The Healthy Majority

You may have noticed (or may not have noticed) that I haven't had a heck of a whole lot to say about the whole health care debate. Part of the reason for my silence is that the whole thing is really, really complex, and I don't think I know enough about it to make an intelligent comment about the pending legislation. Another part of the reason is that there is so much SHOUTING going on in regards to it that I felt like what we didn't need was one more person talking about it. So I've kept my mouth shut.

Until now.

That's because I've found a solution to the whole problem! Two, actually.

Before I get in to that, though, let me tell you why I think we're a long way away from making any serious changes to our health care system. There are two reasons, I think:

1) We're a government that is ruled by the majority, and at any given moment in time the majority of people in this country are NOT sick. When you're not sick, the health care system is working great! You don't even NEED health insurance at all when you're not sick. It's only when you're sick that it matters. And it's only when you're REALLY sick that it REALLY matters. Most people are NOT really sick, and most people aren't aware of the people around them that are really sick and that are really struggling to make ends meet because they don't have the money to pay their hospital bills, or maybe they're struggling because they can't navigate the maze of the insurance industry's bureaucracy to get the company to pay for something. I'm not saying those people aren't around. They are. They're everywhere. But they don't wear t-shirts that proclaim they're struggling due to medical insurance issues, so we don't know.

2) No one in this country, regardless of ability to pay, is denied medical care when a situation is life-threatening. As long as that's the case, as long as we're not really dealing with life and death situations, politicians and lobbyists won't be willing to take health care seriously.

And those two realizations led me to an epiphany. I have two ideas, either of which if they were implemented would almost guarantee major medical insurance reform in this country. Here they are:

1. Bright Idea Number One: Don't reform health insurance. Reform the AMA code of ethics. The American Medical Association's code of ethics states that doctors are REQUIRED to care for the poor, regardless of whether or not the indigent can pay. Those code of ethics should be reformed to make it unethical for doctors and nurses to knowingly give medical care to anyone who cannot pay. Congress should even make it a law: any doctor who gives care to a person who cannot pay would a) lose his/her medical license and b) risk a fine or time in jail. If we made this change, poor people would start dying in droves, and people would be in an uproar. Can you imagine how people would react to the story of the caring mother of 4 who worked a minimum wage job rather than go on welfare and who had a mild heart attack and was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, only to be turned away in the ER when it was discovered that she didn't have an insurance card, and as a result she died a few hours later? Can you imagine hundreds of stories like that making their way to media outlets?

We'd pass major health insurance reform in a month if that were the case.

Bright Idea Number Two: Out people. In the same way that the government will advertise in the newspaper when a land owner has outstanding real estate taxes, we should change the laws to allow hospitals to advertise the names of people who owe money to the hospital because they didn't have health insurance or couldn't afford their co-insurance. The hospital would include in the advertisement the person's full name and the amount owed. Once healthy people start seeing names of friends and neighbors in the paper, they may start to realize that our current health system is causing a lot of hurt. Maybe we'd all be a little more sympathetic.

Of course, neither of these things is going to happen. And there's also not a chance that any kind of major health reform is going to pass, whether or not President Obama gives another press conference.

Not as long as the majority decides...