National Health Care

The wealth and power of any nation depends on the production that its citizens can create. One of the most important resources any nation will ever have therefore, is a healthy workforce. That resource is far too important to be left to commercial corporations who must, by their very structure, subordinate that national need to their own need for profit.

Commercial businesses operate on a short-term basis, usually from one quarter (a three month calendar period) to the next. Commercial health care corporations plan their services and operations based on that calendar system, because the well being of those corporations depend on their profit, and their sale of stock, but the health care of the nation is an on-going, long-term project requiring elaborate planning for events that will occur a generation or more into the future.

Our present system has already produced close to 50 million Americans who have no health insurance at all, perhaps 50 million more who are under-insured. Many Americans who do have health-care insurance they like, still depend on their employer to provide it and are dependent upon and bound to that company. They can’t quit their job, or look for another job or move because they may not be eligible for ANY health care if they give up their current plan. And since many American businesses also carry a portion of their employees health care costs they find themselves at a disadvantage when competing in the global economy with companies from other nations who do not carry these costs.

Will a governmental health care plan cause an increase in taxes? Probably. But America is currently paying - for its dangerously ineffective health insurance system - about twice as much as any other nation in the world and getting about half as much in return. Taxes may go up, but the price we are paying commercial insurance corporations may totally vanish! Not only will we become healthier, but we will have more money too. And even if we do pay additional taxes, we will get most of that back in care. And even if you or I do not need health care at all in any given period, we will all still realize benefits from having a healthier national workforce with more discretionary money to spend.

How do we implement this national health care? Begin with Medicare. Expand that to include ALL citizens. Phase it in over say, five years or even less. That will give us the strongest possible public option, we will then have a single-payer, single-collector system, and the prices will be set by health care providers and consumers working together under governmental regulations. Together we can improve this system as new opportunities become available. According to reliable polls the majority of American citizens want a single payer system with a strong public option, and most of the American health care providers want that system too. Medicare has been one of the most popular services our government has ever provided.

What would our founding fathers think? Well, remember they lived before the discovery of the germ theory of disease in a nation of less than four million people, aproximately 15% of which were slaves, and about half of which could not vote (because they were women), transportation depended on horses and the wind, communication was accomplished with quill pens, and the life expectancy of Americans was about 35 years. They designed a magnificant political structure for the world they lived in. We now live in a vastly different world. Hello?