Twelve needless deaths an hour among uninsured: An ethical mandate

September 21, 8:06 AMDC Ethical Issues ExaminerLaura Harrison McBride

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Are we a nation of Cains? (Ghent altarpiece, Wiki Commons)

On Thursday, Sept. 17, a study by Harvard Medical School was released. Taking into account many more factors than previous studies that claimed one American dies every 30 minutes because of lack of health care, the Harvard Study said it was more like one every 12 minutes. Following is an ethical analysis of why that news should be taken much more seriously by Americans, and why something must be done immediately.

Click here and here to read more on the study.

When World War II ended, Britain was physically a shambles. In the port city of Plymouth, a main target for German bombing, the lovely old cathedral is still an empty hulk with just the bare outer walls standing. A roundabout has been built around it, carrying traffic to and from the city center mall, itself a necessity after most of the commercial buildings went the way of the cathedral.

Nonetheless, British spirit was, if anything, wildly expanded as a result of their suffering. Not too long after the end of the war, in July 1948, the legislation that created the National Health Service was enacted.

The French, who also endured immense suffering and had both infrastructure and economy in a shambles, enacted their system even earlier, in 1945. Today, it is ranked first in the world by the World Health Organization in terms of availability and organization of the health care providers.

The United States is ranked 37th. (Find a list of the rankings of all nations here.)

Lately, the U.S. media has been littered with horror stories about the Canadian system’s failures. Nonetheless, Canada STILL outranks the United States by seven places. If I had to choose a health care system, there is no doubt I’d pick the Canadian one over ours, and still less doubt that I would choose the French system if I could.

Most Americans don’t have that choice, although I know more than one ex-pat who fled to Europe because it was possible to do so. If one has a parent or grandparent born in most European nations, one can get "citizenship by descent" almost automatically, and move at will. Decent, affordable health care in Europe was too good to pass up for my ex-pat friends and acquaintances.

It is too good to pass up, and wildly noticed in its absence. Lately my colleague, Tinamarie Bernard (Modern Love examiner) and I have emailed each other about both our thoughts and experiencess regarding this issue. In one exchange, Tinamarie wrote:

“As a child in Germany, I was too young and poor, by any standards, to be a ‘contributing member of society,’ and yet when I needed healthcare, I got it. There was no extended wait time or inferior care. We saw excellent and compassionate doctors, received the best medicines. When we moved back to the States a year later, all that changed. We were poor, we were uninsured, and I remember being afraid to get sick or hurt. I was only twelve.”

What a horrible way for a child to grow up, literally not knowing whether she would live or die if the unthinkable happened, and she got gravely ill. And yet, millions and millions of U.S. children face that horrific quandary day after day after day, as their parents are forced to sit helplessly by and watch a fundamental terror steal the joy of childhood.

Unless the United States begins taking care of its citizens, all of its citizens, it would be unethical to advise anyone against moving to Canada or preferably Europe if they could. The only ethical drawback to giving such advice is the unexpected burden the influx would place on those nations. Since we are so amazingly stingy and only grudgingly allow people into this country, and we have no such thing as "citizenship by descent," we could not expect open arms if we were to exit en masse in search of health care. Nor should we expect it.

So, the only ethical thing to do and the only thing that places the burden where it belongs -- in the United States rather than in any nation that will receive our health-care challenged population --  is to enact Universal Health Care. We are already about 60 years late. Those are:

· Sixty years in which Americans have been forced into poverty to survive major illness.

· Sixty years in which insurance companies got rich as people died needlessly.

· Sixty years in which, between our misadventures overseas and our insupportable holier-than-thou attitude at home, we have become the laughingstock of the globe.

Dying for lack of care

We are an unhealthy laughingstock at that. According to a United Nations report, for the period 2006-2010, life expectancy in the United States will be 38th in the world, below that of most wealthy nations, dead last among the G5 nations (Japan, France, Germany, the UK, the US), and below Chile and Cuba. To repeat, for the statistically challenged: In life expectancy, the US ranks below Cuba, our nemesis in the western world, ruled by a despot and his brother, devoid of personal freedom (usually soul-deadening and contributory to early death), and economically embargoed by us for the past 40 years or so. Cuba, the demon spawn of the Caribbean, has better health care and a longer life expectancy than the United States.

Our global reputation is not the ethical reason to enact Universal Health Care. Our embarrassing ranking below so many nations we have, as a body politic, castigated for decades or actually waged war against is not the ethical reason to enact Universal Health Care, either.

The ethical reasons are these:

• Because we have a suffering population, both those without insurance and those whose lives are ruled or ruined by the morally bankrupt health insurance industry.

· Because we are still, unless we do much more squandering, the richest nation on earth.

· Because we claim to be a nation of religious believers, mostly Christian, who have invented the meme, What would Jesus do?

