OrionWorks wrote: >I agree with Jed, and especially with Mr. Storm's assessment of the >situation. Some form of a modified (Americanized) socialism is >probably the only way we will be able to survive the health cost >crisis.
Something like Medicare for everyone would be fine with me. It is silly to call such things "socialism." We have always been a collectivist society, quite unlike Europe and Japan. The Japanese were astounded by the behavior of American GIs after WWII for many reasons, not least of which was their collectivist, socially responsible, volunteerism. For example, when a cart full of fruit being pushed by an old lady spilled on the street in front of a trolley car, the GIs on board jumped out, picked up the fruit, loaded it on to the cart and jumped aboard again. In 1945 anyone would have done that, civilian or soldier. Nowadays we would probably look the other way, but someone with my upbringing would instantly volunteer. The GIs were not being kind-hearted so much as they wanted to get on their way without destroying the fruit. No Japanese person would have done that back then, and I doubt many would today. Our tradition of helping other Americans -- and also, on the dark side, interfering with their personal lives -- goes back to the Mayflower. In Colonial New England, when people who did not teach their children the ABCs by age 6, the government took the children away. The rugged individualist American is mostly mythology. You don't build a civilization in the wilderness without collectivism. See H. B. Parkes, "The American Experience," (Alfred A. Knopf, 1947) But regarding health care, it is a complex problem, and especially the technical side admits no easy solutions. That's a subject the readers here can understand. Medical technology has improved tremendously, but it tends to be expensive, high-tech stuff, and there is a built-in imperative to use whatever we invent. For example, when kidney dialysis came along, many patients died because they could not afford it. The Johnson administration eventually pushed through a law making it available to everyone who needed it. That cost a tremendous amount back in the 1960s, although it improved the state of the art and today dialysis machines are mass produced and much cheaper. As I have pointed out here before, many diseases cost nothing in the 1960s because they were incurable and the patient died quickly, but today they cost tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands to fix. I expect that my friend who suffered a stoke would have gotten no treatment 40 years ago, except for bedrest and nursing, which would have cost practically nothing. He would have recovered just as well as he did, because they performed no surgery or invasive diagnostics. They spent $82,000 on stuff like MRIs to determine that: 1. It wasn't so bad. 2. There was nothing they could do anyway. If I were the patient, I would want them to do the same thing! I have seen what stokes can do to people. There are other factors driving up the cost of medical care such as greedy insurance companies and so on, but the technical conundrum is something we can all sympathize with. It is not caused by villains or unreasonable people. It is like traffic jams: no one is at fault, but collectively we cause the problem. The only solution is also collective. - Jed
