Remember, Unemployed Means Uninsured
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Health Care, Jobs
With the startling new unemployment numbers coming out this week, it’s a good time to focus on what this actually means to the individual people.
New York Times takes a look at the 275 workers who were recently laid off when the Archway cookie factory had to shutter its doors in the fall…
About 10.3 million Americans were unemployed in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of unemployed has increased by 2.8 million, or 36 percent, since January of this year, and by 4.3 million, or 71 percent, since January 2001. [...]Starla D. Darling, 27, was pregnant when she learned that her insurance coverage was about to end. She rushed to the hospital, took a medication to induce labor and then had an emergency Caesarean section, in the hope that her Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan would pay for the delivery.
Wendy R. Carter, 41, who recently lost her job and her health benefits, is struggling to pay $12,942 in bills for a partial hysterectomy at a local hospital. Her daughter, Betsy A. Carter, 19, has pain in her lower right jaw, where a wisdom tooth is growing in. But she has not seen a dentist because she has no health insurance. [...]
Another former Archway employee, Jeffrey D. Austen, 50, said he had canceled shoulder surgery scheduled for Oct. 13 at the Cleveland Clinic because he had no way to pay for it.
“I had already lined up an orthopedic surgeon and an anesthesiologist,†Mr. Austen said.
In mid-October, Janet M. Esbenshade, 37, who had been a packer at the Archway plant, began to notice that her vision was blurred. “My eyes were burning, itching and watery,†Ms. Esbenshade said. “Pus was oozing out. If I had had insurance, I would have gone to an eye doctor right away.â€
She waited two weeks. The infection became worse. She went to the hospital on Oct. 26. Doctors found that she had keratitis, a painful condition that she may have picked up from an old pair of contact lenses. They prescribed antibiotics, which have cleared up the infection.
How often in our nation’s history have the lives of many been forever altered by the bad decisions of the few? And this hasn’t been any more evident in the past half century than right now. But this is how our economy works, and so we must accept it. But what we don’t have to accept is the reality that over 40 million Americans are without health care. This is wrong. The government will never be able to prop up companies like Archway, but it can make sure that every single American has access to a basic safety net that every single first world country in the world except us has.
Of course the question after that is “How to pay for it?”
Well, I’ve got at least one idea, but the quicker we figure out how to get everybody covered, the more likely it is we’ll find ways to save money because the efficiencies will become obvious.
NY Times gets the last word…
M. Harvey Brenner, a professor of public health at the University of North Texas and Johns Hopkins University, said that three decades of research had shown a correlation between the condition of the economy and human health, including life expectancy.“In recessions, with declines in national income and increases in unemployment,†Mr. Brenner said, “you often see increases in mortality from heart disease, cancer, psychiatric illnesses and other conditions.â€
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 and is filed under Health Care, Jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 7th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
If you cut the defense budget, you will cut defense department jobs and those people will have no health insurance. I suppose those people are warmongers working for Amerikkkan imperialism, so maybe they don’t deserve insurance.
How about decoupling health insurance from employment altogether, sort of like car insurance, so people could keep their own personal insurance from job to job, and have a much broader scope of insurance options to choose from?
December 7th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
The solution is simple in concept but very painful to get going, and it’s called “socialized medicine”. If medical care is privatized like today, there will be a profit motive in every step of the process. That’s why there are now useless middlemen making enormous money for NO contribution… no, worse, they’re making mass quantities of money while making things worse for many. You would call those middlemen “insurance companies”.
Their profit goes up if they deny people coverage… they make billions upon billions every year. Why? What do they contribute, beyond added misery and essentially stealing money out of the health care system? It’s insane.
With a profit motive in every step of the process, and with both people and organizations always looking out for number one, the end result is a system where the health care systems primary goal is making money for everyone except the citizen needing the care, who gets bled white! Actual health care is a byproduct, with all that implies.
With socialized medicine, the Government would not have a profit motive. They would try to keep costs down, yes, but at least they are (in theory) directly accountable to the people. Much better than letting unchecked greed keep 40 million people without health care.
Government could (should!) also kick health care providers in the ass hard and swift and bring their prices down to sensible levels. Legal means should be employed ruthlessly, if need be. They are only completely out of control now because they have been artificially boosted in the current environment with the useless conscienceless middle men… I mean, insurance companies.
Could someone explain why a doctor is worth so much money he gets to live in a gigantic mansion whereas a teacher has to live in poverty? Why should it cost $50 thousand to reattach a finger vs what it costs for two hours of any other professional service? I’m not arguing a well educated professional shouldn’t make healthy money, but not ruinous profit, and certainly not to provide something everybody will need in their lifetime – namely health care.
The $700 billion bailout demonstrated once and for all that when it’s the fatcats themselves who are feeling the need for some socialistic approach, the Government will provide. Now it’s time to accept the consequences of that revelation and extend the concept to the common man getting health care. Simple as that.
