Because of what they see on T.V.,
people demand superhero-like efforts of the medical industry, and this
leads to massive burden on insurance companies as people pressure
doctors go to extremes that are unlikely to produce better health.
Don't get me wrong; I understand the desire to live as long and as
pain-free as possible, but there comes a point at which infirmity and
death are unavoidable because of injury, disease, or age. We don't
really accept that. People have come to believe that medicine has more
power than it really does to save us from these things, so they start
burning up resources just to feel better, figuring that insurance is
covering most of the cost anyway.

My co-worker cites his grandparents as going to the doctor almost
daily just because they get attention there and aren't stuck at home
with nothing to do (I guess that's another element of the problem -
their need for attention - and this could have some reasonable
solutions). It's also part of a culture of dependence on doctors,
though, and an overdeveloped confidence in their capabilities to
improve our health.

I think part of the solution will have to be a change in culture. Our
denial of the reality of infirmity and death is a deep and complicated
part of American psychology with roots in our consumption-based
economic system, among other things, and I'm not sure how to fix that,
exactly. Rationing health care would certainly correct the impact it
has on the system (am I siding with socialized medicine here? I can't
believe what I am reading). I don't know of another way to correct
this part of the problem.

[Jake Patterson]

Re: superhero-like efforts.

I was a hospital administration major for a while. I think that was
my seventeenth major. Anyway this was a concept that the hospital
admin community gets very frustrated with. It's really exciting when
some doctor performs an emergency experimental surgery and it saves
someone's life. It's the kind of thing that great dramas are made of.

But it's not reality. The public health sector now is made up of
inspection agencies and public awareness campaigns. These campaigns
are underfunded and rarely very successful. They primarily focus on
prevention and healthy lifestyles. If this kind of work made an
impact in our lives less and less people would be in the E.R.

But we don't want prevention because it's not interesting. It's the
daily grind and we get enough of that. From the hospital we expect
the kind of care that will solve all of our neglect, and it's just not
possible.

I agree with you, Keith, that we don't like to accept infirmity and
death, and this leaves us demanding more than can be reasonably
expected for a price that cannot reasonably be done.