UPDATE: This is not about whether health care is a right, responsibility or luxury. It's about whether providing health insurance should be a profit-driven market activity.
The supported style of debating in the U.S. is about how well you can avoid the question asked and, instead, steer your answer to some talking point you want to make. A skilled debater manages to make it seem connected to the question. As a methodical thinker who likes true connectedness in dialog this drives me up a wall. Yet, it's a celebrated approach, so I don't expect that to change.
At a "town hall" style debate, though, it really doesn't read well. The purported idea is that "average voters" get to ask the questions in order to push the candidates to talk about what's on their minds rather than what's on the minds of pundits and news-makers. So, when the candidates go off on a tangent and never answer the question asked, it's an insult to the "average voter." They might as well say, "What a stupid question!" Below the fold, I'll discuss one that I find mighty important...
Both candidates did this this evening. All the snap polls and "dial" groups have declared a winner for the evening, so I don't feel the need to go there. Instead, I'd like to focus on a very smart question that both candidates ignored: "Should health insurance be a commodity?"
Neither candidate responded. Did they not understand the question? It's true that it could have been put differently: "Should people be able to make a profit, thereby forcing costs to go up, on health care?"Still, it's not a difficult question.
We're all talking about the cost of healthcare. Well, how much was paid out in stock dividends this past year? How much profit did health insurance companies derive? How much was distributed in executive pay? Wouldn't health care costs go down just by removing this additional money burden from the equation?
How many health care protocols are driven by the mandate to provide maximum dividend to shareholders? Are wise long-term health care testing and treatment options put aside for short-term profits? Doesn't this make the overall cost of health care greater?
This should be something that we consider seriously in this country. Our choices about how to provide insurance to people are not limited to for-profit or government. There is a third way that I never hear disussed: make providing insurance a not-for-profit activity, where the mission of the non-profit is to provide the best health care for patients. That's a very different priority than shareholder dividends. It would still be a privately run industry. This industry could still charge insurance premiums to sustain itself. What it couldn't do is allow a few people to profit at the expense of quality health care for all.
What we have to pay for health insurance would reflect the real cost of providing quality healthcare. Not the cost of creating profits. Being a not-for-profit would make the financials more transparent and therefore responsive to public scrutiny. Again, this would likely keep the costs down. Once we've stabilized those prices we can then consider what kind of assistance we might need from government to help families afford appropriate care. Until then, government is simply lining the pockets of shareholders.
I wish the candidates would have stopped for one moment, put their scripts out of their heads, listened to the question and, at a minimum, said, "well, that's something to consider." Instead, we the people got shoved aside in the name of maximizing some investors' portfolio values.