In France, the European Union, the rest of the industrialized world (but not in the United States), healthcare is a right of citizenship. During an economic downturn, Americans face daunting odds, access to healthcare is one of the first luxuries to disappear.
I just finished reading the excellent diaries by bonddad and Jerome a Paris. Please forgive my random and panicked thoughts. But I am panicked just like all of us.
One huge thought is circulating through my brain. And I'm sorry to say this. We Americans are not very lucky. If we lived in any other industrialized nation, we would not need to add to all the other crises bearing down on us, how to come up with the scratch to pay for healthcare.
But we do. In the United States, healthcare is business, and if you can't pay for it, you don't get it--except as Mister Bush tell us, all is good because you can go to an emergency room.
Americans who lose their jobs, will also lose their health benefits. How many will be able to afford the blistering premiums for COBRA continuation benefits? Very few.
To tell you the truth, COBRA is a joke. It's unaffordable.
How about the U.S. government do something bold and nationalize healthcare, just like they boldly used taxpayer money to bail out Bear Stearns?
I'm wondering will the meltdown of the financial markets make anyone serious about the other meltdown? The implosion of the U.S. healthcare system. Or will we need a direct hit, a Katrina-like healthcare event to force the policy makers to recognize the Titanic healthcare system has hit an iceberg.
What we have unfolding in the United States, is the spectre of a surge of Americans facing unemployment and a loss of their health benefits, which for most are still tied to their employment.
Employed or soon-to-be unemployed, Americans face a dramtic decline in real wages as inflation eats away at the value of our money. The good old American consumer is on life support, and paying for gas, rent and mortgage will take priority over skyrocketing health insurance premiums.
As employers face withering health insurance premium increases, they will have no alternative but to chip away at health benefits. Well, there's no more fat to chip from, we're now deep into lean muscle mass. The American worker will face painful cost-shifting. What does this mean? It means sharply higher co-pays and deductibles as employers desperate to maintain any benefits at all, shift the work force en masse into very high deductible junk insurance. The perfect storm, like Katrina, has made landfall.
Hospital emergency rooms will be overrun with the swelling army of the uninsured and underinsured. But Mister Bush says this is the American way.
These cascading events will sting all of us. The middle class are experiencing massive losses in stock holdings, and certainly the value of their major asset, the family home, is dropping like a lead balloon.
So we're staring into an terrible abyss. Rising energy costs, rising food costs, rising healthcare costs, rising insurance premiums, how will Americans pay for all this?
Well, many won't. They'll try desperately to hang onto their homes and put food on the table, health insurance will become another unaffordable luxury which will be jettisoned.
Healthcare in America is a luxury--a privilege--not a right of citizenship.
If we were citizens of any other western industrialized nation, we would not add the terrible anxiety of healthcare payments to all the other economic woes savaging the American people. By the way, you won't hear anyone in the media discuss this awful truth.
I was with some people from Ireland the other day, you know what they sad to me? They said, "we are praying for you, Eve, and all the American people". I wonder why.
By the way, speaking of hard times, if anyone needs eyeglasses a great Kossack sent me a link to The American Optometic Association which offers free and low-cost glasses.