Health-Care

The issue of healthcare in the United States is unrelated to prion disease but still similar to it in both its scope and its range of implications. The system in place today has existed for decades and allows healthcare to operate within the realm of basic economy rather than under government funding and control. By this system, healthcare is viewed as a service to be provided only with compensation; an individual in need of a heart transplant pays for a heart transplant. Of course, with this idea an individual unable to pay for this treatment is refused, and it is exactly this scenario which is the system’s greatest flaw. Further, market forces reward hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that inflate costs, and as a result proper health care is pushed out of reach of lower income groups. Health insurance providers were intended to counter this problem by assisting those unable to afford treatment, but since these companies also operate from within the free market they too are subject to its profit-maximizing, cost-minimizing demands. As a result, basic market concepts are applied to transactions concerning not expendable products but human lives. This flaw shows healthcare to be fully incompatible with the free market, and most people see this; few would argue it immoral to refuse a man a TV he can’t pay for, but the idea of turning him down for a blood transfusion is considered deplorable, and rightly so. Yet not just hospitals and pharmaceuticals but even these insurance companies operate on exactly these principles – insurance providers literally search for reasons to refuse payment in the interest of maximizing profit by minimizing cost.
Proponents of health care reform desperately point to other national health care programs that operate separate from the national economy, funded by the state and providing cheap or free health care regardless of social or economic standing. Unfortunately, a conflict of interest arises not unlike that seen with mad cow in the UK and US; national welfare stands at odds with powerful economic interests. Federal movements toward reform are typically squashed by lobbyists and other internal members sympathetic to the needs of the associated economic parties, and are replaced with ineffective programs such as Medicare which fail but provide the illusion of progress towards a solution. Luckily public interest in this issue is at an all-time high, and it is unlikely that this system will be able to remain within a country no longer oblivious to its fundamental flaws.