The Case for Universal Healthcare

The current American health care system with its obscene profit incentives and increasingly impersonal nature undermines the essential point of all prior medical knowledge, namely an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It gives essentially the promise of medical care without the substance of quality care. It is increased nurse patient ratios stretched by ever expanding workloads and less individualized attention to patient needs. It is the substitution of doctor's orders and prescriptions by cost care analysts and accountants not health care professionals. It is profits before patients and premiums before patients, not the reverse as it should be.

While HMO's and insurance companies decide how much care and at what price working families lucky enough to afford its premiums are doled out, a vastly expanding number of as many as 50 million Americans have no coverage at all and are plagued by chronic illnesses. Our American Quality of Life is a Right that must and should include access to affordable and quality health care. It should guarantee the respect and dignity for our disabled and aged as well as our children and lower our infant mortality, which has become one of the worst rates in the industrialized world. Health care for all should be one of the guarantees, rights, and responsibilities to all our citizens and based on special circumstances, not political slogans.

We need only to revisit the recent tragedy at one of our major Universities to also explore the failure in the mental health sector. We have failure by a system beset with guidelines that require a direct emergency to provide and sustain help to many Americans. We also have failure by a system that turns away many Americans and allows insurance companies to cap lifetime benefits without regard to personal needs or safety.

We should hold as inviolate the relationship between a patient and their health care professional, not between an insurance company and a drug manufacturer, just as we hold as inviolate the relationship between the clergy and their ministry, and between an attorney and their client. They all need be an essential part of the free and just exercises of Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness in any future America.

-Thomas P Love