In which I post about my life on Facebook, because the Internet is self-reflective like that.
I don’t know if it’s The CurseTM coming or I’ve just used up the day’s compassion for sloppy thinking, but when I logged into Facebook and saw the utterly meaningless meme traveling through it, I got a little worked up.
Many people are posting this as their status: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.”
So, being me, I posted this: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care (unless they spent all their money on stupid shit and actually deserve to die), and no one should go broke because they get sick (unless it’s their own fault because they ate at McDonald’s three times a day for 27 years).”
Heh. Pretty clever, huh?
Apparently not. My friend Jake asked, “So… You don’t think we need health care reform? How disappointing, Mush! Who are you?”
Well, when your friend asks you who you are, you gotta answer! And this is what I said:
“Of course I want health care reform. But it ain’t just gonna suddenly be free awesome health care for everybody, now is it? I know from reading my Vonnegut that people are NOT all equal, and pretending that we are is idiotic because it leads to handicapping and I will be damned before I’ll accept handicapping to make me as dumb as the chick I just got off the phone with!
“In some schools, they don’t let sports teams win because they don’t want the losers to feel bad. This is what happens when we try to homogenize and make everyone equal. We’re not equal. Some are much better at living, much better at liberty, and much better at pursuing happiness. Others are stupid, or lazy, or ignorant, or entitled, or just plain nasty.
“We are not all equal. We are entitled to equal opportunity under our country’s constitution, but we are not inherently equal in value or talent.
“Some people are deliberately more expensive, health care-wise, than others: smokers like myself, addicts, and the grossly obese, just to name a few. Do you want to pay for that?
“Right now we have a country full of obese, addicted, and old people. Do you want to pay for that? Do I? Hell, I’m poor enough I can’t pay for my own healthcare; how can I afford to pay for that family down the street, who, because of their choice to eat nothing but fast food, will all have diabetes and heart disease by the time they’re 35? Those conditions are both expensive to treat and avoidable.
“And although I respect the idea that everyone deserves to live, we don’t all deserve it equally. Pretending that every life is equally valuable is absurd: I myself don’t have as much value to my society as a gifted heart surgeon, but I do have more value than a 90-year-old with terminal cancer.
“So while I think that every effort should be made to save every life, I know that the world doesn’t work that way. If it did, we wouldn’t have the word ‘triage.’ In the UK, they say that deaths go up significantly during the last two months of the year because surgeons have quotas to fill and tend to quit doing operations after they’ve achieved them. People who need surgery in March are not inherently more valuable than people who need surgery in November, but they’re a lot less likely to die. Studies show that only one in five people who need surgery to reduce the risk of stroke actually get the surgery in time due to the way the healthcare system works there.
“Over here, if you’ve got the money, you get the surgery in time. So at least a portion of society gets adequate care… it just doesn’t happen to be the portion I’m in.
“There is in my estimation no way to make a perfectly fair system of health care in this world as it is, so today’s “post this as your status” Facebook meme is essentially empty. It doesn’t mean anything other than that we care in a half-assed way – only enough to repeat something toothless when it only takes us 5 seconds to do so.”
Let’s all remember that not too long ago I needed surgery myself, and I had no health insurance. Because of my extreme poverty the hospital gave me their services for free (somewhere around five grand worth) and it took me slightly over two years to pay off the surgeon, the lab, and the anesthesiologist. The only reason I’m not still paying it off is that my rent was only $50 a month during that period. That was LUCK, not worth. I didn’t “deserve” the excellent care just because I draw breath, and as a grown person I certainly hadn’t taken the responsible steps to grow an emergency nest egg or obtain health care insurance on my own. My results were, as I said, simply good luck.
So I’m not being a heartless bitch; I’m just saying, THINK ABOUT THIS, PEOPLE. Our system sucks, yes, but it may be that it sucks less than it could.
Thoughts?
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Socialism is theft.
Well. Hmmm… First of all, I got that meme and posted it as my status and was pleased to see my friends follow suit because I was afraid I’d be sent to FB limbo for saying such a thing.
