Looking North for Health Care Reform

For a decade, conservative idealogues have distracted Americans from our true goal: A Healthier Nation

Andrew Garib, Turn Left | It’s no secret that Americans are adverse to most ideas involving big government, nationwide state social programmes, or anything that is remotely related to socialization of government. Americans’ attitudes towards heath care seem no different. But here in a nation where forty-five million citizens are without proper heath coverage, it is doubtful that we can long ignore the possibility of a Canadian-style single-payer health system, nation-wide, and universally accessible.

One can hardly blame party politics or government conspiracy as the sole reason why the United States, the richest nation on the planet, still has yet to implement a system of universal healthcare. Indeed public opinion drives the polls and election results which are the winds in the sails of potential legislation. Ultimately, the American people don’t seem to want a single-payer (i.e., government administered) universal health-care system, not because the plan is meritless, but because they are afraid of what they have been warned about since America’s inception – government intervention in their lives. So why does Canada, an equally prosperous nation, hold such dissimilar beliefs?

In the last week of November, The Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, headed by former Saskatchewan New Democrat Premier Roy Romanow, plans to release a monumental report with recommendations on Canadians’ health care needs, and how the government is to address them. The commission, in its attempt to stake and objective and definitive claim on the issue, has collected 18 months of data and opinion from across Canada and around the world.

In Canada, the focus of discussion more often than not is the dichotomy between private and public care – the same discussion we hold here in the United States. Nevertheless, in a nation where the per-capita GDP is little more than half of that of the United States, report after report recommends the expansion and consolidation – far from the privitization – of Medicare, Canada’s public medical system. No doubt, with Romanow’s background as the former social democratic Premier of the first jurisdiction in North America to elect a socialist government (not to mention the first province to create and administer to a public health system), the verdict will be quite consistent with outstanding moderate and left opinion.

It’s clear that Canadians’ goals and values are different than those of American policy makers, who have for ten years insisted on retarding the efforts of those supporting the implementation of a single-payer health system. Not since Bill Clinton’s efforts in 1993 to introduce universal health care has there been any such debate on the future of America’s health as there has been in Canada, where health care is a pressing issue in each federal and provincial election. The reality is that Americans have been blindsided by the propaganda of rightist government ‘streamlining’, mongering fear of big, inefficient, and intrusive government infringing on the freedom of Americans to make their own health-care choices. Effectively, they speak of the freedom of medical insurance companies to rake in considerable profit.

Leading the movement against public health care in the United States is, not surprisingly, the Health Insurance Association of America, or HIAA, representing the hundreds of health insurance providers who will doubtlessly be the greatest losers in the nationalization of healthcare. The HIAA, whose “Harry and Louise” ad campaigns of 1993 claimed that Clinton’s plan for healthcare would “limit choice”, met with the harshest criticism from Hillary Clinton. The former First Lady openly accused the industry of greed and deliberately lying in order to protect their profit margin, an unprecedented action for someone of her stature in government.

Yet there is a more insidious threat – the ideologues. In 1993 they were led by then Republican Whip Newt Gingrich, who by 1995, as the Speaker of the House, had enough influence and legislative power to kill any and all attempts at left-Democrat reform of healthcare. Gingrich’s philosophy was simple: All left-wing initiatives had to be stopped in favour of private-sector, free-market solutions – The American Way, according right-Republicans. Medicare, in his opinion, was the next great fight for the Left, which had to be routed at all costs. Our nation’s health had not only become a commodity, but also a political tool.

It was Gingrich’s ideals, and those of many other moderate and right-republicans and even moderate democrats, which ended cooperation between the major parties towards universal healthcare – a programme which had as its goal the welfare of the nation and not the politicization of the legislative process or government services. Fear of socialization, or rather, a hard-line free-market ideology is what destroyed universal care in the United States, kept the private lobbyists as powerful as they were, and is what inevitably politicized an initiative that by all means should have been a bipartisan movement for the betterment of Americans.

Party spin doctors and lobbyists from center to right insisted upon the destruction of the movement not because universal healthcare had no merit, or because it was infeasible in the richest nation on earth, or because helping the average American was on their agenda. Dogmatic ideology – something we in the Left are so often accused of – is rampant in the American Right, and by all means is equally dangerous to the rhetoric of the far Left. No one who is against universal medical care is prepared to state that private care will ever take care of the forty-five million Americans without health insurance, but their arguments are invariably matters of choice and corporate freedom, not the wellbeing of the average American. Despite the fact that in other rich capitalist nations – Germany, Japan and Canada to mention just three – universal healthcare is a mainstay of public governance, in the United States the ideals of the free market are applied evenly to all commodities, including our health.

Unlike Canadians, Americans view our bodies as our great (and in terms of profit perhaps greatest) contribution to a Market guided by the invisible hand, and driven by greed and profit. Conservative ideologues play into the hands of corporate interests and are smiled upon by the Market Gods, while forty-five million go without adequate care. This is a story we have time and time again in America; with this issue, however, the very health of the nation is at stake.

There are also those in Canada who wish to dismantle public health in favour of a two-tiered system, where a poorly-funded public service would care for the poor, and the very best private service is reserved for the rich. Again, the enemies of public health are conservatives with fixed ideas about government and society, whose supporters are as confused about the supposed evils of government intervention in the economy and society as the average American.

Thankfully for Canadians, those against universal public health care are a minority in that country. Their formula, however, is the same: an idealistic political right, a greedy private interest, and a confused electorate, all willing to bow to the supreme force of the market. The ideologues plan to leave national administration of health to the wayside, the detritus of inefficient, intrusive government whose only fundamental “fault” is their obligation to the health of the nation’s poorest.

While Gingrich’s counterparts in Canada strive to destroy that nation’s landmark health system, the Canadian government and people continue to support the decades old tradition of universal heath care, the idea that anyone anywhere can afford primary care. Yet we here south of the 49th parallel insist upon faith in the uncompassionate Market Gods who dictate who is deserving of health. But if our goals are sound, if our hopes and dreams are not in an idealized economy but a better life for all, it makes perfect sense to adopt a system where each and every American has the best of health to maximize their contributions to our economy and society.

In a week’s time, we will see the future of Canada’s health care system in the Romanow Report. But until we can decide for ourselves that the health and wellbeing of Americans is our true priority, we have only to look North and set as our example a health system that, while imperfect, takes into account the true needs of a nation’s people.

http://www.healthcarecommission.ca/
http://www.cbc.ca/news/features/romanowreport_overview.html
http://www.princeton.edu/~starr/20starr.html End.