May 17, 2002
Bill Moyers: I don’t know if your reporting has turned this up, the answer to this question, but every industrialized democracy in the West, and some developing countries, treat health care as a human right. We treat it as a function of the market. Why can’t we move toward what so many others embrace?
Julie Rovner (NPR’s health policy correspondent): I think because we’ve had this ongoing debate really over the last 50 years about which way to go. Everybody agrees that people should have health insurance, that people should be able to have access to health care, to good coverage. But we can’t resolve this, every other country managed to resolve this, most of them years ago, some of them more recently. But there is this continuing standoff, a policy standoff in Washington, to some extent in the states, too; you’ve really got people dug in on whether to get the government more out of health care or whether to get the government more into health care.
Comment:
Government: The act or process of governing, especially the control and administration of public policy in a political unit. (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)
All nations, including the United States, utilize governments to administer health care policy. As Julie Rovner states, “Everybody agrees that people should have health insurance, that people should be able to have access to health care, to good coverage.” Since we agree on this, and we know that this goal is absolutely impossible to attain in the private sector, why aren’t we taking advantage of our ability to establish the public policy we want by utilizing our own government that belongs to all of us?
Government is not a “they,” it’s a “we.”