A Sick System
Posted on 22. Oct, 2009 by Lydia Fiser in Politics
Between 2000 and 2006, 137,000 adults ages 25 to 64 died because they were uninsured and couldn’t get the care they needed, according to the Institute of Medicine.
These deaths were preventable and simply a byproduct of our health care system. That’s why our country is debating health care reform, but the debate has turned into a duel with each side vying for its own economic interests instead of focusing on the needs and rights of citizens. This is the same fundamental problem with the health care system: a profit-driven goal.
Because medical care in the U.S. is based in a private industry that operates on a fee-for-service basis, insurance companies saw a niche to make profits by distributing the burden of costs, and businesses have built up the industry by using it to provide benefits to employees.
But insurance companies, like most other Western institutions, operate on a model of exploitation. They make their money by controlling the life and wellness of individuals based on whom they deem fit to cover or who will cost the company the least amount of money. That’s why the more expensive cases, such as people with pre-existing conditions or those diagnosed with deadly diseases while insured, are often left untreated.
Protecting the bottom line is why health care tycoons, like Rick Scott, are setting up obstacles along the path to health care reform in the U.S. But the idea that human life and wellness can be treated as faceless figures on a spreadsheet of yearly profits and losses is why citizens are demanding reform.
We have a collective responsibility to one another to help protect our individual rights through group cooperation. As a country, we’ve yet to figure out how to go about that, but because we’re the last industrialized nation to make health and wellness — as opposed to profit — the central objective of our health care system, we have the luxury of learning from the ways other countries ensure their citizens’ right to health care.