You know the whack jobs who live in rural Iowa. They have been raising hell at the stupid town hall meetings with legislators. If you watched the Iowa news you’d think we’re all carrying guns and holding signs reading “I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!!” & “Obama is Hitler!!”
I want corporate America and especially insurance companies to quit sucking the soul, life and dreams of people without immense resources and to quit stacking the deck in their favor. The insurance companies created the current “health care system” and it has nothing to do with health care and everything to do with profits for shareholders.
I could go off on a long rant but mostly I am so effing pissed because I have searched for you on FB. Do you know how many MM’s there are? Millions, I tell ya.
I can’t find you on FB, either! (And yes, I have a very very very common name. *sigh*) -m
My own doctor posted it too, so I feel a little less worried that I’m going to be giving the cute man a pay cut for supporting change.
Well, I agree with you on some points, but not all. I think that some sort of preventative care should be available to everyone, with the emphasis on “preventative”. Everyone should be able to go to a doctor who will tell them “you’re an idiot if you continue to eat at Mickey D’s every day – you deserve whatever develops!”
I know, I know… I’m a fucking socialist. 🙂
I’m all for universally available preventative care. My main health care provider in Iowa was a midwife because she was practical, cheap, and all I needed.
What I was awkwardly trying to express is that I live in a country full of unhealthy people doing unhealthy things, where money is king. It’s hard to be healthy here; if you’re not actively focused on health, you’re dying. It’s that simple.
And since there’s no profit in prevention, I just… maybe I’m getting jaded. Maybe health care reform will focus on saving money, and prevention will become king, and somehow that will filter through to our food chain and make simple and clean food cheap and widely available, and highly processed shit expensive and therefore rare.
But seriously, is there any percentage at all in hoping that such change could possibly come from the top down?
First, Hi, I’ve commented before as “stewartville.net” back when you were in IA. I still do that site but I’ve got a blogspot too which gets updated more frequently, sometimes.
Anyway, it is refreshing to see this POV shared intelligently. It is one that my husband shares and so I hear it A LOT, but he isn’t as eloquent. I too saw that status go viral on facebook and I was like c’mon people, whatever. I agree that the majority only care in a half-assed way and probably don’t realize the ramifications. I think many people see it like, “Oh hey, FREE? I’m down with that.” Um, it isn’t going to be free…
Stewartville! Hiya! Good to see you! -m
Hon, you know your life experience speaks for itself so you won’t get the wingnut label from me, no matter what you do, but I think you’re a wee bit off base here. Insurance by its nature works by insulating some of us from the choices we and others make, but what would make it work better is if it offers incentives for making better choices. If you smoke and I don’t, under the current system there is no incentive for you to quit via the insurance plan (though there are a myriad of incentives within the system itself outside of health insurance), and no reward for me not smoking or working out. The whole risks vs. rewards system is skewed in health insurance and you’d think that was the problem but societies in which it is even more skewed (i.e. you can’t get dropped for pre-existing conditions, either via fault or no-fault) these things actually occur less. hey, I know it’s a fucking paradox but it happens.
There’s also that little thing where I see bacon, I eat it, I lose weight, which is totally unfair, but you should be able to enjoy a little bacon too right? Did I mention it seems to have no impact on my cholesterol that I fry lots (mostly in olive oil but still…) and eat butter by the tablespoon?
Now for the US I actually don’t want standardized 100% coverage, but rather a French model where you have to have 70% coverage for the big stuff and then you add-on an additional 20%, usually through work or other buy in methods. The last 10% is up to you, and usually covers stuff like extra co-pays. The difference is that you get so many choices it makes the mind cook on its own and everyone gets a minimum level of care.
Maternity care in the US is acceptable if you have great insurance, and let’s be honest few NEED an OB/GYN for that, which pushes up costs when either a nurse with some obstetrics or a midwife would be more than enough. What has to change is how much we consume! People need to adjust to the fact that they don’t need to see a specialist every time they self-diagnose on WebMd but at the same time have access to specialists, without the profit motive intruding.
“Without the profit motive intruding.”
