Every so often a topic comes up that requires some serious reflection. Most of the time, these are issues that jump out from the news or from our daily contacts with others. One such item on the front page of a recent newspaper caught my eye.
A man that grew up in this area but is now living on the West Coast with his wife and two young daughters, has been recently diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was a star football player at a local high school some years ago, so he’s now in his late 40’s. Here’s what caught my eye. His medical expenses are extraordinary, including the cost of transportation to and from the facility where he’s being treated. A family friend has set up a GoFundMe account to help defray some of these medical costs, which are mounting at a rapid rate. So let us, as Americans, ask ourselves, why is such an account needed in the 21st century, in a nation with the most resources on earth?
If this were a stand-alone item of interest, then I’d say ok – these rarities happen. But it’s not. Our local newspaper regularly features articles like this – a family with a young child battling a rare disease, a couple where one is awaiting a suitable donor for transplant, and by the way, there is a GoFundMe account set up to help them. A couple of years ago, a friend of ours moved back to her native New Hampshire from New York City to be with family in the final stages of cancer. Once again, there was a need for one of these charitable accounts to pay for her medical costs. So, let me ask once again, why are catastrophic illness so regularly covered only by the generous donations of friends and strangers?
When the term “Medicare For All” becomes part of the public discussion, big chunks of our society have conniptions, talking about “socialism”, as if taking care of each other is a bad thing. Communities of the past understood and valued the concept of “it takes a village”. As society advances, particularly in a pandemic, that should be expanded into “it takes a village, sometimes a state and a nation.” “Every person for himself or herself” didn’t even make it out of the Middle Ages. What happened? An anonymous opinion piece in today’s paper talked about the “persecution of evangelical Christians”. Where are these so-called Christians when there is clamoring to close the borders to stop immigrants or send them “home”, families at the borders are being separated and children put in cages, cutting Food Stamps and other relief programs while at the same time, we’re seeing long lines at food distribution centers. Support for the unborn is prolific and loud, but after birth, apparently, life isn’t quite so important, or at least “it’s not my problem.”
A nationally known humorist wrote, a few years back, that should a liberal come across a stranger wounded in a ditch, as in the story of the Good Samaritan, he or she would treat their wounds and take them to the nearest inn, paying for their food and lodging. A conservative would shake their hand, wish them well, and offer to say a prayer for their recovery. Just this past week, our President was pictured on a golf course at a resort he owns in Virginia. Meanwhile, as the country is spiraling backward in the pandemic, his administration was sponsoring litigation in yet another attempt to nullify the Affordable Care Act. How is that for timing? As millions are unemployed or losing their employment and thus their health insurance, let’s remove health coverage for an estimated 23-plus million more Americans. Their next of kin can always set up a GoFundMe account if they get sick.
Before the subprime mortgage disaster, medical bills were by far the leading cause of personal bankruptcy. The days of the town doctor taking care of everyone, sometimes being paid in chickens, eggs, or vegetables, are long gone. The costs of medical care, particularly medicines for chronic conditions, skyrocketed in the last few decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, making adequate medical insurance a necessity, not an option or a luxury. One or two conditions can now reasonably run in the thousands of dollars per month to treat. In 2018, the median per capita income for Americans was $33,000. Does that make illness affordable? I’m thinking . . . . . . no.
Some view health care as simply another business. But there’s a difference. We can choose to purchase a new car or television. We can choose the foods we eat. We can decide how much gasoline we’ll use by controlling the amount of driving we do. That’s what economists call, “elastic demand”. Health care, on the other hand, has an “inelastic demand”. That means, we don’t really have control over the medical conditions, the illnesses, or the setbacks that happen to us, and therefore the choices are limited to: we treat or we don’t. How sad it is when we read about senior citizens living on slender retirement incomes having to choose between food and medications. That happens more often than we want to admit. We – Her Ladyship and I, are some of the lucky ones because we can afford medical insurance that covers almost all of our needs. We receive our medications like clockwork, and we pay a token amount. We don’t worry about medical appointments, we just go. We pay significant monthly premiums, but we can afford to. We can also afford the copays and those few items not covered by insurance. Again, we’re lucky. We’ve earned them, but I still think we’re lucky. While we worry about getting older, we don’t have to think too much, or worry too much about the cost
While no system is without flaws, most of the top tier, industrialized countries of the world seem to do significantly better at taking care of their citizens than we do. Whether those countries, including most of Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and so many others provide higher benchmarks for medical care, contain costs, or simply take “profit” out of the equation is open to debate. The fact remains, though, that Americans receive a significantly lower standard of care overall than in other countries. It’s a choice we’ve made, and not a particularly good or noble one.
I'm Thinking...No! 