why I support Kucinich's single-payer health insurance plan
I think that basic health care is something that every person should have access to. This comes out of my religious beliefs. One of the key functions of Islamic law is to protect the integrity of our health and life. Obviously, this means that a government should enact laws to protect citizens against being injured or killed and to punish those who try to injure or kill others.
But I think that it goes beyond that, and that part of our obligation to work for the good and prevent the wrong involves preserving the health of our fellow human beings against other harms, such as illness and disease, not to mention providing treatment to those who have been injured. In other words, I believe that society has a moral obligation to provide for the health of all members (according to a recent Pew Foundation poll, more than 70% of Americans agree with this).
On a more practical note, a healthy society is a productive society. How many people can't work at all or must limit the hours that they work because they have a health problem they can't afford to treat?
I've also come to believe that the single-payer system (i.e., national health insurance) is the best way to provide universal healthcare.
I haven't had health insurance since 1999. That's right, no health insurance for the last four years. For most of 2000, I was unemployed; and I've been unemployed since May 2002. Since September 2002, I've been attending school, but my college does not provide health coverage. As for 2001 and early 2002, I was working part time jobs and didn't get any benefits from my employer.
And private health insurance is far, far beyond my means.
That encapsulates the major problem with the current system. If you're not employed, or if you work part-time or on temporary jobs, you probably don't have coverage. Worse, if you are employed part-time or temporarily, your income is probably too high to qualify for Medicaid (national health insurance for the poor).
Medicaid (along with Medicare for senior citizens) is a good start. These are the people who need it most. But as my own example illustrates, it seems to be people of moderate income who are left out in the cold.
Where does this problem come from? I took Economics last quarter and the instructor said that when the government pays some health care costs, because it can do so more cheaply than private insurers it tends to drive the private insurers out of the market. They can't compete, so they find something more productive to do. And as the supply decreases (since fewer private insurers are in the market), prices go up. This is exactly what we see happening!
The solution is either to get the government out of the market or to get private insurers out of the market. The former is unacceptable - it leaves the most vulnerable without coverage. So that leaves us with the latter.
The instructor said that the actual cost to society of Medicaid and Medicare is the cost of insuring everybody, not just the cost of insuring the poor and the elderly. Or as Dennis Kucinich put it so memorably at his campaign appearance in Seattle: "We're already paying for universal health care, we're just not getting it".
So, morally, universal health care is a societal obligation. And economically, national health insurance is the best way to provide it.
That's why I support single-payer. Hopefully after reading this, you will too, inshallah.
For some supplemental reading on this issue, see One Single Solution by the Physicians Working Group, which speaks for 8000 physicians in favor of single payer; Universal Health Coverage: Let the Debate Resume by Dr. Rashi Fein, the physician who wrote an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in favor of single payer, and Why Now?, an interview with Dr. Fein.
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