Nationalized health care may be socialism, but so what?

Over and over again (a bit more in this election cycle than usual) I hear pundits say "Nationalized health care? That's socialism." And, socialism has no place in our capitalist and democratic society.

Well, anyone who is against nationalized health care because it is socialism is either a lobbyist for the health insurance industry, a pundit who's been paid by a lobbyist for the insurance industry, or they're just plain stupid...or ignorant I should say.

I don’t debate for a second that there is certainly at least an element of socialism in a federally controlled health care structure, but maybe less than you might think. Right now, health care is basically unaffordable without insurance, so individuals must take a considerable chunk of their paycheck and put it towards insurance that pays for his/her health care if he/she falls ill or suffers an injury. And, hopefully he/she won’t need it because that co-pay can be enough to cover a meal or two per day for a week—not trivial. Some one could save for health care and just sit on a wad of cash for this occasion, but it you’d have to have ten million dollars before you could just get rid of health insurance altogether. This is because maintenance care isn’t terribly expensive, you have to carry the insurance for the unpredictable events in you life, like an auto accident, cancer, debilitating disease or injury, care for which might cost you upwards of half a million dollars.

The way this makes me feel, I cannot describe without offensive language and imagery, so I’ll just say that the individual is being taken advantage of in our current system. You see this system gets expensive—rapidly so as care becomes more intensive—because insurance companies are skimming at every level. When you buy insurance, you are making a bet that you will get sick. They, acting as your bookie, are making the counter bet that you won’t get sick or that you won’t get so sick that they have to pay out more money than you have paid them. The rates are based on the cost of health care and the percentages of historical health care requirements for people in your demographic group. In other words the insurance company has calculated the odds and is making a very well thought-out wager that is virtually guaranteed to yield a profit. You are in Vegas and they are the house. It’s not just you, the doctors need malpractice insurance and the hospital needs liability insurance (in case they remove the wrong kidney or give you the wrong medication and end-up needing to pay for your health care for the rest of your life). Just like home costs go up when the builder needs to pay more for gas to transport building materials, the insurance costs of the doctors and the hospitals get passed on to the consumer. Through this system, a cut is taken repeatedly by insurance companies. That’s less money that goes to your health care providers, less money in your pocket, and hundreds of millions of dollars into the pockets of insurance companies. Anyone who argues that this system is needed to ensure that we have high quality care is trying to mislead you, or they are—you got it—stupid.

I did some back-or-the-envelope math to see what kind of gross annual profit health insurance companies must bring in and it was something like 10 billion nationally. That buys a lot of lobbyists—enough to make sure that nationalized health care arrives in the form of federally subsidized health insurance rather than a replacement of the corporate health insurance system. Ten billion dollars could also buy a lot of doctor visits. Imagine if you just paid you health insurance out of your paycheck like usual, but the company you work for didn’t have to contribute. You payment went strait to the same account to which everyone else’s health care payment went. Out of this big pot of money doctors are paid, hospitals and other facilities take a cut from this account according to how many people they treat or by how expensive it is to maintain the facility. I won’t pretend to know exactly how this could be made to work, but it would inherently be cheaper than the insurance based system. We’d have to be careful to avoid any administrative structure that might allow for politicization of budget management. It would be all too easy, particularly will their lobbyist minions in place in DC, for the masters of the current insurance based system to take control of any new system that is implemented. Some people will try to funnel extra money to their hospital or their medical specialty. Some people will try to usurp the monies in the form of administrative salaries, because they are so wonderfully qualified—and connected. So, we’d have to be careful, but this is health care paid for by the people for the people. Granted some people might need to get jobs if they intend to contribute to and benefit from the system, but the entitlement mentality is a topic for another day. The point is that this isn’t a paternal government spoon-feeding health care to Americans; it is people paying for their own healthcare, without having to pay a bookie a commission.

The fact that this does require a central, communal fund, and that one of the intentions must be to provide health care even to those without jobs who don’t contribute to the system (if you’re getting excited, this includes children, so simmer down) does smell like socialism, but for me, I’d rather be socialist than continue getting screwed by capitalist insurance companies. Most western, democratic countries have adopted some degree of socialism, because in some situations it is more efficient and provides for a better quality of life for more people than capitalism. Health care is one of these situations. To invoke American anti-socialist sentiments and the images of totalitarian rulers we associate with socialism as an argument against nationalized health care is to show just how unarguable anti-nationalization is.