By J. Wesley Boyd, M.D., Ph.D.
Imagine the following exchange on the phone:
“Is this 911?”
“Yes.”
“I have an armed intruder in my house. Please send the police right away. I’m afraid he’s going to kill us all.”
“I’m sorry. From our database, I see the household you are calling from does not have anyone who is employed and therefore you are not entitled to police protection. You’ll have to fend off the intruder yourself. Bye.” (Click.)
Or imagine this scenario, which might hit a bit closer to home for those of us who have a family member who is employed:
“Is this 911?”
“Yes.”
“I have an armed intruder in my house. Please send the police right away. I’m afraid he’s going to kill us all.”
“I see from our database that your employment provides you with our Best Blue police coverage. Best Blue is a wonderful protection plan. We will be able to send an officer out just as soon as we receive your credit card number for your $10 co-pay. Also, once the officer arrives – assuming your credit card payment is approved by MasterCard – he will be able to use his revolver to stop the intruder but not his shotgun. You’ll have to pay the full cost of shotgun coverage yourself. With the Blue plan, the officer can pursue a suspect on foot free of charge to you, but if the officer needs to pursue in his cruiser, you would have to foot (I’m so sorry for the pun) that bill yourself. Also, we would not be able to provide you with the aerial support that we provide our Gold members but, don’t worry, almost nobody needs that kind of service. And finally, as it states on page 28 of your coverage manual, Blue coverage does assume you are at least a Brown Belt in Karate, so that statistically you would be able to fend off intruders half of the time by yourself . . .”
Sounds pretty bizarre, right? But we Americans accept the same reasoning all of the time with respect to our health care coverage. And it’s going to get even more interesting — and that’s a euphemism — once national health reform is fully implemented.
Why is that? Because the simplest and fairest and most ethical and least costly option for health reform, namely single-payer national health insurance, is not the law of the land.
For more, see Physicians for a National Health Program: pnhp.org.
J. Wesley “Wes” Boyd, M.D., Ph.D., is on faculty in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is a staff psychiatrist at Children’s Hospital Boston and at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), and is the founder and co-director of the Human Rights and Asylum Clinic at CHA.