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« Good Eden Story | Main | No Miracle Pill »
January 14, 2008 |Permalink |Comments (2)
Cheney-Care
Ronni Bennett has an excellent post on health care policy that is worth a read.
My favorite part...
An important financial aspect of a successful universal healthcare plan is including everyone in the pool. The 80/20 rule of business applies to healthcare; about 20 percent of the population uses 80 percent of healthcare. By spreading the cost – through taxes, premiums, subsidies where necessary, etc. – everyone contributes and everyone, rich and poor alike, has equal access to healthcare.If the 80 percent of healthier people object to financing the 20 percent, they would do well to keep in mind that each of us is only one disease or accident away from joining the 20 percent. And if the wealthy want to purchase additional coverage for luxury hospital rooms and monkey-gland treatments at spas in Switzerland, fine. But healthcare is a human right and the time has come for the United States to join the rest of the industrialized nations in granting that right.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the U.S. does not have the best healthcare in the world. It lags far behind every other industrialized nation in the standard benchmarks of national health including life expectancy and infant mortality, and those other nations achieve their superiority at a much lower cost per person than the United States.
Comments ( 2)
I have been on my soapbox about this issue for years. It is so logical that better health care for everyone can be delivered with a one payer system. So much of the cost of health care is spent on duplication, paper work, advertising, etc. That money could cover so many patients that are now uninsured.
Some things should be a right for all living things; food, shelter, and health care. Until the politicians are no longer in the pockets of the insurance, and pharmaceutical industries it will never happen. Look what is happening to Dennis Kucinich. He is being marginalized by the complicit news media. All big industries are against a practical solution because of money. Arrrgh!
Personally, I am very pessimistic that we will ever create a national health care system in this country. I don't understand this paradox - Americans are extremely charitable and giving people. This is evident by the number of volunteer organizations, numerous charitable causes, and the daily stories of heroic efforts by individual people who would give the shirt off their back to help others in need.
Yet, when it comes to the notion of getting together as a nation to formulate a plan that provides a basic human right to health care for all, we are at each others' throats in conflict. Do we really think that we are that invincible? That our pitiful middle class wages are sufficient to help us in a health crisis? Do we really think that by moving into the suburbs, placing our kids in a private school, and holding two jobs to pay for it, that we can "protect" ourselves from the rest of the nation's problems?
There is something inherently wrong with our collective consciousness and sensibility when we fail to see that this is not just a moral issue but an economic one as well. And that it affects all of us, no matter how hard we try to hide and avoid it.
One of the morning shows on NPR ran a segment yesterday talking about the national fury that a leak to the German press caused last week. You see, the citizens there are angry about a recent disclosure of the salaries of car maker Porsche's Management Board. The German nation was outraged to learn that the average take home pay for a CEO of their top 30 publicly traded companies is $6 million.
The average director in Germany makes about 8 times the salary of a skilled worker. In our country, this ratio is 200. Germans think of this as a moral outrage where as we consider it to be a positive value of the entrepreneurial spirit.
Similarly, our strong sense of individualism and self-reliance (certainly values with a lot of merit) has blinded us to the fact that, at the very core, we are completely dependent on each other for survival. Whether we see this or not, it's true.