pameladlloyd | Entries tagged with health care

My husband is sitting in the next room, watching Meet the Press, while I sit at my computer and listen in, occasionally commenting on situations I find particularly vexing. There's a lot going on in the world today that's of concern (I'm understating. Bigtime!) and I'm not always happy with the ways in which politicians attempt to defend our country's position. But the thing that made me sit up and really pay attention, was the following statement, spoken by Senator Harry Reid:

In Nevada, for example, David, at our University Medical Center in Las Vegas, they stopped cancer treatment. People who are in Las Vegas--two weeks ago, women who had breast cancer treatment were said, "We have no place for you to go." They had to leave the state to do that. [link]

Now, I knew our health system was lousy, but it never even occurred to me that something like that could happen.

What other treatments, I wonder, have also been stopped. What is happening to the people who can't afford to travel out of state to seek life-saving medical treatments? How can we allow this to happen? Aren't there some less critical state governmental functions that could have been shut down, so that their operating funds could be funneled to this hospital? Why hasn't the federal government stepped in to prevent this?

This whole situation gets a big stamp of FAIL from me.

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Morally, I see health care as a right. Practically, I see good universal health care as just plain sensible policy.

Morally

How can we defend withholding medical care from individuals, including infants and children, on the basis that they, or their families, lack wealth?

I tried to find more to say on this matter, but it seems to me that there's not really anything more to say. It just doesn't seem morally defensible to me that some people can have access to health care when they need it and others can't.

Practically

When good health is a privilege, it hurts more than a few individuals, it hurts our entire society. We need a healthy populace:

	1)	Poor health policies cost money in the form of increased health care costs . . . assuming, of course, that we don't leave those members of our society who can't affort preventative health care to live or die, when their illnesses are of a life-threatening nature. The old saying, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," is exactly right.
	2)	Poor health policies cost money in the form of lost productivity. People who are sick simply can't work at peak levels, if they can work at all. If our society continues to make choices that make health care more expensive and less available, it will mean a loss of productivity for our entire nation.
	3)	Poor health policies will make our country less competitive, as workers flee to countries where they can get better health care. Think we've got an immigration problem? Wait until Americans are the ones crossing the borders in record numbers, as they head for countries with more humane health care policies.
	4)	Poor health policies hurt us all. The health of the individual members of a community will have an impact on the overall health of the community. At the most extreme level, poor health policies can result in plagues which, while they may disproportionately target the poor, will bring illness to people at every level of society.

( ETA: Links to Articles Comparing the Candidates )

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