Our Health Care Brawl

"What we have here is a failure to communicate!"
Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke

In the current health care brawl we are not listening to our political opponents. At our town meetings, we are shouting down our elected representatives, and we are threatening our opponents with violence and death. We scream epithets at politicians, and brand them liars, socialists, communists or fascists. We admire those of us with the loudest voices that interrupt our opponents with satiric rejoinders rather than relevant information. We all have become members of a political WWF, and we smack down our political opponents with animal roars and vulgar gestures that we should have left on the elementary school playground. Some of us even carry pistols to town meetings and rallies, in the belief that the Second Amendment means it’s okay to intimidate people with weapons. On television every night, we are presented with the alarming spectacle of our feeding on our own emotions.

We can’t communicate because we are afraid. Many of us agree with the voter who screamed, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." Yes, it was an amusing slip, but the man is not stupid. He is genuinely afraid. Afraid that, even though Medicare is a government program, we will not receive proper medical attention if we adopt national health services such as those in England and Canada. Some of us shrink from a government bureaucracy that we have been told will stand between Americans and their physicians. Others of us shudder at the reports of federal death camps for our ailing elderly who cannot pay for medical care. We fear, and we will literally fight to the death those that are advocating evil policies. Even if our fears are based on lies or our own ignorance.

Ignorance is the bane of political discourse, and we can’t communicate because we simply don’t know what we are talking about when we discuss the national health services of England and Canada. They aren’t perfect, but those of us who claim government provided health care is wicked do not understand those programs. In England and Canada surgery, births, end-of-life counselling, vaccinations, medications, physical exams are all provided free, and without permission from a bureaucrat or insurance claims adjustor.

The ultimate in ignorance was an editorial in Investor's Business Daily, which claimed, "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." However Professor Hawking denied the assertion. "I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS," he told The Guardian. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived." I hope that the IBD’s editorial board expressed their views out of ignorance of Professor Hawking’s nationality (he is British, not American), not out of a wish to deceive their readers. Investors Business Daily later corrected their editorial blunder.

We are divided into camps that justify lies, exaggerations, and intimidation of our opposition. And we get away with it, because no one has explained what health care reform will do. However, health care is not the problem. The US has excellent health care. The problem is getting to it. We do not need health care reform, we need health insurance reform.
We are debating the wrong issue. We need to directly address the federal regulation of the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the hospital industry, and the industry that manufactures medical devices and implements.

Federal regulations will not destroy capitalism, privacy and family values. We need regulations to protect consumers of health insurance that pays for the drugs, pace makers, urine analyses, liver transplants, spinal taps, and the machines, tubes, meters, monitors and all the other gadgets and materials that are attached to or inserted into our bodies.

Consumer protection is the issue we should be debating. How do we protect consumers from being denied medical care by corporate bureaucrats and insurance clerks with no medical training? How do we protect consumers from unjustifiable cancellation of medical insurance? How do we protect consumers from unnecessary and fraudulent medical tests and procedures? From losing insurance coverage when our employers go out of business? From emergency rooms overcrowded with ill and injured people with no insurance at all. From fees on our medical bills that pay for the medical treatment of others who are uninsured?

President Obama, Vice President Biden, the United States Senate, and the US House of Representatives have not dealt with these problems. Instead they have kept the debate about health care, a topic so broad that it can be easily manipulated. Obama has not presented a plan that says, specifically, what it will do to protect health insurance consumers. Senators and members of Congress haven’t either.

They can’t, because they are in the pockets of the very industries that need regulation. As long as their re-election campaigns are financed by these corporations and their lobbying groups, consumers will continue to suffer. When Congress re-convenes in the fall, nothing will happen. Health insurance reform will not happen. The number of us with no health insurance will increase, but government workers, including The President, his cabinet and aides, members of the Senate and House of Representatives, will be covered. To them, and to executives and employees of the health insurance industry, "God’s in His Heaven, and all’s right with the world."

As long as they keep us ill-informed and deaf to one another’s reasonable words.