National health insurance makes sense for work force
By Roger Ray
Springfield News-Leader
Voice of the Day
Published Wednesday, June 6, 2007
In the mid 1970s, the then-largest insurance company in the world, Prudential, added auto and homeowners insurance to its product offerings. The reason given for this move was, are you ready?.… because there was about to be a national health program in the United States that would end the need for health insurance! Prudential wanted to give its agents another product to sell to make up for what they would lose in commissions on health insurance. However, the Carter administration failed to overcome the objections of health care providers and insurance companies and abandoned health care reform.
Twenty years later, the newly installed Clinton administration made health care reform a priority. Insurance premiums had risen by more than 3,000 percent since the Carter administration; clearly, something had to be done before health care bankrupted the American economy. But a multimillion dollar campaign, including shamefully deceptive TV ads, was launched by the insurance industry, and the Clinton reform initiative not only failed but was replaced by a reform that not only further empowered insurance companies but reduced medical services and physician salaries while increasing out of pocket expenses to the insured!
Now, as the presidential election season is heating up, candidates are presenting their plans for how to fix a health care delivery system that is so sick there is a reasonable question as whether to take the patient into the emergency room or just head straight to the graveyard. Interestingly, in 2007, no one seems willing to talk about a universal health care program that cuts insurance companies out of the system. Insurance and pharmaceutical companies have become so powerful that no politician who has even the slightest hope for winning an election will dare to challenge them. Our democracy is not “for sale” because it has already been purchased, and the owners are the for-profit corporations in the health care field. There are three lobbyists for every elected official in Washington, D.C. representing the pharmaceutical companies, which is why any legislation addressing medical services or prescription meds is written by and for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, not the elderly, the ill or the poor.
As a member of the clergy, I approach the issue of health care from the vantage point of concern for the poor and the sick. I am outraged that 47 million Americans are simply priced out of the world of health insurance and tens of millions more do not have adequate coverage.
But beyond the whole issue of compassion and social ethics, the way this nation is operating its health care delivery system is insane from a purely economic viewpoint. We provide free public education, not out of the goodness of our hearts but because we know that we need an educated populace to have a strong society. We build road and bridges, not for the convenience of our citizens but to make our citizens productive. We regulate certain utilities, the food industry, pollution and establish standards for construction, automobiles, and even beauty products, to protect our population from harm and to help keep our society strong and productive. Providing health care is just a part of the social network of services that make the country work. We are already paying more for health care than it would cost to have universal health care. The costs of health insurance make our American manufactured goods too expensive to compete in the world market and the number of workers who are sick, disabled or unable to be creative or innovative in new careers is killing our global competitiveness.
From a perspective of sheer greed, we should provide universal health care so that we can export products rather than jobs. It makes no sense to just demonize the insurance industry because for-profit companies have no motivation for self-regulation. For them, the sky is not the limit. They are interested in patients in the same way that fleas are interested in dogs; that’s just the way capitalism works. For the sake of our country’s economic future and for the sake of our very souls, we must make basic health care available to everyone and at a cost that allows people to still earn a living wage. We must regulate the insurance industry until such time that we can do what every other developed nation in the world has already done: make it unnecessary.
Roger Ray is the senior pastor at National Avenue Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). “From the Left” appears every Wednesday. Coming Tuesday: “From the Right.”