Our Health Care System is Killing Us

By Broadside Staff Correspondent Sabra HayesBy

Since viewing Sicko, the most recent documentary by Michael Moore, I have become aware that the United States’ failure to provide adequate health care is causing the suffering and even death of many individuals in our country.

My question to the people of the United States is, why fight the socialization of our medical care? We already depend on so many services which are socialized, such as the police, firefighters, and school systems. We call the people who work in these industries our heroes and role models, but why is it that we cannot add the doctors, who also constantly save lives, to this list?

In the U.S. we claim that we are the best--that we take care of each other. This is a lie. We cannot say that we are the world’s greatest nation if we have one of the lowest ranking healthcare systems among industrialized countries in the world.

According to the World Health Organization, the U.S. is ranked 39th in the world for health care. Meanwhile, many countries that have socialized healthcare are ranked at the top of the list, such as France (ranked number 1), Italy, Spain and Japan.

In France, their socialist healthcare works in the ways that America’s should. According to FrenchEntrée.com, the health care in France is funded by the working population, who spend about 20 percent of their gross salary to fund their social security system.

A significant amount of this money goes towards public health care, to which every legal resident of France has access to under the law of universal coverage. Taxes and national insurance funds go toward supplying these countries with doctors, adequate hospitals and all other medical services.

This socialized system of health care in France reminds us of the fact that we are all people and we need to take care of each other; that the sicker you get, the more care you receive, instead of the American standard of: ‘the sicker you get, the more you pay.’

The entire question of socializing medical care always revolves around money. American health care providers have become greedy. The rest of the world has learned to open up and share with their fellow man, but to us it’s all about the money. The cost of insurance has sky-rocketed and many have to get jobs just to be able to hope that they will be covered by insurance in the event that they become ill.

According to Business Week magazine, the US spends 16 percent of gross domestic product on healthcare (which is more than any other country). Now granted, the doctors in countries with socialized medical systems tend to make less than American doctors, but they still live very comfortably.

This should be the standard for Americans. We need a system where it does not matter what’s in your wallet, but what your illness is. People should not get turned away from receiving care because they have pre-existing conditions that limit their choices of insurance and ups the costs. We need to open our eyes and view our medical care system for what it really is: a division of our Untied States, between the rich and the poor, the haves and have nots.

As Moore states in Sicko, “You know when we see a good idea from another country we grab it. If they build a better car, we drive it. If they make a better wine, we drink it. So if they’ve come up with a better way to treat the sick, to teach their kids, to take care of their babies, to simply be good to each other, then what’s our problem? Why can’t we do that? They live in a world of ‘we’ and not ‘me.’ We’ll never fix anything till we get that one basic thing right.”

It is time for Americans to speak up and to fight for the freedom to receive better health care, to not have to worry about whether or not your insurance will cover the cost of your ambulance ride, or of your surgery, or even your medication. We as people have the inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They are the most fundamental set of human rights and are not conditional. We have the right to life; a life free of the hassle and worry of whether or not we will die from drowning in our own medical care crisis.