Universal Healthcare

Left Field by Patricia Nell Warren

Dear Democratic and Republican Candidates,

When I talk on the phone with a friend in Toronto, we often discuss the healthcare of our two countries. “You silly Yanks,” she says. “When will you have universal healthcare like us? Sure, our system has its problems. But if I lived in the U.S., with my heart problems and my low income, I’d be dead now.”

Yes, dear candidates, my Canadian friend has a point. The United States is now the only industrialized Western nation that doesn’t have universal healthcare. We’ve made a collective decision to write off our low-income health needs and let thousands of people wither on the vine every year. Those facing certain death today are running the gamut—from PWAs who were just dumped off the ADAP rolls to a friend of mine with no health insurance who just realized that he can’t get treated for a life-threatening injury.

Recently this friend, who is unemployed, developed a hernia in his groin. Between job interviews he called around town trying to find help. The fix-it-now hernia operation would cost only $3,000. But no doctor or hospital is willing to let him arrange for payments—he must pay the $3,000 now. Since he can’t afford it, he must wait till the hernia actually starts cutting off intestinal blood supply, then crawl to the County emergency room, where the law requires that those who can’t pay must be treated. He’ll have to hope that the ER doctors can save his life. If they do, this far-more-serious operation could cost Los Angeles County and the taxpayers many tens of thousands, compared to the $3,000 that taxpayers could have handily covered with universal healthcare.

So, dear candidates, these health threats require grade-school arithmetic, not the kind of calculations needed to send NASA’s Rover to Mars. Recently Michigan’s WILX News summed up the problem this way: “More than 43 million Americans don’t have health insurance, so they often delay going to the doctor. Studies show those delays lead to about 18 thousand deaths a year. Now a report from the Institute of Medicine says universal coverage for all Americans is essential. The question is how to cover everyone and who will pay, something Congress has struggled with for more than a decade. Now the Institute is hoping [that] election-year politics will once again ignite the debate.”

Since when is it acceptable for our supposedly humane nation to log eighteen thousand annual deaths from failure to treat? That’s six times the number of Americans who were killed on 9/11! Government wants to keep us anxious about terrorism, but ignores the more personalized terror that many of us feel over our growing inability to get treatment in life-threatening situations. Yes, dear candidates, there’s something very personal about facing death this way—something you don’t experience because you have that lifetime golden healthcare package guaranteed by your status as an elected official.

I can’t address the Democratic candidate by name yet. But Mr. President, you’ll surely be the Republican candidate. You came up with an educational program called No Child Left Behind, but on the health front, your administration leaves 18,000 adults and children permanently “behind” in the grave every year. Recently you asked for $100 million to shore up ADAP. The ADAP deaths are starting to happen now as a dozen states deny treatment to low-income PWAs. Maybe your handlers convinced you that these deaths won’t look good in an election year. But, Mr. President, this $100 million is just a Band-Aid on top of more Band-Aids. AIDS care is part of the larger healthcare system, and the system doesn’t need another Band-Aid. It needs rebuilding from the ground up. A society that deliberately pushes its poor into catastrophic health scenarios like the one my friend faces, must be considered not only inhumane, but criminal.

Do note, dear candidates, that the solution must include affordable drugs for everybody. November’s winner will hopefully stand up to the pharmaceutical industry and force them to lower drug prices. Do you have balls enough to do that? I wonder.

Yes, I hope the voters are mad enough to hold both parties’ feet to the fire on this issue. Universal healthcare will cost us less, and be more life-friendly for some than the current system, which so easily turns “healthcare” into “hell.”

Patricia Nell Warren, author of fiction bestsellers like The Front Runner, also writes provocative commentary. Her writings are archived at www.patricianellwarren.com. Reach her by e-mail at patriciawarren@aol.com.