>***** Forty million Americans have absolutely no health care, but
>who gives an enema? Wall Street is healthy and that's all that
>matters!
>Other countries look at this statistic and are appalled. You talk to
>any Canadian, Brit, German, or Kenyan and they cannot comprehend that
>our national health policy is: "You're sick? Too bad!"
The TV Nation story is fun and right on, but it is too simple to just say that those without insurance have no health care-- they have bad, irrationally provided health care, which costs everyone way too much, but the rhetoric of "no health care" is unconvincing because people know it's not completely true. The poor get onto Medicaid -- as long as they don't work hard and get them poorly paying job that rewards them by taking away their Medicaid. Or if they have no other option, they skip the relatively inexpensive regular health care system and head to the emergency room, where they can cost the whole system far more than it would have with poorer attention to each patient.
But some care is available-- we'd actually probably find if it was costed out that the US spends more on health care for poor people than many other Western countries, just to incredibly poor and inefficient results, since we fail to provide cheap preventive health care and deliver care for the poor only when they head to the emergency room. (It's no accident that a show called "ER" is the main place where you'd see poor people getting health care.)
The scandal of the US health care system is not just how poorly we provide heatlh care, but how much we spend overall doing so, spending a far higher percentage of our GNP for those results. It's nice to appeal to other Americans from the goodness of their heart for universal health coverage, but the left should regain the confidence to argue for the efficiency as well of socialist solutions.
-- Nathan Newman