The Health Care Crisis: Will It Ever Be Resolved?

At this point with the current administration the way it is, I can honestly say I feel health care is a lost cause. If people want to pay up all the time, then by all means, quit fighting the good fight. Give up. Don’t fight. Pre-existing conditions need not be put back into the “even-disabled-people-need-insurance” clause. To gut Medicare at a time when people need it, this is wrong, if only because health care is a human right. To deny that right, well, it means that the planet is enjoying a rise in fascism from many other countries, not just the United States.

The rising cost of health insurance is something that employees, consumers, and taxpayers are forced to pay. I know that capitalist culture is all about how much money you make, and how much money you spend. Health insurance is a human right. My foray into SSI should have come right out of high school or during. But the thing is, nobody told me about the world’s best-kept secret: free medical care. I was told there was no such thing as free medical care, so I stayed put on my parent’s insurance and relied on my school clinic for minor details that affect a diabetic’s life a lot.

To take steps backwards in our evolution as a species is what health care is doing today with all the talk about allowing pre-existing conditions to be used as a rubric for determining who gets covered by insurance. The Affordable Care Act was a truly democratic solution to the massive health care crisis of modern times. As a child, Cobra was all I had sometimes, and this was my unemployment insurance at best. Why should anybody have to pay for health?

Insulin is the most expensive medication there is. $274.70 for one bottle of Humalog, a fast acting insulin that brings down the blood sugar in ten minutes and peaks in an hour. So I ask, why can’t America turn socialist and provide health care free? This was on Bernie’s mind during the election, but the capitalist pigs in charge will not allow this massive, grandstanding change to sweep the United States. Nobody can conceive of free health care in the US at large. It is something we have no experience with, some of us. We really can’t imagine it.

So then I pose the question: What will it look like? Nobody knows for sure what single-payer would look like? Single payer is funded by taxes. That covers the cost of health care for all residents. We will look back on 2018 as the health care Dark Ages. Single payer proposes starting a geographic or political region pool if you will. It also establishes a way to keep crazy drug prices under control. Opponents of single-payer feel it doesn’t lead to better health care to even dream about single-payer. Some would prefer the government stay out of healthcare completely. But you see, programs like disability insurance or SSI rely on government. My psychiatrist is government, and I got better only because I saw a legitimate psychiatrist in those sorts of programs. Yes, today I feel the pessimist if only because I can’t imagine what single-payer would look like in the United States. We all, collectively, can’t imagine it. This could be a book I can write; talk to average people to gather a picture of what single-payer could look like if it were to actually be implemented. The truth is, nobody can imagine it. Free healthcare in a capitalist country? Impossible, not possible, and random. I need to do research to get out of my pessimistic funk here.

Works Cited:

PBS.org

Wikipedia