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New gripe will cure health-care brouhaha
(by Hertha Binder - May 20, 2010)
OF KIDS AND NATURE, BY HERTHA BINDER
New gripe will cure health-care brouhaha
Now that the brouhaha over the health-care bill seems to be simmering down, and everybody has criticized it one way or another, here is what I think about it. Since I had been a practicing physician in Geauga County for nearly 40 years, I've seen quite a bit of health care.
Let's look at the bill's bad and good sides.
Bad, of course, is that it will cost a lot. Who wants to pay more for anything? For other people's insurance? Young, healthy adults feel they don't need health care. But just as the people who work now have to pay Social Security taxes for the retired folk, so the healthy somehow have to pay for the sick ones.
The group from, say, 18 to 35 years, will, with luck, stay healthy. But you couldn't have a medical insurance only for the decrepit old fuddy-duddies, the insurance company would go broke before all its clients were enrolled. They need healthy young individuals for financial balance, basically to pay for the ill ones.
But don't worry, you young folks; in another 20 or 30 years, you will need heart bypass surgery, chemotherapy, replacement of hip and knee joints. The next generation will then, more or less, pay for your care. And you'll be surprised how fast two or three decades slip by.
It's the same with any insurance. Think, for instance, of fire insurance. You or your parents might have paid for it for decades. You never had a fire, so your insurance didn't have to pay you anything. Unfair? I don't know. I'd rather not have a fire and get no reimbursement. But that old guy down the street -- his house burned down completely, and his insurance built it all back up again. That's the principle of insurance: Anybody is at risk, and the many who don't need it pay for ones who do.
Then there are the wealthy people. Bill Gates will get excellent medical care, should the need arise, with or without insurance. But let's hope the well-to-do won't mind too much. They are heavily taxed anyway. For them the insurance will be just a little more.
Many of the formerly uninsured are poor, but they have oodles of kids whose health-care expenses we will have to bear. Even middle-class families still boast about their many kids. Maybe we should grant a tax exemption for the first two kids, but none for number three and so on. And a double tax deduction for adopted children. With less kids per family, the health-care expenses would not continuously rise
Are there any good sides to that bill? Well, the vast majority of people without health insurance simply couldn't afford it -- people who have lost their jobs and with them the insurance for the whole family, people who have lived in poverty all their lives.
Yes, they went to an emergency room for treatment, but only if an illness had gotten really bad. A kid's whooping cough would not heal; a broken leg had to be fixed without delay. But a diabetes wasn't diagnosed until the patient was in a coma; high blood pressure wasn't found till the patient had a heart attack or was at the ER for some other illness, and there was no preventive care at all.
On top of it the costs for the care of these uninsured people who, of course, could not pay cash either, had to be absorbed by the hospitals, putting them in a precarious financial situation. So, if these people get health insurance, they'll have a family doctor who can prevent their illness from spiraling out of control.
We learned that about 40 million people were without health insurance. Do you know how many people that is? The entire population of Spain is 40 million. As many as all of Spain had no insurance in the U.S.A. That's hard to imagine. Forty million is an enormous section of our population. I could well imagine that some European could chide an American, "You guys always brag about your human rights, and then you don't even give your people health care!"
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can be sure no one could throw that accusation at her anymore. On top of it, 17 years ago, when her husband became president, he tried to get a similar bill passed, but apparently our country wasn't yet ready for it.
I once read that, in the Scandinavian countries, "everything" is free, health and life insurance, pension, you name it. Yeah, but their taxes are higher than in any other country. Of course, it has to be paid somehow.
So, I think we'll gradually get used to the new health-care plan and find something else to gripe about. That's part of democracy. You have to accept what the majority wants, even if it's only by a slim margin. In future years, we'll look at health care like we do on Social Security and Medicare, which we now take for granted. We'll get used to being more civilized.
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