As two Rec diaries today point out (here) and (here), the public option is LONG overdue, and we're not going to take it anymore. But, the public option is only half the battle.
See Update with links to a couple of bland government websites.
Simply convincing congress to support (or even discuss) the public option requires a focused effort, and I don't mean to distract from that. However, the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about is the variety or quality of health care people should be receiving.
While it's no secret that Americans are overly steeped in pharmaceuticals, the only question we feel entitled to ask is, "How can we pay for our meds?" Invasive surgery may be over-prescribed as well, but again, we're only concerned that all Americans be able to afford surgery at all. I understand this mentality, as it SHOULD BE our primary concern that Americans not be bankrupted by basic health care. However, I'd like to explain why reexamining our basic health care paradigms goes hand in hand with providing universal health care.
Most importantly, we often forget that most widespread health issues are also those that can be addressed most cheaply, often with government programs that are already in place. Foremost of these are nutrition, sanitation/air quality, and physical fitness. Hospital care is expensive and our resources are currently limited regardless of how much money the government provides, which is why we need to focus on prevention.
Two significant reasons why we don't currently focus on prevention. First, it's wimpy. Remember the Republican "drill baby drill" chant? This was a response to Obama's suggestion that inflating car tires would conserve more oil than new drilling would discover. He was 100% correct, but inflating car tires sounds too wimpy to be a solution to such a massive-sounding problem. Same goes for eating your broccoli, exercising, etc. The fact is, nothing has extended the human lifespan longer than basic sanitation, which is hardly cutting-edge medicine.
Second is that the mainstream medical community shies away from any solution they can't fully explain, or that isn't easily testable using the scientific method. It's not hard to imagine that if everyone ate well-rounded, healthy meals, exercised more, had cleaner water, cleaner air, and were generally exposed to fewer environmental toxins, there would be fewer diseases. Here's the thing -- environmental "medicine" is inherently multi-variable. We can, for example, link car and cigarette pollution to lung cancer and asthma, which is reason enough to cut down on both. But, let's say we do that, and people start eating better, and we use cell phones less (a random one, but bare with me), and suddenly the rate of brain tumors falls dramatically -- what's the cause?
Now, a smart person would say, "Doesn't matter -- we know all of these things have roundly positive effects. We should do all of them, and reap whatever positive side effects we didn't anticipate." Too often, however, the fact that we don't know a therapies full effects counts as a strike against it (at least to Western doctors and scientists).
For example, Dr. Rahul Parikh recently wrote an article for Salon.com condemning Oprah for recommending dangerous and untested procedures. Good! But, he then roped in all of holistic medicine. For example, he condemned her for recommending Christine Northrup, who uses yoga to help women deal with a thyroid conditions. Northrup believes that yoga can improve throat energy (for women who have been repressed). Parikh writes:
She said she relies on Ayurvedic and other Eastern approaches to health to treat thyroid disease and other disorders. Yet there's no medical evidence at all to support her view that thyroid disease is the result of a woman's inability to assert herself.
Now, I'm not going to take a stance on what yoga can and cannot do. But, here is a doctor essentially discouraging people from doing something cheap that's guaranteed to improve your overall fitness, simply because modern science hasn't or can't verify its claims. While I understand that refusing all modern medical treatment is in many cases ill-advised, and this is Parikh's concern, there's clearly a large amount of hubris in Parikh's nay-saying. If some woman fixes her own problem by taking a yoga class, Parikh doesn't get to fix her.
I'm singling out Parikh, but this sort of thinking is wide-spread. We've placed all of our medical care in the hands of doctors, which on the surface sounds sensible, but in fact prohibits the government from doing good where it's most capable. In fact, it's precisely the fact that we've come to exclude spiritual wellness, nutrition, fitness, and sanitation from our definition of "medicine" that the government can increasingly provide these things without stepping on anyone's toes. Instead of paying for drugs and bypass surgery, keep people from ever needing these things.
I don't want this to turn into another modern medicine for alternative medicine debate. Rather, I merely want to point out the overlooked fact that most of the high-tech (and therefore expensive) medical treatments created over the past few decades are only needed in a small percentage of cases. I'm all for pouring money into medical research (preferably government rather than pharmaceutical-funded), but there's SO MUCH we can do to improve this country's baseline health.
To underscore my point, I want to relate this statistic: Roughly 40,000 Americans die in car accidents each year. We suffer roughly 6,000,000 accidents each year. And we're not even factoring in the air pollution caused by driving. Now, you tell me perhaps the single most cost-effective way the government could go about reducing this nation's health care overhead.
Update:
Asthma and Air Pollution Fun Facts
Nutrition in Schools