Once you cut out the cancer called health care insurance that is bleeding money out of the system, and get the health care providers and drug companies themselves to charge humane amounts of money, tax income should be able to easily keep Americans in health care.
I don’t really foresee it happening, because for some reason Americans have been indoctrinated into thinking “socialized medicine” is about as nice a term as “cannibal genocide”… but it’s the only way the system will ever do what it’s supposed to, provide all citizens with care.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Jimmy… You’re an ass. The problem with jobs isn’t based on Defense spending. We could easily move those jobs to any other department of the gov’t. If we cut defense spending. Which we most likely never will. The point is that while we are in a recession, more people will spend less, more companies will go down, and it will spiral from where we are. Less jobs, more unemployment, more unemployment less insurance, more people not going to doctors, more death, etc.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Cutting defense budget doesn’t necessarily mean layoffs in he defense department. It does mean dropping a lot of the dumb, trillion dollar wars we have in certain middle eastern counties.
The car/health insurance analogy is an obvious one, but you’re ignoring the orneriness issue of what happens if a private insurer refuses to cover you. With cars, you simply don’t drive. With health, the consumer has little recourse.
Look, I love the free market just as much as anyone, but operating under the assumptions that the market allocates all goods in an equally efficient manner, and that the allocation that results is automatically socially advantageous, is exactly the kind of thought that got us in this mess in the first place.
December 7th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Tell that to Justin. Hey Justin, commenter John thinks you’re an ass.
So we can continue to manufacture tons of ammunition and bombs and Humvees and tanks and frigattes, we can continue to do research on future weapons systems, but so long as we don’t use them, we will “save” trillions of dollars? I don’t see how that’s possible. People will have to lose their jobs, as they did in the 1990’s, if the defense budget is cut. Maybe we make it up by increasing spending in other departments? Who knows. But if we do make up those jobs, its a zero-sum game anyway, so just deal.
Wars which, projected over 25 years or so, could actually save money for the United States, by reducing the need for a protracted military presence in the middle east – one which was needed as long as Saddam and his sons were in power (remember the now defunct Tawfik airbase in Saudi Arabia?). Or how about now that the world has a booming global producer of wealth in the Democratic Republic of Iraq, rather than a drain on the worlds resources and a humanitarian disaster under the Baath party.
You got to think of this sort of thing when you are budgeting, Cap’n!
December 7th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
If the government were to mandate that carriers cover everyone (no rejections), it could *possibly* work if they also required everyone to carry health insurance. So the insurers increase their risk with some customers, but also tap into a huge well of 20-somethings who traditionally don’t carry coverage and are generally healthier than average. Probably the only way to make a “no rejections” policy work. There has to be a free market (gasp!) element in the process to ensure that the quality of care stays substantially higher than what a government body would come up with. Plain and simple, governments don’t run businesses very well.
And decoupling medical insurance from employment mentally makes a lot of sense. My company doesn’t pay for my car insurance….
December 8th, 2008 at 3:08 am
Just look at the UK. Sure the country has problems with finances as well, but they have had universal socialized healthcare since World War II, and health care in the UK has a fine level of quality. People get sick – people get care. They don’t have to both have a life-threatening illness like cancer and also lose their homes because of it, the way even people in the lucky group in the US who are insured may well do due to “deductibles” and other such BS…
The US system with insurance middlemen is just wrong. Plain and simple.
December 8th, 2008 at 11:43 am
I think the most telling part of your cost analysis Jim, specifically in your assertion that wars (specifically Iraq) may be more cost-effective, is the complete disregard for the loss of life. Currently, there are 4,209 reported deaths of US soldiers (with 3 deaths pending) according to the DoD (icasualties.org) and somewhere between 89,600 and 97,828 documented civilian deaths (reported by iraqbodycount.org). How one could justify this with defense budgetary savings is callous at best, complicit in manslaughter at worst.
And therein, I feel, lies the biggest tell in orthodox conservative ideology. There is a larger preoccupation with the fiscal bottom line, rather than the human.
December 8th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
They might get care eventually after 18 months on a waiting list, that is, if they get the proper diagnosis. If its such a good deal, why is it that year after year, election cycle after election cycle, politicians, pundits and the public complain about the “health care crisis” in the UK? Its always the number 1 issue. Socialized or Privatized, its pick-your-poison.
ASC makes a good point that socialized medicine favors the rich because only Rich people will be able to afford the qualitiy private care, while that same private care gets priced out of the range of middle and lower income workers. If you abolish private care altogether, like they tried to do in Canada, there will be a huge public outrage, since the government infringes on your personal liberty to buy healthcare for yourself, but not so for your pets.
December 8th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
We weren’t talking about the moral value of the loss of life in this thread, we were talking about billions of dollars in government spending. You brought up the cost of the iraq war without mentioning human lives, not me – as if the financial expenditure was a significant factor in deciding whether the war was right or wrong.
Who is being callous here?