Abstract

Desperately Seeking Health Insurance

The article discusses problems with the United States medical policy as of 2004. As crises go, medical insurance is not a very sexy one. It is not that no one talks about the 43.6 million uninsured, skyrocketing drug costs, emergency rooms crammed with patients in search of routine care or the 18,000 citizens who, according to the Institute of Medicine, die each year for lack of care. Maybe we have been living this way so long that we have just accepted it. Maybe the kinds of people who are uninsured are the sort voters are all too used to ignoring. And maybe the political classes, who have good coverage and money and tend to live in places with lots of specialists and state-of-the-art hospitals, fear they would have to stand in line. Lack of insurance can precipitate an avalanche of trouble: job loss, debt, bankruptcy, more illness, inappropriate charity treatment that worsens the original problem, prescription drug addiction, homelessness. Critics complain about the cost of universal coverage, but if you think of those 43.6 million uninsured as embedded in families, you have to count the privations endured by everyone in them as part of the true cost of the status quo. Conservatives are always worrying about divorce--what about divorce as triggered by the financial and emotional stresses of uninsured illness? Maybe universal coverage could be sold as a family value.