Health Care Reform
Health Care Reform (Length 2:28)
We have in the United States 47 million people without health care insurance. It’s really a national scandal. We are the only industrialized country that doesn’t have universalized access to health care. We came pretty close to sort of discussing this at a national level in the Clinton administration in 1992 and ‘93 with the proposed Health Security Act. Once that died, this issue fell off of the national radar.
And one of the reasons, one of the impediments, is that the health care system, for about 85 percent of Americans, works pretty well. It works pretty well for me; I have co–payments and so fort, but for the most part it works pretty well. I may wait a little bit with my HMO to see my doctor but, by and large, I can get in to see. But there’s a good many people, a good many Americans––either from low socioeconomic classes or individuals who are self–employed or employed through small businesses––that don’t have any access at all. And for those people, the system is really a disaster.
I think that in the United States, the challenge is to think of health care not as a commodity that is subject to sort of market forces and market transactions, but to think of it as a public good, analogous to protection that is provided by government through police, through fire protection. Think of it as, every American has a right to public education. Again, education is a public good. We need to think about health care in that same way, because a lot of the health care that is necessary for individuals is really beyond their control in the same way that a crime or a fire in many cases is beyond an individual’s control. So again I think the shift, the cognitive shift in the American populace, is to not think about health care as a market good but to think about it as a public good that we all have a stake in and we all have a share in.