Today the Supreme Court announced it was upholding Obama's healthcare law.
I find myself conflicted, hobos.
On the one hand, I agree with the principles of universal healthcare, although I'm not really on board with all the aspects of the new healthcare plan. I do think there needs to be improved access.
If a mother is working two minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet, and can't afford or isn't offered insurance, it's a problem. This isn't about giving it away to people who aren't willing to work or pay for it. A mother should not be forced to choose between dinner and antibiotics for her five year old.
If you had cancer and lost your job and insurance, ... but by a miracle you got better and tried to get insurance at a new job -- they should not be able to deny you a policy, because of a preexisting condition. That's bullshit.
So, obviously, changes need to happen.
On the other hand...
We cannot afford this as a country right now. I realize, it makes it more important than ever to have, but we do have to acknowledge cost when our entire country operates on credit.
It is the same thing as needing a car to get to work. Your old car is hemorrhaging you money, and you barely have enough money to live on week to week, struggling to pay your credit card bills - so what do you do?
Do you take on the debt and responsibility of the newer car? You'll get to work reliably. You won't be paying huge bills when your old engine dies yet again. But you'll have that monthly payment, a payment that you're not sure you'll be able to handle.
Or do you stick with your old car... fix the fanbelt with pantyhose, slap on some duct tape, and pray nothing bad happens. You've dealt with it this long, right? And you know that if nothing bad happens, you'll be able to pay your rent this month.
It's a tough choice.
And I'm not sure throwing more money at healthcare is going to change a goddamn thing, because the US gov't already pays the absolute highest in healthcare costs, while being toward the lower-middle of the pack when it comes to how successful they are in actually caring for people.
And it very likely that most of the money for this program does not go toward healthcare, but the administrative salaries and pensions that will be created for middle management. Middle management who will get better government funded insurance than the government funded insurance they're planning to offer to the populace. That's how our country rolls, folks.
The third hand is Torchwood: Miracle Day.
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| Fuck yeah, Captain Jack Harkness. |
For those unfamiliar with it, basically - a day comes when everyone stops dying. And at first, everyone is thrilled. But people are still getting sick, still living in pain - and things start piling up. Where do you put all those people? How do you prioritize who gets care? How do hospices deal when no one is dying, but everyone still needs to be cared for? How do nursing homes deal? Hospital ICUs?
Governments in this show actually used death camps, which is a horrifying idea. But you'd have a person who you could not save - such as a victim of an explosion, but was still somehow surviving - and the population count rising rapidly everyday, leaving less resources for everyone. Designated care facilities barely provided care at all, it was more just to keep the sick people out of the way of everyone else. And pharmaceutical corporations had a clear stake in everything.
For a sci-fi show with a really shitty ending, it was eye opening about the problems of health care management.
Obviously, our situation is not the one on this show. BUT..
We have this idea of saving everyone. And people live longer now, survive more diseases now. We also have a huge increase in diseases where people need chronic care: autism, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson's. Not all of them are going to have families who can or want to take care of them, which means society is going to have to build more care centers, funded by more subsidies, managed by more middle management.
And by no means am I advocating killing people, I just worry about the fact that since we try so hard to let no one die -we might be making it harder for everyone to survive. We're heading towards having a strong majority of the population completely dependent on others for care, children, elderly, disabled.
We can't really tell them to fuck off. Because that would be wrong. And a more important reason - chances are most of us will hit at least two, if not three, of those categories in the course of our lives. So we'd be telling ourselves to fuck off. Our society is better at self-interest than having a moral conscience, let's face it. Anyway, it seems like we're going to have some hard choices on the horizon about what kind of care we can afford to provide.
