Health Care: Win or Lose?
Health care is the debate of the hour, so let’s look into how it’ll effect the 2012 election:
For one thing, there isn’t anything close to a consensus as to how to handle the health care system. As it stands right now, the amount Americans spend on health care is 16% of our GDP. That’s $2.3 trillion a year. It’s second in the world only to East Timor, and their GDP is around 3.5% of ours. So we’re spending a lot. Aside from the tremendous cost is the staggering inefficiency of our system. It leaves 15% of the population uninsured and a significant amount more underinsureds, and medical bills, according to a recent study, prompted 62% of bankruptcies in the U.S. in 2007. It’s becoming more and more dangerous to get sick. The quality of the treatment you get is dictated by the insurance companies, health in general is getting significantly worse (never mind health CARE), and some people are just straight up overtreated. The use of prescription drugs in the United States costs us $289 billion a year - 45% of the amount spent throughout the world.
These are numbers similar to ones you’ve probably already heard. One need not lo0k far to find a staggering statistic about health care in the U.S. And there really isn’t anyone within the medical profession who doesn’t think there needs to be a massive overhaul in the American health care system.
How to do it is where it gets tricky. Many countries in the western world have socialized medicine, and, as a whole, get significantly cheaper treatment than Americans. But the quality of care isn’t quite as good. Budgets must be trimmed, and sometime your sickness takes second place to someone elses. You see Canadians coming to America to get quick, high-quality treatment, and Americans going to Canada to get affordable treatment. So let’s not delude ourselves that there’s only one side to that coin.
Socialized medicine, is, of course, anathema to the United States, which has the long standing reputation of being the champion of capitalism in the world. Socialism is a bad word in the U.S., and Barack Obama, who isn’t even pushing for single-payer, is being accused of socializing medicine and America. If you don’t know this already, keep your eyes peeled for the supremely idiotic caricature of Obama painted as the Joker from Batman with the word “Socialism” on the bottom (the Joker was an Anarchist. This makes no sense whatsoever.).
Point being, it’s an extremely politicized issue, and as such, nothing will really be fixed except on a tiny, incremental basis. And that might not be fast enough. So let’s look at what each party is doing:
-The Democrats are pushing a health care bill through Senate right now, rather ruthlessly blowing the Republicans out of the way, and have killed the public option. The plan they’ve set up doesn’t do much. It’s more political than pragmatic. It’s a weak compromise. Obama made a huge mistake in that he said, “We need health care reform!” but didn’t outline a specific plan to push. If he’d done this, he wouldn’t have left it up to the spectacularly polarized and semi-incompetent hands of a sound-bite obsessed congress.
-The Republicans, on the other hand, really aren’t doing anything at all. They are existing more to punch holes in the Democratic bill, and they haven’t been pushing significantly different models for health care. So basically, the message sent by the Republicans is, let’s stick with the status quo. Which, as we said before, isn’t really an option in the eyes of the medical industry.
So how it effects 2012 depends on the spin. If the Democrats get a win out of this bill, if people start recognizing a marked change in the quality of their health care, they might be able to spin that into some good press. It would also help them to spin the Republicans as do-nothing contrarians.
The Republicans, on the other hand, should do what they’re best at: whipping up hysteria over phantom menaces like socialism, and then resting on those laurels without producing anything substantial. Then, when the backlash they’ve manufactured destroys the Democrats bill, they can say it’s another victory for capitalist ideals.
Ultimately, the Republicans will do the least to actually assuage the issue of health care, but they will pull out of it politically.
What you aren’t saying here is that most of the hard working people in the U.S. don’t feel it is the govt’s business to tell us where to spend our money or to tell us that we have to spend it on health insurance. Skip sending your kids to college, you have to have health insurance. I for one am tired of being told what I HAVE to do by a govt that obviously doesn’t care what I think.
If they are so sure we need all of this junk that they are packaging up and selling as health care reform, let them bring it to us for a vote…lets see how that comes out!
Recent polls have actually shown that most Americans – prior to all of the politicking in this Health Care debate – were in support of a single-payer system, which is far more extreme than what is currently proposed. Lawyered.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/health/policy/21poll.html