All around the United States, Americans are either cheering or commiserating, depending on whether they vote Democrat or Republican.You must have been living in a hole if you don’t know why. Last week, Congress passed a bill that comprehensively overhauled the healthcare system, and should offer some 32 million currently uninsured Americans access to healthcare.
It’s been a long and complicated battle and it’s not over yet – some Republicans are determined to take the opportunity presented by the midterm elections in November to turn out in force to vote and derail the bill’s progress.
As a Brit who is only belatedly realising just how good the NHS is, the proposed changes seem a no-brainer. How can suggesting that everyone who gets sick should be entitled to healthcare be a bad thing?
And yet there have been some utterly horrible things going on out here – a recent call to New York Democrat Louise M. Slaughter, for example, said snipers would “kill the children of the members who voted for healthcare reform.” Later, a brick smashed her window.
There’s no doubt that any talk of healthcare brings out the most extreme opinions of some – reading a friend’s Facebook thread recently on the topic, one American commentator wrote, “this is one of the saddest days for the USA. Our civil and social freedoms are being slowly dismantled…. This is not social justice. This is a giant leap toward socialism.”
It’s an interesting thought, and one that is massively relevant in America. For whatever reason – it may be the pioneering spirit that brought them here, the sense of “every man for himself” and “you make your own destiny”- the idea of any sort of state intervention smacks almost of Communism in American eyes. They simply don’t want anyone else getting involved in their lives.
And of course, so much of this is about money. Because what the reform actually means is that all Americans are now required to have healthcare and don’t have the option of not purchasing it.
Admittedly, the insurance companies are being forced to relax some of their more stringent rules – like refusing to insure anyone with a pre-existing condition, or dropping children from their parents’ plans before they are out of college and able to earn money – but at the base level, everyone must pay.
And that rankles. Those Americans who do currently pay for insurance don’t like to think they will have to cough up more to cover those who don’t have it: the idea of a tax that benefits the whole of society seems to many to be an anathema.
It scares me. At the moment, you have insurance companies and the healthcare industry conducting the whole thing on a business basis. The health industry exists to make a profit and the insurance companies hold the reins.
Surely it is better, no matter how entrenched or partisan they be, to have elected politicians overseeing the health industry than businesses simply in it to make money?
“My friend Chris Roe died of leukaemia when he was 14 because no insurance company in America would cover his terminal illness and the one he had dropped him,” wrote one commentator to the thread on my friend’s Facebook wall.
Health should not be a non-wealth issue. America is a modern, supposedly democratic society. How can this be allowed to happen? And how can people not think it is an outrage? It beats me, it really does.
Lucy Denyer
