By Gabriel Edwards
The Pulse (OHSU Student Newsletter), Fall 2012 edition
The process of getting through medical school is fraught with uncertainty. What kind of residency will I apply to? Which lunch talks this week are offering free food? What innervates the palatoglossus muscle?
There’s another question I’ve considered as I get through the first year. I wonder what our country’s health care system (the system in which I will practice medicine) will look like in the next few years. Embedded in this question is one thing I’m certain of: our health care system is broken.
We spend double the money of every other developed nation in the world, and our health is worse for it. We are fairly unique among developed countries in the degree to which our quality of health care depends on income or employment.
Wealthy Americans receive some of the best health care ever devised by humans. Less wealthy Americans are denied care because of lack of resources, succumbing to preventable illnesses at rates higher than our industrialized counterparts.
Both major political parties say that the health care system needs to be reformed, that costs need to be contained lest they eventually bankrupt the country.
During the latest battle of reforming health care there was talk about what would happen to various stakeholders in our current systems. What would reform mean for doctors? For private insurers? For patients? For President Obama’s political prospects? For the opposition’s political prospects?
Another question is asked far less frequently: What does it say about us as a society that, compared to other countries, so many more people are dying from preventable diseases or going bankrupt due to health care costs?
Our country has already decided that every American is entitled to education, police protection, and fire protection. Prisoners have a guaranteed right to health care. Right now there are tens of millions of Americans who don’t have the right to adequate health care.
Obamacare, fully implemented, would cut the number of uninsured only by half, leaving 23 million Americans without health insurance – 23 million who can’t afford all the health care necessary to ensure a high quality of life. And the problem doesn’t stop there. Insured individuals declare the majority of medically related bankruptcies. This is not a problem of insurance versus noninsurance. This is a problem of equity.
The solution to this problem, I believe, is to create a health care system that covers everyone, without exception. Obamacare will not do this, but a single-payer system could. I believe that this is the most moral solution.
Who is healthy and who becomes ill in life is not solely determined based upon personal merit; health care shouldn’t be awarded based on what one’s salary and job happen to be.
Everyone has a right to medically necessary care. I want to care for patients in a society that maintains that right. I strongly believe that we will get there together. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s the right thing to do.
Gabriel Edwards is a first-year medical student at Oregon Science & Health University in Portland, Ore. This article was originally published under the title, “Opinion: Health Care Reform.”