news story / By Alan Sanborn

End Waste, Inequality

I don’t have any problem with people making obscene profits from iPods or cable TV, but some things should be placed outside the schemes of the marketplace. I would put our health in that category.

Pure and simple, the purpose of most private health insurance companies is not to provide the best health care possible. Their primary concern is their corporate concern — providing the highest returns possible to their shareholders. The sicker we are, the fatter health care corporations become. Our collective welfare, our fear, our misery, has become merely a game on which financial giants place well-calculated bets.

I think we would all agree that health care workers should be well compensated. It is difficult, personal, often stressful work. We demand that they are extremely well educated and updated on the latest innovations. Most of us probably feel the same way about medical researchers. Paying them, in a nutshell, is paying for health care. Everything else — the insurance industry, the CEO salaries, the shareholders, the advertising, the lobbyists, the competing health care bureaucracies, the armies of phone representatives and form filers — has nothing to do with our health (other than what they add to our stress levels).

Basically, instead of just paying for health care, we are paying for health care and four or five other whole industries at the same time. Therein lies the real cost of the system we are presently stuck with.

Nothing involving millions of people is clean and easy. Cutting the waste from health care would admittedly mean the loss of thousands of jobs. We would be better served, though, if those workers were involved in the hands-on aspects of health care — or family planning, or renewable energy, or land restoration, or teaching, or family farming, or … anything that actually benefits us.

We’re not the only health care system in crisis. Global depression, aging populations and unsustainable population growth are overburdening every nation. But couldn’t we face those looming problems more effectively if we had an efficient system to begin with — a system with people’s needs at its core?

As an advocate of single-payer health care, I know I’m about to be disappointed. However, the words “single payer” were almost unknown and definitely unspoken in Bill Clinton’s push for reform. Now those of us supporting it are perhaps the largest single cohesive segment of the debate. I can only hope that we see a “robust” public option in the Senate’s bill. Anything short of that means merely that we will be revisiting the same issue in a few years with a lot of new faces in Congress.

Alan Sanborn is a writer and painter living in Arcata.

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