The government funds public schools, libraries, fire departments, and more. But millions of Americans have to privately pay for expensive medical care, even though health is just as important as education and public safety. As President Obama tries to make medical care more affordable and insure 46 million uninsured, we asked historian Ann Tiquity to explain why the U.S. doesn't have a single-payer plan.
"Adam and Eve wanted national health insurance until realizing they were the only two people on Earth to fund it," says Ann. "So they phoned a private practitioner for a house call, but the physician never showed up. Adam and Eve first thought it was 'an apple a day keeps the doctor away' type of thing before remembering the physician didn't exist because there were no other humans on the planet. So they enrolled that serpent in medical school, but the snake couldn't find a human cadaver to study in anatomy class."
Ann continues: "We jump ahead many years to ancient Rome, where national health insurance was about to be enacted when lions in the Coliseum ate the blueprint of that medical legislation. The people who drew up the blueprint kicked themselves repeatedly for not making photocopies, and all their kicking practice helped Rome beat Greece that year in the World Cup Soccer finals. The U.S., which didn't exist, finished a strong third.
"We jump yet again to the 1300s, when Chaucer published The Single-Payer Tales as an e-book. But people had problems downloading the volume on their sheep-powered computers, and couldn't get help because tech support had been outsourced to 2009. Meanwhile, the only way Chanticleer the rooster and Pertelote the hen could afford antidepressants was to mail-order them from a Canadian pharmacy.
"Four centuries later, Thomas Jefferson mentioned a national health plan in an early Declaration of Independence draft ('we hold these co-pays to be self-evident...'). But a powerful insurance company got the draft spiked -- and, as of 2009, that company has yet to pay a medical claim Jefferson submitted just before his 1826 death.
"Dying in 1832 was Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, who never wrote about the need for a national health plan. But people reading his novels backwards found references to the inadequacy of private insurance (after which they were locked in out-of-network padded rooms). Thus the seeds for government-run medicine were sown in Europe. But Scott never visited America, where his fans perused his books frontwards while waiting for Mark Twain to be born.
"The 1900s saw sporadic efforts to get the U.S. government more involved in medicine. There was Theodore Roosevelt ('talk softly and carry a big co-pay'), FDR ('the only thing we have to fear is co-pay itself'), Harry Truman ('the co-pay stops here'), Richard Nixon ('I am not a co-pay'), Ronald Reagan ('Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that co-pay'), and Bill Clinton ('I did not have sexual relations with that co-pay')."
Thank you, Ann, for your invaluable perspective on why the U.S. doesn't have a single-payer plan. Readers who think Ms. Tiquity's historical analysis is silly should remember it's even sillier for America not to have national health insurance.