The following is an excerpt from a chapter “Unhealthy Economics” from David Cay Johnston’s “Free Lunch”:
“In America we do not speak of police insurance, or education insurance, or, when vacationing at the seashore , lifeguard insurance. Rather we pay taxes for police, education, and lifeguard services because they are essential services for a civil society. When we need a cop, we dial 911. How quickly the police respond depends on their judgment as to the urgency of the call compared to other demands for service at the moment. When a child is five years old, the government does not require proof of ability to pay before a child may start kindergarten. And when someone caught in a riptide cries out for help the lifeguard does not check a list to see if the person has paid in advance to be saved and also whether the coverage included Tuesdays before noon when the sky is overcast. But that is exactly what we do in health care, because we use a business model instead of a service model. In the process we also take from the many to enrich the few.”
Johnston goes on to say “No other country spends as large a share of its economy on health care as the United States….The uniquely American system of health-care-as-a-business results in some poor countries having better health outcomes than the United States. America ranked thirty-sixth among nations in its rate of infant mortality in 2006…No one in the modern world ever goes bankruptcy because of medical bills, except in the United States of America… among Americans with less than average income, 57 percent are without health care….On the other hand, the lucky few who have positioned themselves to take advantage of the government rules are becoming fabulously wealthy under government policies that result in taking from the many to benefit the few. Government policy has replaced legal limits on pay with sky-s-the-limit pay plans that have produced billion-dollar fortunes for the lucky few. It has made plundering public assets immensely profitable.”
“Free Lunch” was published in 2007 and was a New York Times bestseller. The recently enacted Obama Health Care Reform Bill does little to redress the problems noted above. At most the new legislation is it but a small and preliminary step towards effective health care reform that would put American health care on a par for service and expense with other advanced industrial nations.
