The Real Health Care Debate
By Tommy Leung on August 25th, 2009 in Politics, Public Policy
The most popular topic in the political world lately has been health care. I have tried to refrain from writing about it because of its charged nature. Â However, I haven’t been completely quiet about the issue. I have my opinions and Facebook has seen quite a bit of it!
First off, I am competely against the bill and the idea of universal health care. There is no such thing as a good bill that is thousand pages long and there is no such thing as a well run government system. Those are both fairytales.
It is entirely ineffective that those on the side of the bill resort to name calling in the form of the Bush Administration’s tactic of calling critics unpatriotic and the Obama Administration’s tactic of calling critics racists. Both are unproductive and not what a debate is about.
As expected, those who want the bill passed don’t want a debate; they just pay lip service to the idea. The real debate is not whether we should have reform or not. No one disagrees that the current system is imperfect and needs to be reformed. However, reform is a vague term.
There is no guarantee that any old reform will make things better. Things aren’t so bad that there is no way the government can make it worse. We aren’t at rock bottom.
The real debate should be what kind of reform we should have. The only way we can have an intelligent debate on is if we understand what the problems are and not how to solve the symtoms.
The problem is not that we have an estimated 45 million uninsured people in the United States. Having health insurance and having health care is not the same thing. For whatever reasons, we have become conditioned to believing that the two terms are interchangeable. It is how the media talks about it and it is how the politicians talk about it.
The underlying problem with health insurance is that we are insuring every medical procedure under the sun. It doesn’t matter if its a check up, a cold, cancer, or broken bones. The system insures it all. This is not the case in any other insurance industry. No one buys car insurance to cover oil changes and tune-ups. We don’t buy house insurance for carpet stains.
