- An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
- When people get really sick, we (as a society) will have to pay for the cure.
- So we might as well pay for the prevention.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Why I Support Universal Healthcare
It's basically a three-step logical process.
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4 comments:
Sure. There certainly are some people who disagree with everyone having healthcare. These are people who don't want to take their ounce of prevention for society's pound of cure. These are people who don't want the government to foot the bill for Joe the Uninsured when he walks into an emergency room, or don't realize that it is being paid for by the gov't. These are people who don't know nor understand the economic/public policy rationale for "might as well pay for prevention".
I'm not sure where you're drawing the line here, but there's also the debate for or against single-payer (government) health care. I don't support strictly single-payer health care, but I do think that the government should mandate and/or enable everyone to have health care.
#1: I think prevention is as much about lifestyle as about health care, and free health care doesn't incentivize people to take care of themselves (not that paid healthcare seems to do a great job of it). Catching cancer early means the patient survives longer, but doesn't necessarily mean that costs go down (partially because the patient lives longer)
#2: If someone is unlucky enough to be born with or acquire some condition requiring ridiculously expensive care that reasonable insurance won't cover, then it's great for society to step in. Everything else can be insured against or planned for, so an argument for universal healthcare is largely an argument for redistribution. That's fine, but don't disguise it.
The "ounce of prevention" argument is fraught with peril. Smokers, for example, cost the system $100,000 less on average by dying seven years earlier than nonsmokers. Do you think we should encourage people to smoke as our "ounce of prevention?"
There simply isnt enough money budgeted for healthcare to make it effectively universal. Waiting 3 months for a government subsidized MRI isn't preventitive if it takes too long to get a diagnosis. Healthcare for the "well" and healthcare for the permanently disabled are entirely different beings. The people who would be involved in implementing this system are too far removed from it to understand what actually is required to practice preventitive medicine.
That said, our current system is a bust with insurance companies initiating competitive bidding for medical equipment, hiring case managers with no medical background to decide who gets what care, and government systems such as medicaid who have decided that items such as power wheelchairs for paralyzed citizens are considered "luxery items".
I'm at a loss as to which is the lesser of two evils.
Sigh
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