The Common Health

In my earlier post Doctor’s Dilemma, I offered up the idea of the common health, a parallel, I suppose, to the common wealth.  We have a measures of common wealth, but no corresponding number for the common health. It is my idea to offer a series of posts on the health care debate.  In this first one I want to set some premises and home truths.

It is my belief if we consider only health care and funding insurance, we will fail.  A public program must seek to create public health and private health.  We must understand that we have a vested interest in our neighbors’ health as well as our own. The recent swine flu scare brought this idea home to many of us.

Some facts we need to acknowledge:

1. Life is 100% fatal. Health means we can live a happier, more active life.
2. The rich have always had better access to doctors than the rest of us.  It’s not until the 20th century that this becomes a major advantage.  Diet, cleanliness, and not doing dangerous work account for most of the upper classes health advantages throughout history.  Nothing we do will change this.
3. Our public health system is currently strained and any serious threat might break it.  If swine flu returns as a pandemic  this fall and hits the uninsured, our emergency rooms and public clinics will be overwhelmed.
4. Medical science is not as advanced as we like to think.
5. Private persons are responsible for their own health. No system we put in place can alter that. A concern for your health means a concern for the health of others.
6. Medicine is most expensive at the margins of life.
7. Whatever our feelings about statistics, health care must use them.  If we know that for a set of symptoms a particular test is useless 97% of the time, no insurance should pay for it.  If we are in the 3% whose cancer would have been detected early, we want to sue.  No system can give millionaire’s coverage to everybody.

There are probably many more facts I could list here, but I’ll start with these. We will need to be willing to examine both market and non-market solutions. In no other area of our lives is the “role of government” more contentious than this one. We need to think deeply and originally about these problems.

Tagged as: Emergency department, Health, Health care, Insurance, Medicine, Public school, Swine influenza, Uninsured in the United States