Can we fix the nation's health care crisis in 700 words? We can try.
Let's start with the latest poll, a CBS News/New York Times joint production that made for a stunning headine: "Most Americans Favor Universal Health Care.'' Hillary Clinton must have done a jig on her desk.
But we already have universal care. We're a generous nation. We have a big heart. When you come to the emergency room with that enlarged heart, you get treated. No, the question isn't universal care, but who pays for it, and on this wee little point the consensus looks a little less impressive.
The poll details are telling. Most people are satisfied with their care; 41 percent are "very satisfied,'' and given the American tendency to kvetch over everything from the color of Anna Nicole's funeral shoes to the high cost of caramel lattes, that's remarkable.
A majority, however, are dissatisfied with the cost. Not necessarily with the cost they pay through insurance, one suspects, but the cost in general — the $9 aspirins, the $37 charge for rotating the batteries in the hospital room TV remote, the jaw-dropping prices for the procedures themselves.
It's hard to disagree, especially if you're a boomer who ran across the delivery bill your mom kept. "Room — $2. Listerine — 50 cents. Infant extraction w/spanking surcharge — $6.'' Dad paid with a twenty and got enough back to buy cigars for everyone on the factory floor.
In those days, however, they didn't have high-tech preemie wards, in-utero surgery, or annual malpractice premiums exceeding the cost of the doctor's education.
But surely that's not the reason for increased costs. Who better to solve this mysterious case of waste and inflation than the government? Takes a thief to catch a thief, after all.
Do people want government to take over the entire system? Yes and no.
Let's go back to the poll. Sixty-four percent said the government should guarantee health insurance for everyone. But less than a third believe the government would be better than the private sector at providing coverage. Forty-four percent think the government would do a worse job. Most people want to keep their own private plan, thankyouverymuch, but want the government to offer some bare-bones plan for that other poor schmuck they keep reading about.
The basic message of the poll is clear: Somebody do something.
One California state legislator is: She introduced a bill that would get rid of private health insurance in the Golden State altogether. Wow. It's fascinating how the people most likely to yammer about the right to privacy and the sanctity of choice are the first to sweep rights aside when a greater good presents itself. And there's always a greater good that trumps your personal rights, if one looks closely enough.
Why, look at the needs of undocumented proto-Americans, as we must now call illegal immigrants: A recent poll of Bay Area citizens revealed that 79 percent want the state to guarantee health insurance for aliens. It's one thing to say hospitals can't turn away a sick illegal; it's another to say that the citizens of this country are obliged to insure the citizens of another.
But that's where state involvement inevitably leads: You begin with a warm-hearted desire to prove health care for poor children, and end up subsidizing acupuncture for an able-bodied man who threw out his back running from the border patrol.
Have we fixed the crisis yet? No, but there are a few dozen words to go.
How about this: There is no crisis. There is a problem. There are challenges. There are pressing reasons for oversight and scrutiny and careful extensions of programs to cover children. But "crisis'' supposes that everything's broken and needs to be swept away like some ancien regime that prescribed cake to the sick peasants outside the gate. If most people are satisfied with the quality of their care, that's obviously not in order.
As many have pointed out, there's a shining example of a government-run hospital already: Walter Reed. Imagine that example replicated across the land. Then again, imagine if the government was the defendant in every single medical malpractice case in the land.
If nothing else, we'd get tort reform.
