Column:

Health care debate has wrong priorities

By Jordan Stein

Published Aug. 25, 2009

I decided to speak about health care in this column, not only because of my personal convictions, but because the issue has so permeated every public forum that I even saw a long comment thread about the impending health care bill underneath an entry on fmylife.com (entry No. 4660097).

This issue obviously warrants more comment than the 600 words I'm allotted here, but I want to address some of the arguments from the conservative side that insist the proposed changes to health care are unnecessary.

The biggest argument against expanded health care, a single-payer health care system or any government assistance program at all, is taxpayers should not be paying for services provided for those who cannot pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

The fact of the matter is, in a post-industrial democracy like ours, the next step in the evolution of a society is to start providing a basic standard of living for all citizens. Yes, that includes providing health care, unemployment and other services so that our poor don't resemble the poor in third world countries.

A more specific argument against expanding health care is problems existing in the bureaucratic health care systems of other nations such as Canada and England will occur here and those problems are not worth the potential advantages. I must admit I don't support a single-payer health care system in our country, at least not in the immediate future. I do think allowing any citizen to buy into a newly expanded Medicaid program in addition to permitting everyone else to keep their private health care providers is the best way to start fixing the problems in the system.

Some would argue a private health industry could never compete with a cheaper government entity, but I disagree wholeheartedly. Several public services have successful and long-standing private counterparts. Private colleges and private military contractors are more than capable of competing with their governmental equivalents. Even public transportation, which is available in almost every city in America, cannot hold a candle to the private transportation industry. No one takes the bus if they can afford their own car. The higher echelons of society will always pay for a higher standard of service, if available.

My personal reasons for supporting better health care access for all are mostly philosophical. I think the right to health is included in our inalienable rights, an extension of the right to live, if you will. I also think people shouldn't be penalized financially if they get sick.

We live in a country where the best of all types of medical care are available. But there are those that work hard and pay taxes that cannot access that care because of deficiencies in the system. Perhaps I'm a bleeding-heart liberal, but that strikes me as thoroughly unjust.

People usually cannot help it when they get sick. The growth of the health care industry is to blame for a lot of the health care problems we face. When health care is run like a business, the "fat" is inevitably cut. And in this case, the "fat" are citizens who are the sickest.

It simply costs too much money to cover and care for people who have no hope of getting better or have particularly expensive ailments.

The debate about health care usually boils down to numbers, statistics and technical minutiae. I think it would benefit the national debate if everyone, politicians, pundits and frequenters of fmylife.com remembered that we're talking about people's lives, and not the bottom line.