Do We Have A Right To Be Healthy?
Do We Have A Right To Be Healthy?
Almost everyone wants good healthcare, or at least they will once they discover their formerly young and seemingly invincible bodies have stopped cooperating. Our extreme opposing views about its access range from private plans that only the wealthy can afford, to free socialized governmental distribution for all.
What we’ve wound up with is something in the middle which, like so many programs, punishes the majority of the population who make up the middle and lower-middle classes.
Rich people can afford the best private insurance, which not only provides them with premium medical care but also the best preventative measures to avoid ill health in the first place. Combined with financial access to cleaner environments and healthier food choices, this provides them with greater odds for longevity and quality of life.
Poor people are compensated by society with entitlements like Medicaid to give them access to medical care they couldn’t have otherwise afforded. There are shortcomings, certainly - longer wait times, less preventative care, lower quality doctors, and ill-equipped facilities are not uncommon, but the care is available to them with the costs borne by others.
Many truly need this, because despite their hard work they have not been able to acquire the means for financial autonomy. Many others, however, take advantage of this gift.
I’ve never been in an ambulance in my life, mostly because they are expensive and should be reserved for medical emergencies. I also avoid emergency rooms for the same reasons. When I worked in poor urban communities, however, it was common to see Medicaid recipients who did not work at all who called ambulances for trips to the emergency room over minor ailments.
I once saw this happen for an ingrown toenail. This abuse of “free” care is done at the expense of taxpayers and is far from actually free.
Some point to Canada and Scandinavia as examples of how things should be done, but that is a case of selective processing of information. They will say things like “Why can’t we be more like Denmark, with its socialized health care?”, oblivious to the fact that Denmark’s economy is set up to meet the needs presented by its unique population, geographical location, and political standing in the world.
The entire country would only be the 42nd largest of our 50 states, with a population under 6 million, fewer than New York City by itself. Its comparative lack of natural resources and commitment to neutrality in world skirmishes result in a lesser need for active military and its related costs.
These and numerous other unique realities (such as significantly higher taxes), far different than those in the United States, help explain why Denmark’s economy has the wiggle room to fund universal health care.
For those who want to emulate Canada, the pros and cons of their healthcare system could fill a book and, as with all things, it’s better for some and worse for others. Even if you’d take it over America’s more privatized system, however, its availability once again is directly connected to the unique needs of the Canadian economy.
The geographical challenges, population density, and standing on the world stage are monumentally different in Canada than in the United States, and have an enormous effect on the availability of funds for public services.
Pervasively pointing out America’s perceived shortcomings with selective policies neglects to look at the whole picture. Like all countries, we have strengths and weaknesses, often feeding each other. The two examples of Denmark and Canada clearly show this.
While they have some policies that are more open and appear preferable to ours, others (like immigration) are far more restrictive. Financial support for one thing takes away from another. No country has the financial ability to maximize every benefit program.
In the United States, the people who get lost in this also happen to be the majority - the middle and lower-middle classes. I know this because I’m one of them. I’ve never been rich, but I have endured years in lower income brackets. Hard work, experience, and frugality resulted in a more comfortable financial situation over time, but those goals were counterintuitive when it came to healthcare.
Many full-time jobs with reasonable wages produce incomes that, with conscientious budgeting, allow for independent living. But they also simultaneously place their earners above the Medicaid threshold, leaving a huge swath of the population without affordable medical coverage. Many, like me, simply do without.
For lower-middle to middle-income earners, the goals of the Affordable Care Act are mostly myths. People who earn from $30-70,000 per year cannot afford over $1,000 per month in health insurance (not counting deductibles and services that are not covered) without substantial sacrifices to their daily lives and financial futures. (If you don’t think it costs that much, think again.)
If they decided to abstain, they were punished with a shared responsibility mandate fine until 2018, a “damned if I do, damned if I don’t” scenario if ever there was one. These folks, representing a huge segment of the population, do not receive entitlements but do pay taxes which contribute to the system. So while they cannot afford healthcare for themselves, they are forced to pay for the healthcare of others.
Our system is disincentivizing effort.
If this wasn’t already a slap at most working-class people, now the White House is expanding migrant healthcare. Once again, we are permitting our government to use hard-working American citizens as stepping stones for illegal immigrants to stand upon and rise up.
My wife and I rarely see a doctor, except when we pay cash at a clinic if we’re very ill and need antibiotics, for example. Planning for our future is impossible if we need to devote $12-20,000 per year towards health insurance premiums (even for an ObamaCare plan), so we are forced to take our chances that we’ll avoid something serious.
This is of course unsustainable and is simply postponing the inevitable as we get older. Meanwhile, our taxes supplement free healthcare for families which circumvent our immigration laws, many (though certainly not all) under highly dubious claims of “asylum” which often exploit and abuse the nature of those laws as they were intended.
None of this is meant to imply that people from other countries do not require healthcare, though I am unsure why it becomes our responsibility when they show up at our doorstep. It simply means that if we continue taking advantage of the people most responsible for making our country run smoothly, it will stop running smoothly.
Healthcare is one of the many issues which blur the lines of success, and make us question whether the jump from poverty to the middle class is worth the effort. When that effort required to strive for something better becomes negated by the parallel requirement to be responsible for those who stayed behind (especially the ones who do so intentionally), all hope for societal advancement is lost.
The working class dissipates, only the rich get richer, and the wealth gap continues to widen.
We have to find a way to stop punishing those who have worked and contributed, and stop rewarding those who haven’t.
Zephareth Ledbetter is the author of “A White Man’s Perspectives on Race and Racism”, available as an ebook at smashwords.com/books/view/1184004, and has numerous articles on SubStack
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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I have struggled with the health care socialized/private issue for a long time. I am now much more against it. We have a perverse system in the US where private entities will capitalize off the public subsidies. The ambulance company will not turn away the ingrown toenail patients if they know they will be paid. I very much doubt Denmark or Sweden experience this issue. They are an example of a decentralized small-scale socialized system that cannot be scaled. A woman who did housekeeping for me came to this country for her daughter to get heart surgery. Her son injured his knee in soccer and received MRIs, etc. for something most of us, a generation ago, would have just used ice and rest. I liked this woman and she was on her way to becoming a citizen. But I knew then - 20 years ago - this was not sustainable. It is wealth distribution not by kindness but by force. I think of the medical industrial complex every time I am in the grocery store. I would say in the average store only 20% of the items are good for one's health. At the local farmer's market, the volunteers pedal and try to ramp up the number of shoppers with gifts, etc. I told them instead of giveaways, why not subsidize the gas for the farmers to come to the market? With gas well past $5.00 in LA, that would help them and allow them to price their healthy items in a more competitive framework.
A telling fact about the nationalization of healthcare is that Republicans ran for years on a platform of repealing Obamacare, and they won. Then when they got the votes in Congress to repeal Obamacare, they simply didn't do it.
I guess that's whey the call it the "Uniparty".