When Chemists Attack

A while ago, I posted about what a few of 2008’s Presidential hopefuls were planning to do about the sorry state of health care here in America. Democratic candidates were tight-lipped on what they planned to do about health care, but Republican candidates weren’t even acknowledging that there was a problem.

My question is … why isn’t the state of the health care system in America of more importance to these Republican candidates? Is it some ideological blindness – something akin to “people who don’t have health care don’t work hard enough to get it”? Do they simply not recognize that our health care system is as vital to our prosperity as any other piece of infrastructure? Do they (the wealthy ones, at least) think that health care is simply not their problem, since they can go see a doctor?

We’ve trained ourselves to avoid medical care. Even those of us with an insurance plan know that getting sick can mean huge bills or bankruptcy. For people with low incomes, even simple things like a round of antibiotics to treat a bronchial infection are often out of reach. Simply going to a doctor’s office for a prescription can cost a hundred dollars – and that’s before actually filling the prescription. The prescription could tack on another hundred to the bill, unless the medication’s available as a generic. So, people try to stick it out when they get sick and avoid treatment.

Saving money by avoiding medical treatment is “just what the doctor ordered” – if you happen to be a communicable disease.

Let’s say that you’re one of many middle-class families where both parents work to make ends meet. If that’s the case, you might have to make use of some sort of day care facility for your children. Day care facilities are not known for providing lucrative benefits packages (i.e. health insurance) for their workers. Chances are, the people you pay to care for your child while you’re at work don’t have access to adequate health care. When they get sick, they will be sick longer than if they would have had proper care. They’ll handle your child, too – unless they happen to get so sick that they’re completely unable to come in to work. That means your child is much more likely to get sick.

If you talk to these day care workers, they’ll tell you that most doctors won’t even see them. The ones that will see them demand a large chunk of money up front (which they can’t pay). They’ll also tell you that the hospital emergency rooms will often turn them away if they don’t seem to really be an “emergency” case.

So where’s the moral outrage, here? Or – at least – the enlightened self interest?

I’ve not had much time for local news the past few days, but I notice this morning that Steve Spurrier (head football coach at the University of South Carolina – for those of you who don’t follow South Carolina’s dominant religion) has blasted the flying of the Confederate flag on State House ground.

Spurrier feels that

“No one had ever asked me about my opinion on the flag, but if they had I would have told them it needs to come down. I don’t know anybody that disagrees with me, but obviously there are a lot of South Carolinians that do.”

[…]

The flag issue, according to Spurrier, is an obstacle to the state’s improving its image.

Sounds pretty sensible to this Tiger fan. If you want to convince the rest of the country that South Carolina isn’t a state full of ignorant, bigoted rednecks, a good place to start might be that flag and the racism it has come to symbolize.

I actually learned about Spurrier’s remarks from taking a glance as the letters to the editor page of The State. One letter caught my eye. It said:

Coach Steve Spurrier’s claims that removing the Confederate memorial flag would “make us a more progressive, better state.” This is akin to a coach saying that if the team would change its uniform colors or mascot, the team would score more touchdowns.

[…]

Removing a flag that commemorates history to solve the state’s problems makes as much sense as rearranging the deck chairs on Titanic to save the ship.

In a sense, this letter writer has a point. Removing the flag would do little to ease the burdens of folks living in our poorest counties. It would do little to improve infant mortality, or to better fund our schools.

But I’ve learned something from being an educator all these years. For a student to rise to the challenge of learning something new, he must first realize that his ignorance is not something to be proud of. Once he realizes that, he has a motivation to invest the time and effort necessary to learn something new.

For this state to become a “more progressive, better state”, it has to do the same thing. We have to stop being proud of the ignorant things some of our forefathers did. The flag is just a small step, but it’s an important one.

The letter writer got his metaphor wrong. Removing the flag isn’t rearranging the deck chairs. It’s taking the first, small step towards the lifeboats.

Perhaps you’ve heard of South Carolina’s latest attempt to embarass itself? It’s called HR 3355, a bill which would add the following to South Carolina law.

Any woman who wants to have an abortion, for whatever reason would be forced to have and view an ultrasound of the fetus:

The obstetric ultrasound must be performed by the physician who is to perform the abortion or a certified technician working in conjunction with the physician.

The images viewed by the physician or certified technician to verify the gestational age must be reproduced and reviewed with the mother by the physician or allied health professional working in conjunction with the physician prior to the woman giving informed consent to having an abortion procedure performed.

