A Broken System: The Case of Healthcare in the United States

I was watching the 'Ed Show' on MSNBC today and I was disturbed to hear that President Obama was strongly considering taking the single-payer option off his health care reform plans. From my perspective, taking the public insurnance option off the table is C-R-A-Z-Y. Without a public insurnace option, meaningful reform of America's healthcare arrangement isn't even possible. We can't continue looking at this system, seeing that it's broken, seeing that it's been abused by hmo's and powerful insurance companies, and then try and "reform" it without really pressuring these companies from the outside by providing Americans with a real public healthcare choice.

Last semester in one of my political science classes, the head of the Republican Party in Louisiana came in to guest speak. He was a measured individual and generally instructive, but I found his personal healthcare views to be outrageous. He was entirely serious in saying that he thought "health care was a good that should be bought and sold on the free market". He admitted that there was no "perfect solution", but he still thought the free market was an appropriate mechanism to generate better health care. I don't know how he could think that when the free market has been responsible for health care all this time and the situation has not gotten better. 50 million Americans absolutely do not have health care and there are millions of Americans who pay for coverage but are constantly fucked by the insurance companies, whose bottom line is profit, not medical care.

Let's something straight:

Capitalism is fine (when highly regulated), but it shouldn't be thought of as anything more than an efficient engine for economic growth. Capitalism is not at all desireable when it is applied as an overarching social framework, as Republicans would like it to be. In short, the free market will not solve the health care crisis.