Seeking and Finding Wholeness

This is a good cartoon video titled ‘Why We Need Government-Run Universal Socialized Health Insurance‘. It explains why we need a public health insurance option or some sort of a government-run health system in the US.

The video compares Health Insurance to the fire department in a very effective manner. I’d like to add that fire departments used to be private and for profit in Chicago, then came the Chicago fire. After the Chicago fire the fire department was socialized to distribute risk and lower cost.

It’s ironic that nowadays fire department remain socialized, and work very well. We all expect the fire fighters to show up at a phone’s call, yet when your own body, your own intestines, brains, or heart are on fire (i.e. sick/ill) you cannot get the attention needed, since the system is so very broken.

Enjoy the video:

Animated by Andy Lubershane. More comics at http://www.earthlycomics.blogspot.com

Text transcript of the video:

Why we need government-run universal, socialized, call it what you want, health insurance.

We all know from basic civil class, or just being alive, that a lot of essential services are already government-run, universal, socialized, whatever you wanna call it.

Think water treatment, police, fire, postal service, coast guard, all those things you know are gonna be there for you, every single day without even thinking about them. We all pay our taxes and the government uses the money to pay for the things everyone needs just to get by.

Now, health care is just as essential as any of these services. Sure, a few of us may be lucky enough to make it through our whole lives without any medical problem but the rest of us depend on health care at some point in our lives just to get by. Besides its essentialness, there’s another reason health insurance is just like those government run, universal, socialized, whatever you wanna call them services, that’s this: There are very very few people that can afford to pay on their own the cost of health care when disaster strikes and they or someone they love gets really really sick.

So, we all need insurance, which basically means when we pool our money together enough so what when anyone of us gets really really sick there’s enough money in the pool to pay for that person to get better, that’s insurance.

But, who should we choose to manage the pool of our money and give out our money to the people who need it? Well, private insurance companies are the ones that we are using right now, but there’s a problem. On average, these companies take 10 – 20 cents out of every dollar we put in the pool.

Some of that 10 -20 cents they spend on administrative cost, processing paper work, and paying for ads to get more people to sign up, but some money is used for things that aren’t even remotely connected to caring for people’s health, like paying for political campaigns to fight against health insurance reform for example. (.e. say no to death panels).

Of course some of the money they just take out as pure profit – Who gets the profit? Investors, generally wealthy people who have money to invest. Now, insurance companies are ultimately responsible or accountable to their investors. The more profit the executives at insurance companies make, the bigger their bonuses, it turns out that one of the best way of increasing profit is denying people coverage for their health problems. That’s why insurance companies try to do this as much as they think they can get away with it. Which brings us to the biggest reason why we need government-run health care, profit wouldn’t be a part of the equation. That means the government would spend more of our insurance pool on actually caring for peoples health, probably much more.

The Medicare program for example, a real live model of government-run health insurance only takes 2 or 3 cents out of every dollar in the pool for administrative costs; they take 0 cents for profit. That means more money goes to actually caring for sick people.

Some people seem to think that government health insurance could never be as efficient as private free market insurance, I’m not sure why they think so, the government certainly runs lots of other essential services really well, police, fire, water treatment, all these services I talked about before.

Just imagine if instead of being public government-run and free you had to buy fire insurance like people buy health insurance today. First you’d have to try understand a hundred-page fire insurance policy with lots of legal terms nobody but a fire insurance lawyer specialist could understand. Then, either you or your employer would have to pay the insurance company with money from your paycheck to join the plan. Then, of course 10 – 20 cents of every dollar you gave the company go to administration and profit instead of hoses and other tools.

And if there were a fire? You’d have to call around and make sure you find a fire station that was in your insurance companies preferred provider network, then the fire trucks would come to put out the fire but wait that’s not the end of the story, it may turn out the small print fire insurance legal language in your policy says that the particular type of fire in your house wasn’t covered by your insurance plan, or maybe you had a pre-existing fire burning in your back yard barbeque, so the insurance company wont pay the firemen. Now you owe the firemen hundreds of thousands of dollars; you mortgage your house to pay them back but its not worth much because it was so badly burned in the fire.

It turns out that fire insurance is just fine the way it is now, free for everyone, paid for by tax dollars with nobody skimming profit off the top, and that’s the way health insurance should be too. Now