Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau reports
On Thursday, October 18, the House of Representatives voted to override President Bush's veto of the recent SCHIP reauthorization bill, but fell 13 votes short of the 60 percent they needed (the Senate version of the bill passed with enough support to override the veto). The House Democrats have passed a new SCHIP bill with minor changes, which will put pressure on the Republicans and President Bush not to veto such a popular, necessary, and successful program. Ideally, these minor changes will be as much as necessary to draw enough Republican support to overturn another veto or to convince President Bush to accept the bill. The minor changes they made, however, include not providing healthcare to children who are undocumented or to parents, as some states use the program to insure adults as well. These are actually serious changes, the inclusion of which will make it natural to deny healthcare to someone because he or she is not a citizen, doesn't speak English, has brown skin, or because we somehow think that being more than 18 years old makes one less worthy of rights and protections. Acknowledging and tolerating racism or ageism, even in legislation and programs that are progressive and positive, leave the roots of hunger and poverty untouched. What this means is that while we must support the new SCHIP bill because it does provide excellent healthcare to children who need it the most, we should continue to be aware of the problems with this program and recognize that a true solution to the ills of the U.S. healthcare system is single-payer, universal healthcare, which would provide healthcare for all and be financed through one entity, most likely the government, but would not dictate which doctor you could see.
The fundamental problem with the healthcare system in the United States is that the economic rationale beneath it discourages providing quality healthcare. The Medical Industrial Complex is the integration of government, healthcare services, and business. It is the network of pharmaceutical corporations, medical technology corporations, health insurance corporations, for-profit hospitals, doctors and nurses, healthcare workers' unions, healthcare and health advocacy non-profits, the Federal Drug Administration, Congress, the Department of Health, and the Executive Branch. This interconnected network has become the United States healthcare system. In the Medical Industrial Complex, healthcare provision is motivated by profits, and the government reinforces this profit-making system through legislation and funding. Industrial complexes, whether they are the classic Military Industrial Complex, made famous by Dwight Eisenhower, or the newer but more insidious Prison Industrial Complex, are advantageous for our economy because they guarantee production and consumption. A central problem with our economy is that production often outpaces consumption, so it needs to secure ever increasing markets to satisfy its amazing capacity to produce. If consumption cannot keep pace with production, production is stopped, jobs are lost, recessions occur, and social unrest threatens the powerful. By colluding with government, industry has been able to ensure that what it produces will be consumed, stability ensured, and social unrest avoided. For the military industry, a government contract for Lockheed Martin to produce cruise missiles means that the government is ensuring industrial production by ensuring consumption, meaning that the United States runs on a perpetual war economy. We can also say that the United States runs on a perpetual "sick and unhealthy" economy because keeping Americans sick make us consume more pharmaceuticals and healthcare services.
In the medical industry, the government ensures consumption by providing subsidies and support to private insurance, cutting public health programs, and supporting drug production and research instead of preventive medicine. Intelligent healthcare would involve long-term, preventive care and would stress nutrition, psychological and environmental health, and healthy lifestyle, but this form of healthcare is not conducive to consumption. Our healthcare system is organized to create ever increasing consumption of medical services, not to provide the best treatment. New drug treatments, surgical techniques, and technological procedures are accepted primarily because of marketers and public relations and not because of the merit of the drug, technique, or procedure; if this were not the case, pharmaceutical companies would not bother advertising to the general public but would instead rely on the judgment of the professionals, the doctors, professors, and scientists to inform each other of the best practices. What is more, this healthcare system is particularly exploitative of the poor.
A recent survey by the Commonwealth Fund found that three-fifths of the uninsured had trouble paying medical bills or were paying off accrued medical debts. Among those with medical bill problems or medical debts, four in ten were unable to pay for basic necessities such as food, heat, or rent; more than half used all or most of their savings to pay medical bills; and one in five ran up large credit card debts or took out home equity loans to pay medical bills. Though hospitals and medical clinics receive tens of billions of dollars in government support each year to cover the costs of caring for poorand uninsured patients — and non-profit hospitals have a legal duty to provide charitable care — in recent years, the medical industry has grown increasingly aggressive in pursuing payments from those least able to pay. The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers have reported on hospitals that foreclosed on the homes of former patients, attached patients' bank accounts, or had patients arrested and jailed for failing to attend court hearings related to unpaid bills.
-Double Jeopardy. Why the Poor Pay More. Dick Mendel
This exploitation is terrible but not surprising for a healthcare industry without an incentive to make people truly healthy, but to instead increase consumption. Being motivated by profit and consumption is extremely dangerous. For the military industry, this has meant that rather than producing weapons only at wartimes, we produce weapons continuously and sell them all around the globe, fueling civil wars and supporting repressive regimes. The United States is the largest producer of weapons in the world, which kill and maim people all over the globe. The government continues to support the military industry, however, with government contracts because it provides a stable economy which undermines social unrest. The 1960s showed what can happen to society when the public realizes its power and President Bush and his ilk do not want to give up any of their power and see the end of an economic system which keeps them at the top. However, what the Military and Medical Industrial Complexes are actually doing is creating more and more instability, and the results could be catastrophic as fewer people have access to healthcare and as weapons continue to proliferate.
Thus, programs like SCHIP are valuable because they take healthcare out of the corporate, profit-driven hands to bring the focus of healthcare back to providing quality health. The SCHIP program will provide real security, sustainability, and sanity to our society. Also, there are excellent grassroots organizations mobilizing support for both the SCHIP program and universal coverage. The Private Health Insurance Must Go! Coalition is a coalition of numerous multi-service, community development, and advocacy organizations creating grassroots support and pressure for a substantive change to our healthcare system, which they recognize will happen only when healthcare becomes public. So let's hope the SCHIP program gets passed in the coming weeks, but let's not forget that there will always be problems with our healthcare system while there are still strong incentives for profit and consumption and not on creating real health.
