Universal Health Care and the Value of Human Life

As a father and husband, part of my responsibilities is to make sure I've got adequate health insurance to cover the current and future medical needs of my family. Through my own career path, I've had some intimate knowledge of how parts of the system work - paying for the births of two children (one covered, one partially covered) and various well being checks. Fortunately, we haven't had any "major" issues that would just be devastating financially (like my blog "One step away" posted the other day).

Like most Americans, I've actually come to believe that comprehensive health care is a right of living in an industrialized and wealthy nation. That when a person works, that person should have some form of (at least) minimal health coverage. When the stats show that out of 300 million Americans (of which we've got around 120 million households), a good 1/4 to 1/3 do not have any type of coverage whatsoever. Basically meaning that they do not have any financing available to pay for health coverage so whatever health issues they end up having come from either emergency room care (the most expensive) or worse yet, they table any minor issues until they become massive and the cost skyrockets.

From this group of people that are either uninsured or under insured, those very expensive health care costs have to be picked up somewhere - either from all of us via tax dollars or through simply increased fees to those of us who do have insurance to pick up the balance for the health care business models. A good friend of mine who is a practicing physician claims that 40% of those that he treats he receives no fees for at all. When a business has only 60% paying customers, that extra 40% has to come from somewhere (typically from raising his base prices to cover the shortfall). Kind of explains why a couple of Tylenol in the hospital costs as much as a 90 day supply from an independent pharmacy...

I have supported the idea of universal health care for all Americans. I believe that we should have minimal basic well being and health coverage to aid with preventative care and take care of things like well baby visits and prenatal care before issues become so chronic that only the very latest technology and facilities can aid the patient. It seems that we have working models around the globe that we could take the best from those models (Belgium and France for example) and put them to good work in America. I think that a tax-based minimum available plan with simple pass through for medical businesses to handle everyone.

But I do have another side of my thoughts - mainly in the form of how Americans treat the notion of the value of human life. Only in our recent human history have we placed so high a price on the value of a single human life. It dictates immense feelings from everything from abortion, to how wars are fought, torture and even our societal view on suicide. We have pushed the technological envelopes to create health care at any expense to preserve human life. Even, in my own opinion, when it isn't necessary to do such.

For example, massively expensive intensive care hospital stays for terminally ill patients receiving the most elaborate and expensive treatments to prolong their lives by only a few short days or weeks. It doesn't really matter if the person is an infant or 90 years old - all life is sacred and every attempt to prolong that life will be taken - even when the family disagrees, the state can even step in to make that decision for them.

Everyone can point to a personal situation of a friend, family member or even yourself who was that person in question and if you didn't receive that special and expensive treatment, then that life (or yours) would have ended. I have a very good friend whose infant daughter was born with a heart defect and has had several very expensive surgeries to keep her alive. The result is a healthy and wonderful 5 year old girl - if those steps wouldn't have been taken, then she would be dead by now.

So where do we draw the line - or do we draw a line at all? The argument comes from even if we CAN do it, the question is SHOULD we do it.

It's really easy to think that way when it's other people's lives. What would I do if my one in my family was at that crossroads? Probably everything in my power to keep them alive until it was impossible to do so.

So the crux of universal health care isn't just tied up in those who do not any financial coverage at all, but also in the overall thought of what is reasonable care. But someone has to determine what that "reasonable care" really is and all of us would have to adhere to it. It is very possible that with a universal health care program, the wealthy are the group that get to enjoy those special treatments because they have the resources to do such giving them the entitlement to them and that the crack baby who didn't have a chance in the world will have to deal with those resources that they have given to them by the state. Is that the line that's drawn? Who can afford what?

That seems to me what the value of human life really would be tied to. I don't know if I like that very much.