Healthcare: Society and Economy
"Over the last 12 years the number of people visiting America's emergency rooms has soared. Yet here's what's surprising: The number of low-income people going to ERs has not increased. The increase has come almost entirely among middle-class people and many of them have insurance." — Maggie Mahar
"We live in a society not just in an economy," a statement made by Harvard professor of medical economics Rashi Fein, is what drew my attention to this film and this episode of "Bill Moyers Journal" (links below). You know already how much I admire Bill Moyers for his integrity, his honesty, and his courage.
We've been over some of this ground before on healthcare issues. Yes, I believe we should have universal healthcare in the US. Yes, I'd prefer a single-payer plan to do it. No, I don't think it's a "right" and I think that's a dangerous type of argument to make. I do think it's something we can and should do: great nations exist to look after the commonwealth of its people. "We live in a society not just in an economy." Contrary to popular misinformation, we're not really talking about paying more or less for healthcare in this country, we're really talking about changing the method of paying for what we've already got in ways that will improve delivery of services.
I try to avoid "must-see" hyperbole, but I found this film engaging, informative, and refreshingly neither strident nor hysterical. At every scene, it seemed, someone said something quotable and relevant to our current healthcare "debate", one that could certainly use a massive injection of calming reality in the face of so much well-financed propaganda in favor of the status quo. It's forty minutes well spent.
MAGGIE MAHAR: If you can believe it, Rashi Fein has survived 5 decades of the battle for health care reform. In 1953 he served on President Truman's commission on the health needs of America at a time when Truman was pushing for universal coverage. Then he worked with JFK when he fought unsuccessfully for Medicare, a battle that LBJ would later win. As a professor of medical economics at Harvard, Fein has never given up. He firmly believes that medicine should not be all about money. As he puts it, "We live in a society not just in an economy."
[Rashi Fein talked to Maggie Mahar in a documentary film based on her book, Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. The film, "Money-Driven Medicine", was shown as part of "Bill Moyers Journal" on 28 August 2009.]