Last week I asked myself how a great nation, comprised of free men and women,

humans who value their freedom, came to be enslaved to a system of health insurance
that serves no one but the companies that provide insurance and the owners of those
companies? It is a good question and one that deserves a better answer than I can
offer.

I have heard that when a program of national health insurance was politically possible
during Trumanʼs administration and, again, in Johnsonʼs, both Presidents backed off
because the labor unions did not want the program. It seems, as the story goes, the
unions provided health insurance. That insurance was seen as a major inducement for
non union labor to vote to join the unions.

Later, after the rise of the right in the last half of last century, the bias was for an
expanded private sector role. After Johnson, there was no real political will to enact a
program of national health insurance until the Clinton administration.

Most of us know what happened then, though I am not sure anybody knows precisely
why it went down the way it did. Of course, we all know the pitched battle that was
fought and how the very idea of such a program was demonized. What I do not know is
why we, those of us, the great and vast majority of Americans, who would benefit from
such a national program bought the demonization. Why did we allow that to happen?

It was every bit as clear then that there was an great and demanding public need for
such a program. We all knew then, as we know now, either from direct personal
experience or from somebody who had direct experience with a national health delivery
system in England or Canada or France or Japan or any other developed nation. We all
knew those systems work well, delivering care every bit as well as our system does.
Yet, we all just ate what the industry fed us and made no one suffer for selling us out.

As we sit on the cusp of yet another attempt to do something, even if it is only the half
baked Obama proposal to keep the insurance industry alive while removing a few of the
most egregious assaults on the populace by the insurance industry, we appear to be
ready to again consume what we are fed. We appear to be ready to allow the industry to
buy our Representatives and Senators and just, once again, take it.

Before we do, letʼs take a moment and look at some of the non medical, non personal
costs of continuing to keep the industry well fed and happy. Not all the costs are costs
associated with giving and receiving health care. Indeed, when President Obama
speaks of the impact the current system has on the economic health and well being of
the nation, these non medical costs are some of the ones most important.

When foreign car manufacturers tally up the cost of building a single unit for sale, one
item not included in the personal services cost component is health care. It is not
included because it is not a cost. Oh yes, I can hear the gas bags of opposition now.
“But these manufacturers have to pay higher taxes. Those taxes get factored into the
cost component of the automobiles,” they will say.
This assertion does not have the advantage of being true. It may be effective but it is
not true. In the first place, even if taxes were a cost component in manufacturing, the
tax for health care delivery is spread throughout the national tax base. In the second
place, taxes are a component of expense only after all costs and revenues are
determined, not before. Taxes do not even factor into the calculation of profit. Taxes are
something you pay when you make a profit. Taxes only effect the calculation of profit
after taxes.

However, in the United States, this embedded cost for health care is a true expense for
every American manufacturer making anything that faces a foreign competitor. Where is
the outrage from the right? Where are all those people who are constantly bewailing the
embedded costs of environmental regulation? Where are the condemnations for an
unfair cost to American manufacturers like the outrage at OSHA regulations? The cost
of the minimum wage is assailed, why not the cost of health care?

Having a health care component built into every gadget, widget and doohickey made in
America, is an unfair trade advantage benefiting all our foreign competitors. Every
Republican in the United States should be outraged.

What about the unnecessary additional costs to provide an education to those children
who develop learning disabilities from untreated, chronic maladies? It is well known, in
no way speculative, that chronic, untreated allergies, for instance, can lead to hearing
impairments and speech impediments. Either, and both, for they are frequently fellow
travelers, of these “environmental” learning disabilities demand special services if the
child so afflicted is to receive an adequate education. Even if you assume that such a
child is not due and will not receive an adequate education, his or her presence in the
classroom will drain energy and attention from the teacher at the expense of the other
pupils.

What about this cost? This is a cost that falls on the public schools as well as the private
ones. This is a cost that is no respecter of that demarcation in education.

Is there a relationship between crime and untreated, chronic disease? The study of the
inmates entering prison would indicate there may be. Inmates, particularly young
inmates, seem to have one or more chronic maladies in a greater, statistically significant
degree than the larger population of similarly situated; that is, ethnic, social and
economic status, persons in society. Perhaps, there is a direct correlation between
crime and the lack of a functioning national health delivery program. Perhaps, this
disparity may, partially, explain why the United States has the highest percentage of its
population incarcerated of any developed nation.

It is time to ask if the opponents of a national health delivery system are sincere in their
love of this nation and its people? It is time to ask if these opponents prefer a high
incarceration rate? If they think it is a good thing for chronic disease to go untreated?
Do opponents believe it is a good thing for the education system to be forced to deal
with unnecessary learning disabilities in students? Is it, in the opponents opinion, a
good thing that the unfortunate students be afflicted with these unnecessary learning
disabilities? Perhaps, the opponents believe, the unnecessary and permanent
disabilities being inflicted upon these children is good for them and good for society. It is
time to ask why opponents of a national health delivery system hate American
manufacturers and workers?

The opponents of a national health care program seem to believe there is only one
category of costs that is significant to Americans. They seem to believe that we are all
so simple minded that we only fear taxes. They seem convinced that our only concerns
for the present and the future is the amount of tax we must pay.

Yet, in the matter of health care, we are assailed by a wide variety of costs. When the
totality of costs, direct and indirect, of health care, and the lack thereof, are tallied, these
other costs costs dwarf taxes. Many of these costs are avoidable. For some other costs,
no matter the system, one way or another they must be paid. What is not necessary to
pay, is the twenty to thirty percent the insurance industry rakes off without adding
anything of value. What is not necessary to pay are the long tail costs associated with
trade disadvantages, untreated, unnecessary chronic illnesses, environmental learning
disabilities, illness induced crimes and a host of other costs endemic in the current
system.

The national debate is not so much a matter of costs as the old question of whoʼs ox
gets gored and who gets invited to the bar-be-que. The nation is perilously near the end
of its herd.

I, personally, am not a big supporter of Obamaʼs plan. I would much prefer a single
payer system. However, as our President says, when he is not making statements
about police that are even dumber than the things George Bush used to say, the current
system is unsustainable. It is unsustainable because the health insurers are a giant
leech, sucking the life blood from the nationʼs economic body.

I am not sure how they were allowed to sink their teeth into us, but we must free
ourselves from them. It needs to happen now.