Having served up a heaping helping of economic stimulus, we're now told that next up on the Obama administration's agenda is health care. Or at least, the start of a health care reform process.
Yesterday, I got an e-mail from MoveOn.org asking me to go sign a petition asking Obama to pick a progressive health care reform advocate to run this process. I gather that MoveOn.org felt this was necessary because, at an early meeting of health care wonks, there were no advocates of single-payer systems on the list of invitees.
I don't know how you see it, but I see this as a moral issue.
Now, I'm as much of a capitalist as anybody. I work for a private company. I have my own startup business on the side. I have always envisioned someday making it big on my own, just like the classic American dream portrays.
So don't get me wrong. Free markets have a very valid place in a free society. I don't favor broad nationalization of the economy. The Soviet Union tried it, with dismal results. We ought not go there.
But a free market is not, and should not be, the same as a free-for-all market.
Therein lies the difference between my view of capitalism and the view that seems to be espoused by the insurance industry. I believe that a free society cannot tolerate a free market if that market has no moral center. If it is not also a responsible market. If the agents of that market (a.k.a. capitalists) do not have an appropriate regard for the legitimate needs of their fellow citizens.
A free market and a free society can work very well together, if the market is moral. But a free-for-all market can only lead to a free-for-all society, as private interests work to undermine the nation's foundation of laws to advance their own narrow interests.
Despite the romantic notions of Hollywood, America's nearest historical example of a free-for-all society--the lawless "Wild West," with its gun-toting outlaws, rustlers, claim jumpers, cattle- and railroad robber-barons, crooked marshals and all the rest--is certainly not something any of us wants to return to.
So the free market must also be moral. However, I believe there are some segments of a moral economy which are fundamentally incompatible with the profit motive. Segments which should, on moral grounds, be off limits to capitalism. Health care is one of them.
The profit motive has its place in the world. But when profit governs health care, the greed of private corporations and their boards of directors inevitably leads to the intolerable circumstance of murder by spreadsheet, in which the legitimate health care needs of Americans are not met because profit-driven insurance companies refuse to pay for them.
As Nyceve put it the other day, the insurance industry's motto seems to be "take your money, deny your claim."
It's a great free-for-all business model. But it sure isn't moral.
The private insurance industry has had decades now to figure out what they want to be. To figure out how they want to operate. To determine the principles which govern their actions.
They have uniformly shown us that what they want to be is greedy. That how they want to operate is, not to mince words, fraudulently. That the principles they have selected to govern their actions place profit above people.
They've had their chance. They have failed. Their time is past.
Everyone knows this. Everyone who has ever worried over the possibility of losing their house and life's savings should catastrophic illness or injury strike, knows this. Everyone to whom this has already happened, surely knows this. So stick a fork in 'em, they're done.
America desperately needs a moral alternative to the ruthlessly amoral murder-by-spreadsheet insurance industry.
That alternative is clear. It's a single-payer system, wherein the government guarantees payments for medical services, and where everyone chips in their fair share for coverage. It's a system where doctors and patients determine the best courses of medical treatment, and bean-counters don't get to say no.
Everyone knows this, too.
Of course the private insurance industry will object. They will go kicking and screaming to their graves rather than willingly allow a single-payer system to come into being. This should surprise no one, because it is tantamount to telling those corporations that their immoral business model has no proper place in our free society.
And it doesn't. Their free-for-all tactics are quite literally killing us.
I urge the Obama administration, in the strongest possible terms, to move America as quickly as possible to the single payer model that so many of the world's civilized nations already use to great effect.
[cross-posted from the Advocate]