|
|
|
Confusion on the Meaning of "Universal"
Then there are the folks who consider 98% or 95% or even 90% insured to be "effective universal health care" (this includes most of the mainstream Democratic Party). This is a deceptive use of language. Universal can only be universal. "Covering nearly everyone" even if it were a goal worth pursuing would not be equivalent (by a long shot) to universal coverage.
The difference is not one of two, five or ten percent. The difference is qualitative for everyone.
Do you think many parents in the USA would stand by while their children were refused a primary school education and say "fine, the system covers nearly everyone"? Well then who exactly is it okay to leave out of our health care system? And if anyone (even 2%) are to be left out then how do we know that any of us (or our families) will not someday be among that 2%? So we all immediately become at-risk as soon as we approve "nearly everyone" as close enough to universal. And what is so bad about there being a "Right to Health Care" that we have to settle for 98% coverage rather than coverage for all Americans?
|
Working on UHC vs. Working on Incremental Health Reform
There are also organizations on the scene currently which are demanding the "Right to Health Care" and which claim to be working in support of UHC, but which don't know the difference between working for UHC and working on incremental health reforms. Work on UHC demands an overall ("global") rebudgeting for health care and reconsideration of how public money targeted for health care is to be spent. Incremental health reforms, meanwhile, seek to add certain programs and expand others in the current system and they seek consideration of only additional sums for those additions and expansions. Incremental reforms rarely reap cost-savings from streamlining administration or other efficiencies which can be built into a new system.
To pretend that one day incremental reforms will add up to a system which covers everyone is dishonest and denies 20th century history. What can the "Right to Health Care" mean really, for individuals who are satisfied with the give and take of incremental health reforms (annual budgeting)? Which of us would cling to our belief that our children have a right to be educated, if we were told we might have to wait 6 years or more to get them started? Or that whether they could attend 2nd grade would have to wait on how state budget funds get allocated next spring? We would contend that it is not a right at all, if its not something all Americans share in as soon as it becomes officially recognized.
|
Conservative and Libertarian Fears
Conservatives are often opposed to "entitlements" (having a right to anything). But the right of all children to primary and secondary school is now accepted (it was forced upon conservatives) and so eventually will health care, as the whole society benefits, as it fulfills our democratic promise, as its the only way to protect any of us and as it costs us no more than we are paying already. Such conservative thought is often based on a perception that "other Americans" are basically lazy. Frequently, this attitude is seems poorly disguised as racist. Of course, many conservatives are ready to embrace those entitlements that make economic sense and that strengthen the nation. Libertarians, on the other hand, oppose all government functions, public libraries, firehouses and public schools. None of them has ever had to live by their own ideals and deep down they know that even some public health care will be there for them if they should need it due to calamity (even if they spent a lifetime railing against it).
The "Right to Health Care" belongs necessarily, then, to the struggle of UHC both for strategic reasons (motivating the vast numbers of excluded and threatened Americans in a way they can understand) and for solid reasons of principle: 98% is a long way from 100% when your life can only be saved by a treatment in that 2% of uncovered procedures, or if your family is somehow in that unlucky 2% of fully uncovered Americans.
|
|
|
