03.28.08
The triumph of the Moral Hazard Myth: health insurance in America
The New Yorker has said it all too well. As we continue to privatize health care distribution in this country, as overall costs soar, but coverage continues to decline precipitously, the question is never asked, “How’re we doin’?” Or if the question is asked, the answer never seems to involve results.
Or maybe it’s that the “results” that are weighed are unrelated to the effective distribution of health care in this country, nor to the cost-effectiveness of the care that we as citizens receive.
I’ve said many times that the purpose of health care delivery systems in other countries is to deliver health care, while the purpose of ours in this country is to make sure that nobody who does not deserve health care gets it, regardless of how much it costs to make sure this does not happen. Or gets a subsidy. Subsidies are parceled out to the well-to-do, not to the poor, who by the mere fact that they have chosen to remain poor have proven that they deserve no help whatever.
The situation in this country is best illustrated by the situation of the woman who was injured, brain-damaged, and permanently disabled while working at walmart. Her lawyers won a settlement from the insurance company, and walmart’s lawyers have sued her to regain the costs of care they had already doled out. A woman on a forum I post on said that she was “double-dipping”, trying to get paid twice. Excuse me? I don’t think she was doing anything except vegging out in the nursing home where she has no choice but to live, at least until they put her out on the street for lack of funds.
Only in this country is it considered a positive moral imperative to turn people out of a nursing home to die on the street.
