It’s time to start a conversation about national health care. We should talk health to death, plan it out and then find a way to go for it
By Charles Madigan
Chicago Tribune
December 28, 2005
(A note: Your response to the request last week to write your own “Contract with America” was impressive. We will be publishing many of your suggestions in Perspective and at chicagotribune.com early in the new year. Thanks for your thoughts and your help.)
I had an unusual vacation this fall that I’m not going to say much about. I went to a cabin in the woods of Pennsylvania. I got the flu, with all the consequences. A tornado came. (It did, indeed, sound like a freight train.) It took out the electricity. There was no heat. No light. Worse, no water pressure. It was the first week of deer hunting season, so the woods sounded like a war zone.
I slipped into a fever-induced delirium.
That’s when I concluded it’s time for the nation to start having a serious conversation about national health care. I don’t know why that hit me, because I never thought of going to a doctor. Jeez luweez, it was just the flu. So it must have been the lingering effects of the high fever, or dealing with the trots in a waterless cabin in the woods.
Or was it just the news?
Word mysteriously reached the Micheau State Forest that General Motors was looking to slash something like 30,000 jobs. Among other things, it cited the high cost of health benefits as a great burden on its profits.
Unspoken in the announcement was this: Who wants a sport-utility vehicle the size of a house trailer?
We have this stalwart of American industry trapped between high costs and products that aren’t selling well, even as wily foreigners eat up market share by obsessively emphasizing quality, efficiency and giving people what they want.
It’s not that we don’t want cars, we just don’t want those GM cars.
I haven’t been able to get this health care thought out of my mind for weeks. I’m not going to hop up and say it’s clearly the time for national health care, because that would be easy and would diminish the complexity of the subject.
Instead I mean, quite literally, it’s time to start a conversation about national health care. It should be part of the 2006 congressional race. It should be at the heart of the 2008 presidential contest.
We should talk health to death, plan it out and then find a way to go for it.
What surprises me at this point is that this isn’t at the top of the legislative agenda of every manufacturer, every significant employer from coffee shop chains to assembly plants all over America. Can ideological opposition to something like national health care be so strong that employers are even willing to overlook the impact on their bottom line?
Somehow, one would think they would see the logic of a conversation to address this growing problem.
And what is the problem?
The way the system operates now, a lot of people are not covered, a lot of people are not covered very well and those who are covered very well are covered at costs that are becoming prohibitive for employers.
Why?
There are a couple of answers.
My own would be the unpopular conclusion that we go to the doctor way too often, from birth until we shuffle off. I would hope that as my inevitable decline continues, I will view it as inevitable decline and not something that can be fixed by medical science at great expense.
Something big comes along, then I would need health care, preferably covered by insurance.
But it would have to be big. Either big or bleeding a lot. That would be my rule.
On top of that, the system’s appetite for money expands to eat up what is available, and then some, just like a teenager. That has to be addressed.
On the business side, something else is at work. The simple explanation is globalization.
America’s manufacturing muscle, and a wonderful muscle it has been, is now pitted against a whole world full of low-cost operators who don’t have to sweat the cost of health insurance in union negotiations, either because they don’t deal with unions, have national health care, or simply don’t have an iota of concern about the health of their employees because there are always so many more waiting for jobs.
Here in America, we don’t think that way.
Many manufacturers have stepped up over time and provided excellent health benefits for most of their workers. But now they are getting pinched.
The rest of the world makes an abundance of stuff for a fraction of the price it would cost to make here. Then low-cost sellers buy it up and sell it back to Americans.
It would be so easy to point the finger and blame manufacturing for being cheap, for trying to squeeze dollars out of their employees by cutting jobs and benefits.
But I think we should cut manufacturers a break. They are competing in a changing, demanding global game. They don’t need chiding or criticism. They need some help.
Should national health care be part of that package?
