Why we can’t have nice things—–Healthcare

Why we can’t have nice things—-National Healthcare

THE PROBLEM: The United States has no Universal Health Care plan.

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE: You spend way too much money on health insurance (if you can get it) and get really lousy healthcare in return.

Why are we so rich and yet don’t have national healthcare? I’m certain that you’ve heard a lot of answers to this one. These are just a few:

It costs too much and will raise taxes.
We just aren’t homogenous enough.
Americans love paying lots of money for stuff, it’s just the way we do things.

Although many of these have puzzled me for a long time, I have to say that the one about homogeneity makes an ugly blue vein in my forehead pop out just a bit. What kind of magic happens when people are the same color is something I have yet to see but I’ll get into this one on another occasion.

Today I want to talk about the issue of national healthcare being some kind of enormous expense that we cannot possibly deal with despite many other countries not having this unsurmountable problem. Is there something about being a hugely rich country that requires health care bankruptcies? I can’t see that it is.

ISSUE #1: OMG! It will cost too much!!!

Well, folks, we already spend per capita twice as much on health care than the most expensive European system. “Per capita” is referring to per person (FYI) so this has nothing to do with the size of our country (this is frequently used as another flimsy excuse for lack of decent healthcare). With the national system we will pay half or less than half what we pay now, but that amount will be paid through taxes instead of an insurance company. Here’s skinny on how much we spend:[1]

Now, you might say, “Hey, but this is only because we have such great health care and it really is worth it to spend more money to get that machine in the emergency room that goes ping and lights up randomly.” You might say that but, there is ample proof that the quality of healthcare sucks, at least in comparison to the price.

Q: How could we possibly spend only half?!?!

First, take a close look next time that company A buys company B. What happens shortly after the dust settles on the event you will see quite a few employees jettisoned. Why does this happen? Simple, each company now has duplicate paper pushers, and widget cleaners. The same thing will happen when the 5,977 (2016) insurance companies [2](in the US) are boiled down to one. In more technical terms this is saving us on overhead.

Second, with the power of the whole of the whole country behind one huge health insurance organization, our bargaining power would also be huge. Canada has notoriously low prices for drugs compared to the US because they can negotiate for the entire country. Imagine having the ability to tell big pharma that they cannot quadruple the cost of insulin because you will take your 327.2 million[3] people (2018) and buy your insulin elsewhere.

Conclusion: Asking how we as a country are going to pay for something that costs us less is a sad attempt at manipulation. Trying to get your average citizen to focus on what they will be paying more in taxes and not that they will be paying less in insurance payments is disingenuous at best. The real reason that we don’t have national health care is the enormous profit to be made off of most of the American public.