With Senate Dems furiously scrambling to arrive at a compromise health care bill, progressives have reached a point where most fear a health care bill more than they initially hoped for it.
For politicians with reputations to manicure, a health care bill, any health care bill, at any cost, may be better than nothing. For the people of the Unites States, killing the bill would be better than a disease care reform, which from the way things are shaping up, looks like it will only throw more good money (and a lot of it) after bad. Only this time around, it will be taxpayer money.
For all the compromises thought up by lawmakers, for all the talk about fiscal responsibility, for all the revamping of Medicare minutiae, the elephant in the room is still being ignored: Like global warming, health care in this country is sitting on a ticking time bomb. We are raising a generation of sick Americans, and some 20-40 years from now, our disease care system might slowly strangle and eventually bankrupt this nation, public option or not.
At the heart of the matter is the fact that a health care system based on a profit incentive can only do so much. There is no profit to be gained in treating people with pre-disease conditions. It is, however, extremely profitable to treat people after they have become sick--just look at the stocks of health care companies over the past twenty years.
Here Is What We Know:
Here Is What We Do
What does it really mean to help someone? Do you help someone if you let them eat bad foods, let them grow overweight, without ever educating them about proper diet or help them be able to afford the foods that could keep them healthy? Do you help someone if you later on put them on drugs with numerous side effects to deal with the complications of being overweight and/or having diabetes? Do you help someone when you do emergency bypass surgery at age 58, but ignore all the things that could have been done some 20, 30, 40 years earlier to avoid the problem in the first place?
This is why disease care reform will never bring us health care reform. A disease care system based on a profit motive is bound to fail; A taxpayer-funded mandatory disease care system would only augment a system, which is already dysfunctional and unsustainable. Market driven health care, by its very nature, can see little further than the bottom line on the next quarterly report. It's not that health care companies are bad, it's just the way the system works. There is no money to be made from keeping people well.
The only social entity charged with looking out for the greater good, the only institution with a mandate to rein in disturbing societal trends that pose a risk to the long-term health of the nation, the only body charged with safeguarding the interests of future generations, is the government. But of course, government, as Fox News tells us, is BAD, and any kind of significant government intervention in the health care system would be--shiver--socialized medicine.
Instead of scare-mongering propaganda, instead of an endless, bickering health care debate, instead of a disease care reform that is on course to ultimately, do more harm than good, let's get a debate about not what it would take to treat the growing throngs of diseased Americans, but what it would take to make them healthy.
It's time to move beyond the blind worship of market-driven economics and acknowledge that while market-driven dynamics may work in purely business-related matters, they fall short when it comes to tackling large social issues that are played out across several generations. This is the elephant in the room, and unless we begin to face that one straight on, we will simply continue to rearrange lounge chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
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