Health care reform
Lot’s of talk this past week about health care reform. Too bad President Obama and the health care reform advocates haven’t yet joined the basic income movement – because a basic income guarantee could be the key to successful reform.
Obama has pledged to enact health care reform this year: “When times were good, we didn’t get it done. When we had mild recessions, we didn’t get it done. There’s always a reason not to do it. Now is exactly the time for us to deal with this problem.” Here’s evidence: worsening economic conditions are causing 14,000 people to lose their health insurance every day.
Health care reform, regardless of the specific plan, will be much more likely to succeed and much more likely to pass Congress when everyone has a guaranteed income for food and shelter at least. Just about everyone – liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, doctors and insurance companies and public policy advocates, proponents of insurance reforms and advocates of single payer “Medicare for all” – agrees on one point: reducing the costs of health care is essential for any plan to succeed. We have to find ways to cut costs.
Income security for all will reduce the costs of health care. That’s because poverty is closely correlated with poor health. When everyone has at least a basic income for food and shelter, more people will eat better, sleep better, take better care of their loved ones. People will have money to invest for routine and preventive care. That will mean fewer visits to the emergency room, which is currently where a lot of very poor people receive their primary care. Emergency room medicine is extremely expensive.
There will consequently be far less urgency about reforming the system. We’ll be more able to take the time to allow individual states to experiment with their own programs to achieve universal care. Current attempts in Massachusetts, Hawaii, Maine, and other states are getting only mixed results, but those programs are sure to be much more successful when everyone has income security. They may be able to refine their approaches, and one of them may be the model for national reform. National reforms often start with individual states.
If Obama and Congress are able to agree on some national plan this year, great. We can then enact income security for all, and thereby make that plan much more successful at both improving health outcomes and controlling costs. If Obama fails, income security for all can be the first step toward a new model for national health care.
Steven Shafarman
Tags: "the economy", Barack Obama, health care