10 EXCELLENT REASONS FOR NATIONAL HEALTH CARE

THIS MODERN WORLD, by Tom Tomorrow, © 2007
1. False Equivalency: 
-- These modest democratic proposals are the EXACT SAME THING as socialized medicine!
-- Hope you know the words to the "Internationale," comrade!
2. Facile Juxtaposition:
-- Health care isn't very expensive -- at least when compared to things that are MORE expensive!
-- Like huge truckloads of DIAMONDS!
-- Or swimming pools full of CAVIAR!
3. Wishful Thinking:
-- Most of the uninsured are actually YOUNG and HEALTHY!
-- They're probably having fabulous sex in exotic vacation locales even as we speak!
4. Fearmongering:
-- Up in Canada, they have LONG WAITS and ANNOYING BUREAUCRACIES!
-- Unlike OUR system, in which these things are UNHEARD of!
5. Specious Rebuttals:
-- Why stop with health care?  Why not throw in guaranteed CADILLACS while we're at it?
-- Don't I have a "right" to drive a nice car, mister liberal?  HMMMMM?
6. Free Market Triumphalism:
-- People should SHOP AROUND for health care, like an OTHER consumer item --
-- Instead of rushing off to the nearest doctor with every little TUMOR or HEART ATTACK!
7.  Selective Contempt:
-- The government will run health care like it ran KATRINA!
-- Ha, ha!  Government can't do ANYTHING right!
-- Except, um, the things WE support.
8.  Sheer Chutzpah:
-- Why are we even discussing this?  There IS NO HEALTH CARE CRISIS!
-- Michael Moore made the whole thing up -- to sell MOVIE TICKETS!
Makes PERFECT sense to ME!

Introduction

Although some of the best health care in the world can be found in the United States, ours is also one of the most inequitable systems in the world. While the well-insured get all the high-tech health care money can buy, nearly 100 million Americans who are underinsured or uninsured are denied access to health care, suffer greatly, and have life expectancy rates that are much lower than those who are well-insured. And it's a system in which just about all of us are vulnerable.

How did this happen in a country where we spent $2.1 trillion in 2006 -- more than $7,000 per person -- on health care, an extraordinary cost that has nearly doubled in the past decade? How did we become the only western nation not to provide comprehensive health care to everyone, despite outspending all other countries nearly two to one? Why are we spending all of our time talking about health insurance instead of health care? The problem, according to Dr. Arnold Reiman, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, "is the extent to which the insurance and delivery of our medical care is governed by commerce and private enterprise rather than by public regulation and social need."

Our hope is that this book will help decipher the jargon, provide an introduction to the basic facts and arguments about health care, and make the case for a system of national health care -- which is quite simply the only way we will be able to make first-rate care available cost-effectively and equitably.

10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care gives voice to nurses, patients, doctors, health policy experts, scholars, labor leaders, and activists, each of whom brings different perspectives and experiences to their views about health care. Nevertheless, each believes -- and eloquently argues -- that health care is a basic human right. As with the civil rights movement, social justice did not begin to occur until the public cried out for it. Already Americans favor publicly funded national health care by a two-to-one margin, as do a majority of physicians, two former Surgeons General, and numerous medical organizations. Now we must begin to make our voices heard.

In addition to helping the reader understand all of the arguments -- moral, economic, medical, and practical -- in favor of single-payer national health care, 10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care also aims to dispel the many myths that exist about it. Single-payer national health care is not socialized medicine. It is not a "government takeover" of health care. It will leave the delivery of health care pretty much as it is. However, in a single-payer system, health care funding would be managed by a single public agency that directly pays doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers, eliminating the expensive middleman -- private for-profit health insurance companies.

People are often surprised to learn that we already have such a system in place for our seniors and the permanently disabled: it's called Medicare. Medicare does an admirably efficient, cost-effective job of paying health care bills; the contributors to this book believe that a single-payer system that expanded Medicare to cover all residents of the United States would be the simplest and most efficacious way to solve our health care crisis. Since Medicare does not currently include everything needed for truly comprehensive health care, those services not currently included would need to be added. One way to think of it is as "improved, expanded Medicare for all," which is also the name of HR 676, the bill that Congressman John Conyers Jr., along with eighty-eight co-sponsors, has introduced.

Having an efficient single-payer mechanism would save so many billions of dollars that all Americans would be able to have secure, fair, comprehensive health care. Dr. Irving J. Selikoff, the late doctor who exposed the wrongdoing of the asbestos industry (and after whom the environmental and occupational health division at New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine was named) once said, "Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped away."

In this book you will see lots of numbers about the millions who are uninsured, underinsured, bankrupt, sick, or dying as a consequence of our broken-down, profit-driven health insurance system. As you read those numbers, we hope you remember Dr. Selikoff's words -- and then join us in the crucial effort to make health care a right for everyone.

-- Mary E. O'Brien and
Martha Livingston

Go to Next Page