Celebrations broke out last week when Mitt Romney, the Republican Governor of Massachusetts, signed legislation into law that would make health insurance available to everyone in the state. It was hailed throughout the mainstream media as a great leap forward and the model that will be used by other states.
But organizations like the AFL-CIO and Physicians for a National Health Program didn’t cheer. The Physicians website www.pnhp.org discusses what’s wrong with the Massachusetts plan—a plan based on vague promises of affordable health insurance provided by private insurance companies in combination with very specific punishments for people who do not fulfill the mandatory requirement to purchase health insurance.
The more the media talked about how right this plan is, the more I thought, “Wrong, wrong, wrong.” Critics of the Massachusetts plan advocate a single payer system. So do I. In California State Senator Sheila Kuehl’s legislation for a single payer system is making its way through the legislature. The website is www.healthcareforall.org.
Single payer isn’t discussed much in the mainstream media. And the elephant in the room that isn’t discussed at all is that single payer would virtually wipe out the health insurance industry and with it the ability of Big Pharma to suck money out of the health care system. Do you think health insurance companies would put up a fight to prevent being euthanized? Would Big Pharma fight to avoid bargaining with state governments over drug prices? I think they would. I think they are.
So it might very well be that the Massachusetts plan is the best we’ll ever get. Not because the plan is really great but because the only way to reduce in any way the suffering caused by our failure to provide medical coverage to those who are most vulnerable is to officially pour yet more public money into the maw of the health insurance industry which is really just the bagman for Big Pharma.
And so I ask: what do we need health insurance for anyway?
Catastrophic events. Broken legs, heart attacks, what in the insurance industry are called Acts of God. But care in our medical system goes well beyond catastrophic events. Today, most medical care is for the prevention catastrophic events. One example: as Dr. Uffe Ravnskov has said, cardiovascular disease is a made-up disease. It is a collection of symptoms that supposedly cause heart attacks. It turns healthy people into patients.
Health has been medicalized. Health has become the prevention of disease through diagnosis and treatment—frequently overdiagnosis and overtreatment. And what we have come to expect is insurance not only against catastrophic events but also for the very lucrative business of prevention delivered through individual medical care.
This problem won’t be solved by a single payer system—at least not any that are currently proposed. What a real universal health care system would do is to demedicalize health and make health care about safe neighborhoods, clean environments, enriching schools, accessible daycare, a living wage, and community building that empowers us to care for ourselves and the people we love. Instead of health care being about who’s going to be the bagman for Big Pharma.
The issues in this article are developed (with references) in issue #4 of the Progressive Health Observer in a review article titled “Fit to Print? A review of The Truth About the Drug Companies and Critical Condition.”
Related resources are available on the Health Politics page.