[…]

The woman must certify in writing, before the abortion, that the information and obstetric ultrasound images […] have been provided to and reviewed with her

I discussed this bill with my wife the other day. She thinks it’s a boneheaded bill, and I agree. Why do we think this bill is bad?

1. Our courts have already decided that a woman has a right to control her reproduction. This is just an attempt to add more onerous restrictions on that right.
2. It’s a cheap scare tactic. Show a woman a picture of something that vaguely resembles a human with the intent of guilt-tripping her into not doing something that she has already made a decision to do.
3. The state is forcing an unnecessary medical procedure on a woman, who will not benefit in any way from the procedure.
4. To add injury to insult, the state will apparently force the woman to pay for the procedure. Unless I missed it, there is no mention of funding being provided for these mandatory ultrasounds.
5. South Carolina already has a relatively low abortion rate. What problem are legislators trying to solve here – aside from the omni-present need to pander to a certain set of religious conservatives?
6. Presumably, the intent of this bill is for women to give birth to more unwanted children. Given the fact that South Carolina does such a poor job with the children we do want, how can this possibly be a good thing? (South Carolina’s infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the nation.)

We here at Shrimp and Grits are not pleased that our legislators are wasting time with such foolishness.

Talking Points Memo’s Election Central has some information on the Democratic candidates views on fixing our broken health care system.

For Clinton, Obama, and Edwards – things appear about the same as I said in my last post on this topic. The Election Central post, though, mentions a few other Democratic hopefuls:

Bill Richardson
He wants to use some of the money we’ve been throwing into Iraq to help fund universal health care, and wants to help people buy insurance using tax credits. That last sounds too Bushy for me. Given what insurance costs, a tax credit for a middle or lower income person just isn’t going to help uch.

Dennis Kucinich
He wants a single-payer system: “Medicare for all”.

I like this quote:

Health care is a right, not a privilege.

Sounds about right to me.

Via Kevin Drum, I see that the BBC World Service has a poll on the opinion of people on various countries in the world. America’s not doing so well.

I guess that’s not surprising, considering this country’s rather cavalier attitude towards starting wars. What surprised me a bit was the attitude displayed by Americans. 28% of Americans think that this country has an overall negative influence on the world, while 57% of Americans think our influence is overall positive.

Not so bad? The percentage of Americans who think our influence is positive was 71% just two years ago. That’s some food for thought for our elected officials. Their policies are not only pissing off the world, they’re even pissing off America.

Having said that, there’s at least one notable country that loves America – even more than Americans do: Nigeria. 72% of Nigerians have a positive view of America. I bet it’s because they love our Western Union money transfers!

A tale of two citizens

My grandmother was just diagnosed with a rare illness requiring medicine that costs $700 a month. Since this medicine is not covered by insurance – and since she and my grandfather already spend much of their income on medicine and health care – she was forced to go begging to the drug’s manufacturer for access to the medicine. It looks, so far, like the drug manufacturer is going to help her out. That’s not yet confirmed, though.

A few days ago, I read a news story about a twelve year old boy who died from – of all things – complications from an untreated toothache. The kid died because his family did not have access to proper dental care.

Twenty-first century America

When I was little, I remember hearing many things about what the twenty-first century would be like. Americans would drive to work in flying cars. We’d deal with cancer, the common cold, and hair loss with simple pills. Life would be great!

Well, this is America. This is the twenty-first century. I never really expected the flying cars to materialize. But I never, ever expected that in the America of the twenty-first century, our elderly would go begging to corporations for medicine and children would die from lack of basic medical care. I never dreamed of a twenty-first century America where 15.7 percent of Americans are uninsured and have limited or no access to basic care.

How did we come to this? We certainly seem to spend enough money on health care – more per capita than just about anyone else in the world. That includes, by the way, countries that provide medical care for all their citizens.

Fixing the health care system should be a priority in this country. The two stories above should not happen in America. I can’t be the only one who finds the state of health care in this country to be a moral outrage. This is America, and we’re supposed to be better than that!

The Red vs. the Blue

Health care in this country is an important issue to me, and I hope that it’ll be an important issue the next time presidential elections come around. With that in mind, I decided to check out the campaign web sites of several presidential hopefuls to see where they stand.

Here are the Republican hopefuls:

Rudy Giuliani

Giuliani’s campaign website doesn’t say much about health care. It doesn’t say much about any other issues, either. If you want to know his position, you will probably have to go elsewhere.

Giuliani does mention (look at the very bottom of the page) that he was involved in a program called HealthStat, aimed at "identifying unenrolled children eligible for health insurance".

Mitt Romney

Romney has a page dedicated to health care. He tell us

The health of our nation can be improved by extending health insurance to all Americans, not through a government program or new taxes, but through market reforms.

