People like me already have health insurance. It may not be the greatest, but it beats the hell out of nothing and is better than most. We use it. I can honestly say it has saved the lives of my children and probably my own as well. Like I said, we're covered. So why do I care about the millions of uninsured people working in jobs that don't provide health care benefits?
Simple. We share the same air, the same water, the same movie theaters, the same restaurants, the same trains, and the same planes. Not to mention the same swimming pools, restrooms, barber shops, and gyms. For all I know, we may even have sexual partners in common.
I raise the last point because of something my mother said to me when I went off to college many years ago. "Remember, when you sleep with someone you are sleeping with everyone else they ever slept with, too." That's sound advice that applies well beyond the bedroom. It's a perfect example of why universal health insurance is UNIVERSALLY important.
Unless you are a senior citizen, you probably have no first-hand memory of the terror that used to grip local communities every summer. People who grew up in the 40s and 50s are intimately familiar with a word that used to strike fear into everyone who shared the community swimming pool.
Polio AKA "The Crippler"
In spite of everything we know about polio, we still don't know where it originated, where it's natural reservoir can be found, or exactly how it is transmitted to or between humans. Fortunately, we don't need to know any of that to protect ourselves from something we do know: polio is a deadly disease that cannot be treated once contracted.
You can treat the symptoms, but you can't treat the disease. This is where prevention in the form of vaccinations makes all the difference. Thanks to a successful public health initiative of mass vaccinations, polio is virtually extinct in most countries.
Although the threat is contained, there is still something to be learned from this disease. The history of polio in America, particularly in the early 20th century provides a very gripping demonstration of why UNIVERSAL health care is important.
In the summer of 1916, a massive polio outbreak struck New York City. Thousands were affected. It appears to have started in the immigrant communities of Brooklyn. People were quick to blame the disease on immigrants and the dirty conditions associated with tenament living. Initially, this was not viewed as a general problem for "nice" families. All you had to do was not associate with those dirty immigrants and you would be fine. That delusion did not last long.
By December of 1916, the polio epidemic had spread from New York City to twenty-seven states along the eastern seaboard and into the mid-west. Over the course of seven months, out of twenty-seven thousand reported cases of polio, six thousand people had died, and thousands more would be paralyzed or deformed for the rest of their lives. After 1916, the United States did not escape a single summer without an epidemic, although some years were far worse than others.
We are talking about events almost a century old, but people have not changed much since then. Today we still hear similar reactions to outbreaks of infectious diseases, whether it's tuberculosis, swine flu, avian flu, HIV, or hepatitis. The first response is almost always to blame those "dirty furners" for sullying our pristine land with their disease. That is a foolish notion when you consider that communicable diseases don't need visas to cross national boundaries. Inevitably, "their problem" becomes "our problem" when someone who is not one "of them" gets afflicted. In 1921 the face that changed the complexion of polio was a wealthy scion of American privilege, a young and ambitious politician who claimed a president as his cousin. I'm talking about Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
There is no question that Salk would never have been able to develop his version of the polio vaccine without the support of private foundations inspired by Roosevelt. Some might -- inappropriately -- point to that as evidence that private solutions to public concerns are all we need to maintain our health system. They'd be wrong. You can have the best gold-plated bullet in the world, but you are just shooting blanks if you can't fire it out to the population at large.
The only way to protect Americans from "The Crippler" was to have massive public immunizations. You might think the success of that program would be considered as proof of concept and market validation for companies looking to develop reliable and sustained revenue streams. Ironically, the success of the program undermines its potential profitability. If I successfully vaccinate you against polio, the only sugar cubes you are going to need after that will be the ones you put in your coffee. That's great, unless you are a major multinational corporation looking for profitable ventures in healthcare.
The fact of the matter is that vaccine development, production and distribution are not very profitable. That is why so few companies are actively engaged in this work. They all know they can make a hell of a lot more money treating chronic diseases. Never mind the fact many of the chronic diseases that are cash cows for pharmaceuticals could be effectively prevented with proper early interventions. Expecting them to advocate that strategy is about as realistic as expecting drug dealers to stay away from kids. Ain't gonna happen as long as they have an economic incentive to continue operating that way.
That's what makes the arguments against universal health insurance so ironic. We already know the costs of the current healthcare system are the single largest contributor to personal bankruptcies in America. We know it is one of the leading causes for mortgage defaults. We know that it is an unbearable burden on most small businesses. Yet the people who profit most want to perpetuate the myth that changing the system will be too expensive.
Given the recent study supporting the contention that Obama's plan will be revenue neutral, given the fact the current system is an unsustainable drain on our economy, and given the fact that other countries have successfully dealt with this problem by offering universal health insurance, there is only one way to characterize the champions of free enterprise who are standing in the way of universal health insurance: They are not enablers, they are the new Cripplers.