What would Jesus do? At enormous cost to himself if need be, he would heal the sick. Indeed, if one believes Christian dogma, Jesus did in fact, pay the ultimate price to heal humanity of its ills. Certainly Jesus was speaking of spiritual ills (although he did, if memory serves, also heal the lame, make the blind to see, and raise people from the dead). For a Christian to withhold life-giving services from the needy IS a spiritual ill, and yet the US, an arguably Judeo-Christian nation, is engaged in it.

Acting out of fear, always wrong

So we make excuses. My colleague Tinamarie Bernard, in an article on this issue today, puts the issue into that context, noting that fear often underlies our more inelegant actions, and prevents us from doing the right thing. She writes:

Fear permeates our news, it permeates our hearts, and it permeates our minds. We are crippled by it and cannot imagine a system that can take care of everyone without it requiring enormous sacrifice by some.”

She explains how fear and love are both involved in this issue. She writes, “Modern Love, in my heart, also means extending myself to those with whom I am not involved. It means caring for the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the weak, and the poor.”

Because of our fear, we pull back from the best we can do. Fear is behind our excuse that we withhold life-giving health care for the most unethical of reasons: Because we think it costs too much.

How much, then, is a life worth? Is mine worth more than yours? Is yours worth more than that of the homeless man trying to raise two motherless children from the back of his car? Is Donald Trump’s life worth more? Or even Barack Obama’s? Or are all our lives worth the same amount? Priceless. Every one of us is priceless (including the unborn to the conservative religionists), and yet we are unwilling to spend a cent for anyone except ourselves, if we are fortunate enough to have insurance. We are unwilling to dip into our pockets via taxes to pay for it, while we have squandered billions through our taxes saving the financial devils on Wall Street from losing their mansions, boats, private jets and doubtless visits to swell Swiss health spas for experimental treatments if they need them.

We have allowed bankers with no moral compass to send our futures to hell, while we pay the cost of the journey.

We have elected politicians who are no more than highly paid lackeys for those same unethical bankers, making them doubly unethical. And we refuse to rise up as one and demand what even primitive tribes give everyone in the tribe via access to the local shaman: health care. We refuse to pay for our political mistakes, we refuse to pay to rectify our spiritual errors. We refuse because of fear, because of the lack of love, the universal kind of love that is fearless and inclusive…the kind of love about which Tinamarie Bernard writes and which her wisdom says must underlie our actions in all aspects of life.

If we ignore that sort of love, and let fear of using our hearts as well as our minds lead us to unethical actions, we deserve what we get. We deserve to be 37th in the world in health care, 38th in life expectancy. Repeat: We deserve to be 37th in the world in health care, 38th in life expectancy.

We deserve it because, in our fear-based stinginess, it is what we are willing to pay for.

We are not willing to pay one single dime to switch our healthcare system from a Ponzi scheme favoring the banking/insurance/pharmaceutical industrial complex to an equable system where all get at least basic care.

When dying young is our own fault

But we are content to ship our health care dollars to some slavering insurance toad’s tropical private island. We are not content to settle our differences about the issues (payment for abortion, end of life counseling, single-payer or hybrid like the French system, etc.). And so, we remain sick, broke and dying young. We have no room to complain, unless we have the courage to act.

It is unethical, this constant bickering about whether we should or should not pay for abortions; consider it a personal issue and leave at that. Here’s the bottom line: Leave it in, or leave it out; it doesn’t matter. If it is taken out, organizations such as Planned Parenthood will fill the gap via donations. (Having said that, I realize that the anti-choice Nazis won’t actually be happy unless abortion itself is made illegal again. But their ethics is, a priori, in question anyway. It’s a bridge too far, and we must set the far right aside, and the far left as well, and come to a workable middle ground.)

It is unethical, this worry about how much it will add to the national debt. National debt? At this point, that term is laughable. Bush sent most of our money to Halliburton and friends; Greenspan fixed it so that it is unlikely housing will ever recover; Homeland Security has a stranglehold on the Constitution that even Barack Obama is having a hard time coping with, and I understand they recently spent the cost of a Mayo Clinic on a new building to house their snoops in palatial comfort, like a banker. And we are worrying about the deficit?

Hint: There is no deficit, because there is no wealth. It is in private hands, one percent of the nation owns 90 percent of the wealth. If we continue down our road of bickering, setting one group’s beliefs against another’s, failing to bring the cowardly politicians to heel, we are lost. We are lost on healthcare, and we are lost on the most powerful democracy the world has ever known.

The only ethical course is to banish our fears, compromise where we must, open our minds to accept truth, open our hearts to reveal compassion, and enact health care worthy of the world’s most powerful democracy.
 

Please read Tinamarie Bernard's perspective on why we are acting out of fear, not love, as long as we continue to debate this topic.