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The fact that there even is a healthcare debate is so insipidly stupid that it drives me to despair.
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One tries to be a calm, rational individual. One tries to understand whether others are coming from, the sensitivities, cultural and personal, that arise in discussing contentious issues. One tries to be civil.
Sometimes, however, there just doesn't seem to be an excuse. Sometimes it seems like the adults of the previous generations, whose deficits (fiscal and otherwise) I and mine have to inherit, really just weren't even trying.
There is not, technically, a debate about healthcare in this country, only a collection of inanities.
Assumed; that while allocating government funds to a healthcare system is in fact an expansion of government power, and therefore not, strictly speaking, in keeping with conservtive methodology, we can acknowledge the potential drawbacks to such a power, and find a way through these difficulties with the right mechanisms. No different from how we allow our government to handle issues such as public education, highways, park services, and of course the courts and military. Any and all of which may be institutions sorely in need of greater transparency, accountability and efficiency, but which aren't on the chopping block for all but the most die-hard libertarians.
It is fairly easy to argue that the values that would be offered by free or at least very cheap universal healthcare are enormous to society, in an ideal system. This is in fact what most progressive arguments are based on.
In contrast, most conservative arguments against a universal healthcare system are not based on the idea that the concept is bad. They are not based on the fact that it is expensive, at least the ones that know their head from a hole in the ground, because we already spend more per capita on healthcare than most developed nations.
The argument is that government regulation and control creates inefficiency. This is undoubtedly true; the great lessons drawn from the 20th century and numerous unfortunate experiments with socialism is that the government cannot control market forces efficiently. A centrally planned economy inevitably creates massive shortages and surpluses; the giant web of financial interactions that is the economy is too big and complex to be controlled effectively by a bunch of bureaucrats, even if their own activities didn't distort the feedback mechanisms in the system that give them guiding information in the first place.
Government is, in fact, by it's nature, designed to be slow and bureaucratic. Laws aren't meant to be passed in the space of days, nor trials to be wrapped up in a week. The gears of justice move slowly for a reason; to put a check on rash decision making and open the process up to scrutiny.
But while this is fine in the law and the military, it's fatal in the realm of medicine.
And here the debate grinds to a halt. The conservative stance is that socializing healthcare would make it too inefficient and stretch an already thin medical field too far, creating giant backlogs in which vitally ill people die before they can make a doctor's visit. The progressive stance is that plenty of people get seriously ill or die because they can't afford to get basic illnesses checked out which later spiral out of control.
This is considered a stalemate primarily because everyone involved is a great, thundering moron.
Supply. Side. Eco. Nom. Ics.
The average medical student graduates, according to the AAMC, about $120,000 in debt. Depending on age, medical field, history and other factors, malpractice insurance can cost anywhere from 5k to almost another 100k a year. And this is on top of the fact that the medical profession is, you know? Really freaking hard. And draining. And more than a little stressful. You're constantly weighing life and death in your hands. I have some idea, having passed an EMT course to decide that I was never, ever, ever going to join the medical profession because knowing exactly what it looks like up close and personal when someone is impaled by a tree or hare a broken glass bottle shoved into an orifice is not something I really need and that, frankly, I've been trying to purge from my subconscious.
If you fall into the camp that thinks the medical field is full of a bunch of greedy, lazy, entitled people that sit around sipping martinis and planning on how to gouge the poor, allow me to share with you the delightful little concept of black-tagging. It's sort of like a tea bag party, only instead of an obtuse and frankly confusing (and/or juvenile, depending on how much naivete you want to attribute here) attention-grabbing gimmick to complain about government policies, it's a mind-numbingly soul-crushing process whereby paramedics sacrifice little shards of their soul at a time so that you can live.
When an EMT crew arrives at the scene of a mass accident, it's up to the first ones on scene to prioritize the patients by urgency level. To do this, they have four cards. Three fourths of these cards are relatively innocent and based on exactly the same pattern you learned in kindergarten for traffic lights- a green tag means the patient seems to be fine, yellow means they need some attention sooner or later, red means they have to be rushed to the hospital.
Then there's the black tag.
The black tag is placed on a usually living patient at the scene of a mass accident. It means, "We can't save this one".
This is something that paramedics do. They have to look someone in the eyes, try to talk to them, and then figure out in a high-stress, high-pace situation whether or not that person can be pulled back from the brink, or whether or not they have to be left for dead to focus medical attention on the red tags, often based on razor-thin margins, made in less time than it takes most office workers to complain that someone has taken all the jelly donuts.
This is how messed up and soul-destroying the medical profession is. This is, again, combined with the daily routine of wading through blood and feces after breaking your back in years of study so you can graduate in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars before you've made your first paycheck, in a profession where any given mistake- and they can't teach you how not to make mistakes, so get that concept out of your head- can put someone's death on your hands in both a moral and legal sense.
Here's an idea. It's my two step program for fixing the skyrocketing costs of healthcare in this country.
1) Prostrate yourself and thank whatever concept of a Creator you hold dear that there are some people so selfless and strong-willed that they're willing to go through Hell to save lives in this country, and
2) Make it easier for others to join in.
This isn't hard. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing? Why doesn't the government take a fraction of the money it spends on bailouts and pay the tuition, room and boarding costs of all medical students in the country who are maintaining a decent GPA? Why not make all income for the medical profession tax-exempt? These people endure Hell to save our lives and make sure we're around to live them a lot longer. Instead of slapping a thousand new regulations on the system and punishing these people for their greed, why not encourage more people to join the ranks?
Because at the end of the day, the amount of healthcare there is to go around is limited by the number of people who can provide it. I know, I know, it's crazy, but there we are. Now, a voucher-like program such as John McCain suggested on the trail probably isn't a bad idea on top of this; but the first step is to stop punishing the people we're depending on to fix the situation.
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