I’m having real trouble translating this as anything other than "Shut up and take what scraps the market throws you". Just what sort of market reforms are we talking about here? Would it be too cynical of me to assume he means a tax cut of some kind, like Bush proposed in his recent State of the Union address?

It’s a conservative idea, insisting that individuals have responsibility for their own health care. I think it appeals to people on both sides of the aisle: insurance for everyone without a tax increase.

Maybe this is a silly question, but who is going to pay for insurance for everyone? Or is Romney redefining "everyone" as "everyone who can afford health insurance"?

(If Romney was advocating some sort of single-payer system, his last sentence might make some sense. We pay a lot to middlemen – insurance companies – now. If we got that money back, we might end up with more money in our pockets even if our taxes were nominally higher. But I don’t think that’s where Romney is heading. After all, Romney’s made it clear that he’s not interested in any kind of government involvement.)

John McCain

McCain doesn’t have a page on his site dedicated to health care. He does have a page on Human Dignity & the Sanctity of Life – which would seem related. Alas, it’s only McCain’s position on abortion, gay marriage, stem cells, and the evils of the internet. I did find one interesting quote:

The pro-life movement has done tremendous work in building and reinforcing the infrastructure of civil society by strengthening faith-based, community, and neighborhood organizations that provide critical services to pregnant mothers in need. This work must continue and government must find new ways to empower and strengthen these armies of compassion.

This isn’t very encouraging, unless these armies of compassion are in the business of providing health care for these children once they’re out of the womb. They didn’t do squat for that kid who died from a toothache.

On to the Democrats:

Hillary Clinton

Clinton’s got a press release up that tells us

Passage of a universal health coverage plan will be one of my top priorities as President. It is time for bold yet practical solutions and I will use today’s encouraging news to continue my efforts to build support for universal health care.

Clinton’s heart looks like it’s in the right place. She recognizes that the system is broken, and that universal care is something we need. But she’s not filling in any details at this point.

(I can’t say I blame her for lack of detail right now.)

Barack Obama

Like Clinton, Obama has called for universal health care. He also has a page on health care on his site.

The United States is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, yet more than 46 million Americans have no health insurance. Too many hard-working Americans cannot afford their medical bills, and health-related issues are the number one cause for personal bankruptcy. Promoting affordable, accessible, and high-quality health care is a priority for Senator Obama, who is a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Also like Clinton, his page doesn’t go into any specifics on how he plans to provide universal care. The rest of the page dwells on side issues (lead paint, information technology, hospital report cards, etc.). I’d love to see some details on what he plans to do.

John Edwards

Like the other Democrats, Edwards favors of universal health care. Unlike the other Democrats, he’s given us a few of the details on his plan.

Edwards proposes to first require employers to either provide health insurance or partially pay for it, create “Health Markets” to help insured folks have more bargaining power, and to eventually require everyone to buy health insurance. The poor would be covered under an expanded Medicare.

I’m not sure whether the Edwards plan would work, but he’s at least given us something to talk about. For instance, doesn’t the need for people to purchase different insurance plans add unnecessary layers (and costs) to the process of getting health care? I see our system of many providers of health insurance – each with their own policies and paperwork – as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Also, it’s in a for-profit insurer’s interests to take as much money and pay for as little care as possible. (My current insurer excels at this.)

I also don’t care for the association of health care with employment. Why should a pottery shop, for instance, have to worry about dealing with health care? What happens to my care if I want to, say, change careers and start a small business? Wouldn’t our businesses be more competitive if they didn’t have to worry about providing health care themselves?

Perhaps, though, the Edwards system is meant as a transition from the gigantic mess we have now to a system that at minimum guarantees access to care for all Americans. That’d definitely be a step in the right direction.

Summing up

It looks like the major Republicans are (at best) indifferent to universal health care. This might be my cynical side speaking again, but I think the Republicans are more interested in cutting taxes than anything else. Health care just isn’t on their radar – unless it’s used as a lever for more tax cuts.

The major Democrats acknowledge that there’s a real issue with health care, but aren’t as yet providing much information on how they intend to solve it (John Edwards excepted). But it’s early. Perhaps as the campaign goes on, we’ll get more details on the Democratic plans. And maybe the Republicans will propose something more meaty than tax cuts.

If any of you readers have some more information on any of these candidates’ positions on health care and their plans to fix it, leave me some links. I’d be interested in reading them! (The same goes for positions from candidates that aren’t as well-known as the ones I’ve mentioned. I’d be interested in reading what they think, too!)