Business sees illness in dollars and cents

Health care is a human right. The values of medicine and nursing, of caring, and the values of business, of “the market” can never, ever be reconciled. Medicine sees a human being worthy of care regardless of the size of his wallet. Business sees your illness as a profit-making venture.

The Affordable Care Act is hundreds of pages long as it is an attempt to corral health insurers and Big Pharma to act in ways contrary to their nature. To maximize profit, health insurers want to insure the healthy and dump the sick. Big Pharma wants to charge prices as high as the market will bear. The ACA has had some success at forcing insurers to cover the sick, but only by tolerating drastically rising premiums and deductibles and decreased actuarial value.

Bronze plans pay only 60 percent of costs. A family of four may expect $12,000 cash out of pocket before getting $1 of insurance coverage. Narrow networks have sand-bagged many an unsuspecting patient. One goes to an insurerapproved hospital, only to find that half the doctors there are out-of-network. One bears the costs.

The ACA is even less successful at reining in Big Pharma. No wonder 60 percent of all U.S. bankruptcies are caused by health-care costs.

The Republican plans to “repair” the Affordable Care Act by introducing more market factors will only make a bad situation worse. Health savings accounts serve as a tax dodge for the wealthy, and even then only if one is both healthy and wealthy. Tax credits for insurance are regressive, rewarding the welloff while providing no real help to working persons in lower tax brackets. Allowing sale of insurance across state lines only legitimizes policies that are cheap, but worthless when one needs care.

It was entertaining to hear President Donald Trump express his surprise that insurance was so complicated. Health care can be simple. We get an eraser and go the Medicare statutes. Erase every reference to age 65 and to the wasteful and expensive privatized “Medicare Advantage” plans. Pencil in “at birth” instead of age 65. Or pass HR 676 for single-payer improved “Medicare for All.”

Future generations will look at us as barbarous that we ever allowed one’s financial status to determine the health care one gets. Poet Wendell Berry perhaps put it best “Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”

It is past time for the U.S. to join the rest of the civilized world and guarantee health care for all of us.

Brad Cotton Circleville