someone's mother coughing blood. Or a father groaning in pain and yelling behind a closed door. It means parents or other family members arguing because after one of them missed a promotion at work -- because of all the time spent taking care of a loved one. It means slammed doors. It means missed dinners. Most of all, it means a child somewhere, in some inconsequential town, crying, heaving sobs into his pillow, because his parent is going to die. Another child sitting in stunned silence in class, not listening to a word the teacher says.https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/no-words--5
Never mind that just like other civil services, universal healthcare makes for a more civil, prosperous society, if a few millions less for the fatcats.
Positing moral hazard to deny universal health care has just felt wrong, even fraudulent, to me; I recently realized why.
I come from three generations of doctors, and it was only when my
father was training at Yale Medical that the first antibiotic, sulfa
(not seen of much worth today, but a miracle then), came into medicine,
and shortly thereafter, when he was a doctor in a WW II M.A.S.H.,
penicillin. Magic bullets, no mistake; before then, medicine was
a calling and a hazardous one: you were on the front lines fighting
deadly and hideously contagious diseases...that could and did kill
doctors and nurses. Doctors were respected because they
battled for life with guts and precious little effective treatment or
drugs. My father's much beloved younger brother took a month to die
slowly of a bone infection that amoxicillin could have cured in days;
his father, an eye, ear, nose and throat doctor trained in Vienna could
do nothing but watch him die by inches.
Doctors made a comfortable living and could even get a bit rich, but
above all, they were respected for their work in a way that few men
other than clergy were. Healing people was a calling, a
difficult and uncertain battle. Yes, there were venal and
incompetent doctors; we'll always have those in every line of work. But
medicine was first about saving lives, healing broken and diseased
bodies.
The miracle drugs (and later, diagnostic tests and a growing understanding of biology and genetics) changed all that. Medicine became less an art and devotion, more a science of crank-turning procedures, and, alas, a business. Along with that growing success, doctors became technicians delivering a commodity...and now were sued, where they never had been before (because sometimes they couldn't deliver the expected "commodity"). Also, HMOs began to direct and regiment the practice of medicine. My father's practice fell between those two watermarks, between antibiotics and medicine-as-a-business. Dad treated one farmer's wife with a chronic condition that required periodic and expensive care that the farmer could ill afford. Dad worked out a barter: my brother and I had a few days at the farm yearly in return for his wife's care...and so it was that I, a city kid, had the experience of getting fresh warm eggs from a small hen-house, playing hide-and-seek in a hayloft, and picking up baby lambs and having them shit on my snowsuit.
We have an economy that knows the costs of medicine (and how much we
can 'afford') but nothing of its value and aspirations. I
remember being confounded and outraged when the very idea, all bright
and shiny and new, of for-profit medicine burst on the scene.
Obscene and immoral I thought it then; now it is the new
normal....along with tightening the screws for ever more profit.
Medicine is a calling no more: now its high priests are CEOs who
worship profit and bonuses, with doctors their employees on the
treadmill of "managed health".
When a hurricane hits the shore, an earthquake levels our world into
rubble, when a river rises...when natural disaster wipes out
communities, lives and livings, our people and our government
help. Why should it be any different with medicine?
The concept of moral hazard is an immoral fraud...and against the
teaching of all religions, other than those of Ayn Rand.
The injunctions are clear: heal the sick, feed the hungry, clothe and
house the needy. Moral hazard is simply a brutal justification
for ignoring the sick, hungry and needy.
The conservatives say that having mandated health care with
compulsory insurance payment buyin is a restriction of freedom....you
know, like we are forced to pay for police and fire services,
like we
pay for interstate highway for our driving and Federal Air Control for
flights. Sure that consttrains our liberty...or as Charley
Pierce put it: "One of the most
odious arguments floating around the healthcare debate is the notion
that people somehow are more "free" if their choices are so
circumscribed by economic circumstances that they either can't afford
insurance or decide to buy a policy in which the description of Homo sapiens is listed as a pre-existing condition
down there in the fine print."
For those whose faith is in Christ...and also are Libertarian...or
conservative...or who just think universal health care is a moral
hazard, I have a question for you:
Did Jesus not pay the price for your
salvation when He freely offered up his life on the cross to pay for
your sins?
No, He did it for love, love of the whole world; He paid for all and
counted not the cost
Where would you be if God had withheld His mercy and sighed "Moral
Hazard".
Are you truly following in Jesus' footsteps?
The assertion of moral hazard brings this to mind:
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in
moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral
justification for selfishness."
- J.K. Galbraith