Public Options and Profiteering

America is addicted to capitalism, and it's about to strangle their efforts at health care reform.  For a while it looked like the ultimate goal was a universal, free system like we have north of the border, but so far that has proved too socialist for even the most liberal of politicians.  The best they have been able to do is to propose "public options" to "compete" with the current system.  As much as they end goal is to provide coverage for everyone, it still leaves motivations in the wrong place.

Using competition as the means still leaves profit as the end goal and avoids the whole point: getting quality, healthcare for everyone, all the time.  Offering a "public option" simply gives a fall back for people unable to pay premiums or dropped by their other programs.  It's business as usual (with less guilt) for healthcare corporations except that just as Republicans have feared, costs go up, quality goes down, and in the end nobody wins.

The idea that seems to be left out of the debate is this: some things work better as a collective effort (ie socialism).  If you need proof, just take a look what happened before the Fire Department came into play.  It used to be that people would pay private fire companies to protect their house in the event of a fire.  In exchange for payment, they would receive a badge to display outside their house.  Sounds like a pretty good deal, except if your house caught on fire and you had the wrong badge, you were out of luck.  People realized this was a ridiculous system and a public Fire Department was created.  It remains to be seen why almost nobody identifies privatized healthcare as the exact same problem.

Why does this matter to me as a Canadian? Perhaps because I care that everyone has access to proper healthcare, or maybe because it SHOULD matter to Canadians.  We have long been worried about the "brain drain", losing quality doctors to the Americans, and because more than a few Canadians have had health related accidents south of the border, returning home with thousands in hospital debts.  Mostly though, this matters to Canadians because it makes us appreciate how lucky we are to live in the country we do.

As Bill Maher recently wrote in the Huffington Post, "Not everything in America has to make a profit".