I just heard that the young adult son of a friend was hospitalized for an emergency appendectomy. Though it turned out to be more than a simple appendectomy, the good news is that the prognosis is good. The bad news is that though he had applied for health insurance before the incident it had not been approved. Like so many other Americans, young and old, he was uninsured.
He was trying to do the responsible thing and get health insurance before his old policy expired, but something was delayed, fell through a crack or perhaps just didn’t get approved before someone left work early. Good luck for the insurance company, bad luck for him.
Anyone who has ever had to deal with a hospital financial office when a loved one is in surgery will appreciate the difficulty his family is facing. They aren’t rich, both parents are school teachers in local public schools. Hard working, loyal and honorable people who are blessed that their son is still alive, but not blessed with a hefty bank balance to help pay his medical bills.
This is just one more situation that convinces me that universal health care is a necessity for our nation. Universal health care is a subject that causes people on both sides of the issue to foam at the mouth. Some scream about socialized medicine, but publicly funded health care is no more socialized medicine than publicly funded school systems constitute socialized education, or the public funding of the police or fire departments constitutes socialized emergency services. If by someone’s definition these things do constitute socialism, then Americans decided to welcome socialism a long time ago.
If you don’t want to send your child to public schools you have the right to send them to private schools if you can pay for that. If you can’t pay for private schools your children can still get an education in the public school system. As Americans we long ago decided that educating every child was good for our country.
If you have the money you can install private security systems in your home, hire security personnel who will work just for you, and provide the latest fire prevention and detection equipment to safeguard your property. If you can’t afford these things you can still depend upon your local police and fire departments to respond when your house is burglarized or catches on fire.
It’s hard to find anyone who won’t agree that we should pay for such emergency services from public funds. We all need these services, right? So, we’ve agreed to publicly fund them and provide them to everyone.
Under every seriously proposed plan for universal, publicly funded health care everyone with sufficient resources would continue to be at liberty to select the doctors and hospitals they choose and pay for such treatments as they deem necessary or advisable. On the other hand, those who do not have such funding could still receive quality health care paid for with the same tax dollars that pay our policemen, firemen, teachers and military personnel. All we have to do is decide that health care is as essential as those other services and agree as citizens of a great and wealthy country to provide it to everyone.
Publicly funded universal health care makes good sense. It’s the right thing to do for us all. So what’s the holdup?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I wonder if we really are ever going to have universal health care. Obama, Clinton, Edwards, Richardson and every other Democrat who ran for the presidency promised it, but every time I hear health care reform mentioned the language moves farther and farther away from universal coverage. I’m afraid that this Congress will wind up passing some bill with minor perks that help a few people and advertise it as sweeping reform.
The “hold up” is that universal health care is the right thing to do for us all. The insurance companies and prescription drug makes don’t care what’s the right thing for us all, they only care about what puts more money into their pockets. I don’t know what it will take to break the strangehold that the big money interests have on the Congress, but I doubt that it will be broken anytime soon. I voted for President Obama, but I don’t think he can pull this off in the face of all the oppposition he will have from the health care industry.