When Chemists Attack

During Spring Break, I watched Frontline’s “Sick Around The World”. It’s a very good program, showing how several other countries provide their citizens with universal access to care. Strengths and weaknesses of each country’s program are presented. And if you’re tired of hearing about France and Canada, you won’t be bored with this program – France and Canada are not on the show!

The most interesting part of the show for me was the last segment – devoted to Switzerland.

At the beginning of the segment, Frontline interviewed a member of Switzerland’s Social Democratic party. They’re a left-wing party, and you’d expect them to support universal health care – even if it led to a system with a large amount of government involvement or oversight.

But then the focus shifted to Pascal Couchepin, a member of an opposing party – the Free Democratic Party. This party values “the free market, free trade, economic deregulation and the rule of law“. This sounds considerably less left-wing, and almost mirrors what our Republicans say they stand for. So what does Couchepin have to say about universal access to care?

For the Swiss, whether you are right or left doesn’t matter; I think there is a consensus on that. We want that every [one] of our citizen[s] can get the best medical treatment when they need it. …

Later, when discussing what the Swiss people thought about access to care:

Everybody has a right to health care.

And when asked about whether a free-market system could be relied on to provide health care…

No, I don’t think so. If you do that, you will lose solidarity and equal access for everybody. […] We think that is a basic value of living in our society.

“A basic value of living in our society.” That made me think – why don’t we have universal access to quality health care in this country? We’re certainly not too poor to afford a good health system. So what’s wrong with America?

Perhaps it’s a moral failing of our society. We do not provide universal access to care because we do not value life. Or, at least, we do not value life nearly as much as we’d like to think we do.

Consider that on the one hand, some of us will go to great lengths to prevent a woman from having access to birth control or abortion. “We value life“, these people – usually Christian “values voters” – say. But these people don’t demand of their lawmakers that these valued lives have adequate health care. (It’s an issue that isn’t even on the radar with the Republicans these folks almost reflexively vote for!) “Values voters” have, seemingly, no problem with the fact that American families can be ruined because a family member has the misfortune of getting sick. To those folks, I recommend a little reading: Matthew 25, verses 34-40.

To the rest of us, I’ll simply say that universal care isn’t just an economic issue – though it does seem to save money in other countries. It’s a moral issue. It’s simply the right thing to do.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 11:54 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.