We're going to lose the argument for universal health care coverage until we stop ceding our best ground to our opponents. There's a simple, straightforward, reason that UHC makes sense -- it saves lots of cents. That's obvious, once you put it right, but it seems totally bizarre.
Face it, health care is a losing battle. Not only do we all die, but most of us die slowly of disease. How can we possibly save money when we will all be paying to let others die? That's the hidden argument in all this. We need to show it's deceptive, and that its apparent conclusion is wrong.
Basically, preventive care really does save money. It does this indirectly: when a person gets care for a catastrophic illness, then care will be less expensive and more effective if he or she is otherwise largely healthy. It's easier to treat heart disease in someone who isn't also suffering from organ failure due to diabetes, who doesn't need a blood thinner to prevent a stroke, and who isn't otherwise ill. The very tools which could be used to treat the first disease are more likely to put pressure on those other systems -- and if they're already limping along, then aggressive and effective treatment is likely to cause them to fail. Multiple preexisting conditions make treatment harder, less effective, and dramatically more expensive.
Now, here's the kicker -- we all need catastrophic coverage at some point in our lives. Preventive care means that we're more likely to show up with a more restricted set of catastrophes, which will be better treated at lower cost. Even in those cases where we show up with many interrelated conditions, there will be more of a record of their state, and more information upon which to make a decision.
So, paradoxically, spending on preventive care not only makes it cheaper to get the catastrophes fixed, it makes the duration of treatment shorter, and it makes them more likely to be successfully fixed. Cheaper, faster, better...what can be more American than that?