Sherry Chandler » The economics of it, the prequel
The economics of it, the prequel
Here’s a post I started nearly a month ago and somehow didn’t find time to complete and post.
Is this NYTimes article as heartless and blind as it seems?
As Dr. Mark R. Chassin of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York says, “You almost always spend money to gain health.” Of course, the opposite is also true: the best way to reduce health care spending is to reduce health care itself.
Which is exactly what we’re starting to do. The growing number of families without health insurance are, in effect, families who have been kicked off the country’s health care rolls. Many will go without available treatment, will get sicker than they need to get — and will thereby save the rest of us money. They are what now passes for a solution to the health care mess.
The current situation is indeed unsustainable, a point that the conventional wisdom has right. The cost of health insurance can’t keep doubling every seven years, and wasteful spending — the brand-name drugs that are no better than generics, the treatments that haven’t been proved to extend lives or improve health — does need to be reined in.
But far too much of the discussion has been centered on this narrow idea. Somehow, going to the mall to buy clothes has come to be seen as a vaguely patriotic way to keep the economy humming, and taking out a risky mortgage is considered to be an investment in one’s future. But medical care? That’s just a cost.
It’s easy to be against high costs, and it will no doubt be hard to come up with a broad health care solution. But the way to start is by acknowledging that an affluent society should devote an ever-growing share of its resources to the health of its citizens. “We have enough of the basics in life,” Mr. Cutler, the economist and author, points out. “What we really want are the time and the quality of life to enjoy them.”
As if, for most of us in this country, affording $10,000 or so for medical care is just a matter of cutting out a few trips to the mall?
I think this is actually an argument for a national healthcare plan, the argument that our society, not our individuals, can afford to absorb the cost but don’t want to face the reality.
It is certainly a statement of what we are now doing as a society, that is, creating a healthcare class system. Is that really what we want?
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