Exactly. See, this is where I become bereft when I’m thinking about this. I cannot imagine anything working in this country without a profit motive, and health care is now and will ever be a profit-oriented business.
My friend’s wife – an RN – got laid off a couple of weeks ago because the hospital where she was employed hired a new CFO, who fired all the experienced nurses and replaced them with cheaper recent graduates. All the nursing experience? Gone. Nothing but newbie nurses in that hospital now. How safe is that? And apparently, this is the second time this scenario has happened to this particular experienced nurse.
I just can’t imagine a scenario in which health care is not profit motivated. And so it seems to me that the only way to keep it working is to shift the cost from the end users to the government, who will in turn charge the end users through taxes. Right? I mean, the money has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it?
Apparently pharma companies field thousands of medications to come up with only a few that are viable, salable medicines. That’s EXPENSIVE, which is why name-brand meds cost so much. You’re not paying for R&D on the med you’re taking, but on the other several hundred that failed after second or third tier trials. Someone has to pay for that.
My rant was essentially based on my irritation with the meme’s shallowness; yes, I want health care reform. I want it because I’m hitting mid-life and I HAVE NO COVERAGE. My last three employers were too small to even offer it, and I couldn’t carry it on my own because who can afford a quarter of their income on insurance? (I’ll be eligible due to my new job in another month or so.) I feel as if many are just thinking universal health care will drop out of the sky and be awesome and they won’t have to do anything about it.
Everyone should have basic health coverage including preventative, maternity, major incidents and end of life. That’s my bottom line. FBook isn’t the place to have a thoughtful conversation about it, which is why you blogged about it, and which is why you’re awesome.
Big Pharma is good at spinning what they do to make it sound like they’d not innovate without astronomical profits, but the truth is that R&D is spread out worldwide and a lot of the markets that are more regulated actually produce far more novel discoveries. R&D as a slice of total spending is well below replacement level in the US and has been for years, to the point that manufacturers buy off generics to not put out their own products or re-label their medications as new medications for newly “discovered” (read invented) illnesses. Nexium is just Prilosec in twice the amount, Zegerid is just Prilosec with some alka-seltzer added etc. I’ve taken them all too.
R&D spending is estimated to be somewhere between 3 and 5%, whereas the marketing budget is several times that. I’m sure they could spend less on bribing doctors and more on R&D if they wanted to, but they don’t. They also have no efficacy comparison. The UK has a program that tests actual efficacy of new medications over older medications to determine effectiveness, not just what ever the pharma companies claim it does. The pharma companies hate this approach but it really is effective.
It’s really weird that at one point the US was the country that avoided Thalidomide’s side effects because it demanded proof of efficacy and long term studies to disprove side effects has become the fastest route to market for new medications outside of third world states with no regulation.
I’m not surprised by bacon and butter having no impact on your serum cholesterol, because the idea that eating cholesterol raises serum cholesterol has no basis in fact. Humans are omnivores, and we have a system for regulating serum cholesterol; if we eat cholesterol, the liver responds by making less of it.
Most of the cholesterol hysteria originated in animal studies done on herbivores, which don’t naturally eat cholesterol-rich food, in which the animals are fed ridiculously high quantities of cholesterol (the equivalent of a human eating ~18 pounds of beef every day). The only thing studies like that show is that if you feed animals extreme and unnatural diets, they tend to get sick. Duh.
Hi, you! *waves*
It’s true that a lot of studies – expensive, long-term studies – don’t really prove anything useful. (Too bad it’s illegal to do early tier trials on actual people; we’d learn a lot more valuable stuff while testing on the right species. The whole thing about deciding who to test on, though… so morally thorny.)
I love butter. Just sayin’.
I resisted that ridiculously ineffective FaceBook status game not only because I’m not an idiotic sheep, but because I’m not entirely certain that this health care solution is the best.
I believe that people should be in charge of their own health. Smokers, non-hormonal obese people, folks that hate vegetables and/or exercise, don’t deserve my tax dollars.
I want to see preventative and lifestyle medicine promoted.
DENY TAX DOLLARS TO FOLKS THAT HATE VEGETABLES!!!
*falls over giggling*