Health Care – First settle the moral question

Whatever their merits or other shortcomings, the Republican alternative plans to Obamacare do not place universal, affordable health care as a primary value.

Historically, instead of first clarifying our national ethical priorities in a public forum, we have debated health care solely as an economic issue.

For example, in 1994 when President Bill Clinton presented his health-care-for-all plan in his State of the Union address, he did so, not as a moral obligation to all Americans, but as an economic initiative for fiscal growth: “Reforming health care is essential to reducing the deficit and expanding investment.”

Intensive lobbying and high dollar political sloganeering around economic issues crushed the Clinton initiative. The moral argument to provide universal medical treatment to the rich and poor alike was never discussed.

At the same time that the Clinton plan was going down in flames, a different health care system story was unfolding across the Pacific Ocean in the emerging country of Taiwan.

By 1994 Taiwan had become a legitimate economic force and was looking around the world for models of a national health care system. They looked closely at the United States, but found real problems.

Chang Hong-jen, a Taiwanese businessman put it this way: “We have enormous respect for America and some said, ‘Let’s do what the Americans do.’ But we have a lot of Taiwanese natives who are practicing medicine in the U.S. They told us the U.S. system does not work for everybody. American health care is not really a system at all. It is a market. In a market, people with money can buy what they want, and many people are left out. We want a real system.”

Polls show that 85 percent of Americans support a “real system,” a universal health care system. The rest of the developed, industrialized world has figured out how to do this while containing costs.

We could too if we choose to.