Why Invent a Wheel
I’m a musician, among other things, and like so many other musicians, I can’t afford health insurance. I’ve already talked about some reasons why I’m for a single-payer, government-implemented health-insurance program that covers everyone. Here’s another reason: It would be good for business.
Don’t believe me? Talk to the people who run GM or WalMart. Health insurance, as we now know it, is a wild-card external cost that is posing a real threat to profitability for businesses of all size, large or small.
The Economist magazine, a staunchly pro-market British magazine, recently published a list of the nations that offer the best conditions for conducting business in its Pocket World in Figures. The US was eighth. Not first, not second, not third. Eighth.
First place went to Denmark, second to Finland, third to Canada. All have universal national health-care coverage. Per capita, health care expenditures in 2003 (according to Organization for Economic Cooperative Development or OECD), provide an interesting corollary. Countries that have the lowest costs are doing best in business: Denmark’s per capita cost—$2743; Finland—$2104; Canada’s—$2998. Ours was, and still is, the highest among industrialized nations: $5711 in 2003.
By 2005, our per capita health-care expenditures had risen to $6700, or 16% of gross domestic product. It is expected, under current conditions, to reach 20% of GDP by 2015 (figures from the National Coalition on Health Care). The US is lagging behind these other countries in health-care effectiveness, too. Statistics ranging from life expectancy to infant death rates are more favorable in countries with nationalized health care than here in spite of the fact that many procedures cost twice as much here than they would elsewhere. The US story has changed dramatically over the last thirty or so years. In 1970 we were a leading nation in terms of the quality of our care, and we only spent 7% of GDP, or $352 per person on health care.
What happened and why? A lot of things, such as the rise of for-profit hospitals and HMOs, the increasing power and greed of insurance companies, and the reduction of safety nets. In the short term, those may have helped some businesses and people become wealthy, but in the long term they aren’t helping business. In another OECD report, (statistics published in ODE magazine) the US was one of the lowest countries in terms of self-employment, with just 7.5% of the population self-employed. This kind of blows our myth of being in entrepreneurial heaven.
If we could get this health-care monkey off our back, we might see a renaissance in creativity and new business. As it is people are cautious about leaving any job that has health insurance as a benefit, even as those jobs are becoming more scarce. Are a great many Americans working jobs that we hate or that our destroying our health, mentally and physically, so we can have insurance? Absolutely, and I know plenty of them. We are all getting squeezed tighter and tighter into an untenable system. Other nations with advanced economies have already invented a wheel to get us out of this situation. Why are we trying to reinvent one? “You’re talking socialized medicine!”
Socialism. That dirty word raises some kind of knee-jerk reaction in so many of us after 30 years of the incessant neo-con propaganda that has put us in the situation we are in now. But truly, we do have a high rate of social spending and chances are you benefit from it. The only people I know of that turn down social security checks are the Amish. If you’re lucky enough to live to 65 you are probably not going to say ‘no’ to Medicare because it reeks of socialism.
When you drive up the access ramp onto an Interstate highway, or local byway, you are accessing one of the greatest social spending projects of all time. Now we all need an access ramp onto a better health-care system. It will be good for all citizens. It will be good for business, too.
