Health care is as essential to social well-being as the availability of food and shelter. When health care is unavailable or inadequate, individual suffering permeates the wider community. Over the past sixty years, many solutions have been offered to reform the nation’s health care system – a system characterized today by rapidly rising costs and a growing inability of people to pay for it.
Time and again, national reform proposals have been introduced and scrutinized primarily for their fiscal impact. Each time, these proposals have failed to achieve the support necessary to be implemented.
At CHW, we believe fiscal analysis alone is insufficient to the task of reform. The values and aspirations associated with the reform measure must also be taken into account. We believe the debate should be re-framed and the question should be: When considering how to provide for the health care needs of its members, what should be expected of a compassionate society?
In a time of severe financial crisis we believe reform is even more urgently needed. Consider this excerpt from a Chicago Tribune op-ed:
The financial markets are gyrating. The world economy is teetering. The U.S. government is making a $700 billion or more bailout to avert a worldwide disaster. No surprise, health care has become a side show. Or has it? Not only does this upheaval actually make health-care reform more pressing, it makes comprehensive reform—change in the way health care is paid for and how care is organized and delivered— more realistic and feasible.
"Socialism" has come to Wall Street. For more than 60 years, Republicans have criticized as "socialized medicine" any reform proposal that gave government a central role in funding health services or in regulating providers.
The charge has always been false. True socialism requires governmental ownership of the means of production. No health-care reform proposal, even the most ardent single-payer plans, ever suggested the government should employ doctors, or own hospitals, pharmacies, home health-care agencies or drug companies.
The phenomenal failure of Wall Street dramatically changes the appetite of the country for regulation and for shoring up the safety net. With trillions of dollars evaporating in this crisis, millions of middle-class Americans face the prospect of losing their homes and jobs, and witnessing a dramatic contraction of their retirement savings. In response, the public will desperately want financial security, and health care is a critical element of that.
This financial crisis also means Americans may be more willing to forgo gold-plated comprehensive insurance that covers everything with few restrictions. Under the threat of losing everything, Americans may feel content with the guarantee of a decent plan that covers cost-effective treatments with some restrictions on choice and services to save money. This should enhance the chances for a bipartisan deal on health care.
It will take the best minds in America to make a compassionate system a reality, but it’s imperative that we do so. A system that guarantees access to medical care is a system that makes our country stronger. And a system founded on compassion is one that makes our country better.
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