"Let them go to emergency rooms"

by: Jay Stevens

Mon Jul 16, 2007 at 11:12:59 AM MST

"The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America," he said. "After all, you just go to an emergency room."

The callousness and ignorance in this quote could fill a stadium.

This is what you might call callousness with consequences. The White House has announced that Mr. Bush will veto a bipartisan plan that would extend health insurance ... to an estimated 4.1 million currently uninsured children. After all, it's not as if those kids really need insurance -- they can just go to emergency rooms, right?...

Mr. Bush['s] ... willful ignorance here is part of a larger picture: by and large, opponents of universal health care paint a glowing portrait of the American system that bears as little resemblance to reality as the scare stories they tell about health care in France, Britain, and Canada.

Increasingly it's not just the poor that are getting screwed by the insurance industry. In order to feed its need for ever-increasing profits, the industry is bending the rest of us over tables, too.

The question is, why are we letting them get away with it? Health care shouldn't be limited to only the handful of super-rich. It's something we should all have access to, and not in a way that would bankrupt hard-working Americans.

Like the rest of industrialized Western nations, Americans should not have to worry about financial ruin because of times of illness. We have enough resources in this country to ensure that we all have quality health care. And Michael Moore is right. It's time to decide what kind of people we are, whether we prefer to support a few people's "right" to make as much money as they want at the cost of our health and even our lives, or whether we believe in helping our neighbors in time of need.

Oh, and here's a bonus money quote from Krugman:

On the other hand, it's true that Americans get hip replacements faster than Canadians. But there's a funny thing about that example, which is used constantly as an argument for the superiority of private health insurance over a government-run system: the large majority of hip replacements in the United States are paid for by, um, Medicare.

That's right: the hip-replacement gap is actually a comparison of two government health insurance systems. American Medicare has shorter waits than Canadian Medicare (yes, that's what they call their system) because it has more lavish funding -- end of story. The alleged virtues of private insurance have nothing to do with it.