The Near-term Health Care Situation in the U.S.
The changing nature of society in the United States is going to make health care even more of a quagmire than in the past. Americans have always thrown words like rights, democracy, socialism, capitalism, equality, etc. around in such ways that differing citizens use the words to fit their own particular need to talk past each other. We are as blind to reality in this health care area today as we are in many other problem areas which are bearing down on us from all directions. Trumpism is not the cause, but the result of a population in which more and more people are now products of formative environments which leave them developmentally stunted, often permanently. Our ghettoes have not been shrinking, but expanding and include urban, suburban, and rural enclaves. Democracy is fatally broken now, needed national values have shifted, the power of organized religions fading fast, and discontentment running rampant. The Golden Rule has globally been marginalized and replaced by feelings as facts, with self serving family or personal needs trumping any greater needs of society as a whole.
The issue as to which citizens are entitled to good health care is an ethical issue. Good governance is determined by what percentage of the population achieves the greatest degree of contentment—not the form of government. The proper goal of any government is to generate the maximum contentment for the maximum percentage of the population. It is bad government when who gets good health care is determined by certain cabals within the population. On what basis is one child deserving of good health care and another not? Or, for that matter, to have some adults receive good health care and others not? Some say it depends on if they can afford it. Very well then, so it is ok for 3 citizens to have more of a nation’s wealth than the bottom half of that population—which of course means, while there is enough wealth for that society to provide good health care for everyone, it can’t because that society has allowed too much of it’s wealth to be cornered by the very few. That is a government failure, or at best a good government only for the wealthy few. In the early days of our country it mattered less your financial status. There were no cures for most of the diseases and conditions which killed people back then. Today it is vastly different, those with the money can be helped in most cases.
While the United States has enough wealth to provide excellent health care for every one, we make no attempt to do so. Modern health care is very expensive since there are amazing treatments and cures for more and more conditions. Good health care for everyone requires more and more doctors, nurses, and health care practitioners of all sorts. Yet we hardly ever build more medical schools. Instead we let other countries train doctors (to varying degrees of proficiency) and then hire them rather than train an adequate number of our own doctors. Why would we want these good jobs to go to foreigners? We say we want to keep jobs in this country, but good health care for everyone would create vast numbers of jobs for our own citizens, but we can’t bring ourselves to do it since most of those who now own 90% of our wealth control the means to keep all that wealth for themselves.
Right now there is a huge shortage of health professionals and a huge resistance by the public to pay the cost of all the care they personally want. Doctors and other health care personnel are being pushed to treat more and more patients per day, while health care salaries keep slipping lower and lower in terms of the cost of living. The recent trend is to return to good health care for the affluent and poor health care, or no health care, for the poor. More and more doctors are joining practices in which a patient pays thousands of dollars up front for access to good doctors and best treatments. These doctors accept Obama care limits, but make the additional money from the up front yearly fees. As more and more doctors go this route, this leaves fewer and fewer doctors to assist the poor. A hefty percentage of the affluent think this is just fine, and gives them access to the best health care, leaving millions and millions of people right back where they were before Obamacare—poor health care, or essentially none at all. Good health care for all citizens is affordable, would create millions of new jobs nationwide, would pull a lot of people out of poverty, would greatly increase the happiness index in our country, BUT good health care for all is not possible in a capitalistic system without proper regulations and capitalism with no limits. In this system massive amounts of our wealth simply heads into the hands of the already wealthy.
In the last decade there has been a seismic shift in public attitudes and values. When Obama was first elected most people were on board with his everyone is entitled to fair and just treatment for their needs, as individuals or as a group. While Obama himself seemed never to find a group of citizens he didn’t genuinely like and was willing to help, the general public forgot about their own personal prejudices. Obama started with attempting to get more people health care insurance. Right away some people realized that if more people get health care, health costs will go up. Forget that, those who had good insurance were not interested in paying more for it, period. Then came better schools for the children in our American urban and rural ghettoes. Who is going to pay for that? Not those who lived in affluent communities and already could afford good schools. Then came the right for gays to marry. With each new group to get some assistance, many of those already living an affluent life began to bristle. They had not realized that making the playing field more level for everyone involved the burden being shared collectively. Obama might have pulled it off if the salaries of the middle class and poor were keeping up with the cost of living. They were not, and vast military expenditures, including around 800 military bases around the world, left little money to spend on the needs of our own citizens. Strangely, we have not won a victory with all our weaponry since the Korean War which really was a tie. Every country we have invaded since then is worse off than before we invaded, with the exception of Vietnam, which won the war.
The happiness index for the United States is down around 26 now and falling. It is not that many citizens are not content with their lives, but that more and more are falling further and further behind.
When over 40% of adult citizens do not even earn enough to qualify for federal income tax, there is no way they are going to be contented citizens. The issue of health care is but just one of many dilemmas for which, so far, no one has been able to get enough citizens to revolt against this current wealthocracy.
