Our health care debate is more boring than America's – thank ...

by Dom

I’ve long been baffled by how bad America’s health care system is – it’s a prime example of that nation’s love of doublethink, which allows millions of people to believe that their health care is the best in the world even though they can’t afford to see a doctor. And yet, as we heard yesterday, health care makes up around 20% of the American economy. All I can assume that somewhere, private health providers are getting seriously rich.

Extending coverage to two-thirds of the 45 million uninsured Americans – not to mention all the uninsured illegal migrants who, by political convention, simply don’t exist – has proven extraordinarily divisive. The idea that health care should be made more widely available didn’t win a single Republican vote yesterday. It’s been simultaneously described as fascist and communist by rabid Tea Partyists, and many Americans seem to have been having nightmares of Barack Obama coming into their homes and dragging them off to a medical centre against their will.

So I thought it might be taking a step back and discussing why this whole thing matters, and why the Republican notion of health care is, to my mind, so wrong – and, dare I say, immoral. Obviously, a certain percentage of people are going to get sick. Sometimes, lifestyle choices are to blame – to be honest, I haven’t an overwhelming amount of sympathy for smokers who contract lung cancer. But for the most part, getting seriously ill or injured is simply a question of bad luck. Health problems are not the least bit fair, and nobody wants to spend a day in a hospitals if they can possibly avoid it. So, how as a society, do we manage this risk, which affects all of us?

In America, this has largely been achieved through private health insurance. The better your job, the more things are covered for you and your family, inevitably tying the quality of health care to wealth. Which is why we have the unappetising spectacle of rich Republican members of Congress granting themselves excellent publicly funded health care but refusing to do so for anybody else.

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