Health Care for All Americans

A battle of ideas can get boring quick, so let's start with a joke: What do you call a 22-year-old cancer patient with health insurance? A Canadian.
My ol' schoolchum Ed has many fine qualities, but he is an ideologue. This is to say that he will argue passionately and often against his own interests. I'm reminded of the great headline from The Onion: "ACLU Defends Nazis' Right to Burn Down ACLU Headquarters."
Ed's a hardworking, self-employed guy for whom a serious ailment or injury would likely mean bankruptcy. Yet his utter distrust of our democratically elected, representational government leads him to fear and oppose the easy solution to the health care crisis in America. Namely, a single payer system. It's simple, and works like this: If you've got health insurance you like, keep it. If you can't afford it or were otherwise rejected by cherry-picking insurance firms, you're covered. The government has your back. You deserve it. Why? You're an American.
Yet somehow this prospect fills Ed with dread for his children's future. He pitys the poor insurer, struggling to meet the mandates of an authoritarian state. The fact is, the insurer is the problem in the equation, and this is where Ed and I really differ.
We are agreed that to provide health care, we need doctors, nurses, hospitals and janitors. And we need someone to pay them. Fine. But why do we need health insurance companies and their profit motive? We don't.
Consider this: Over half of all Americans are in some way covered under federal programs (Medicare, Medicaid, the VA). The administrative costs under these federal programs are about 4 percent of the total spent. The same cost for a private insurance company? About 20 percent. Why is it higher? Well, the profit motive of course. They have to pay their CEOs and top executives those multimillion dollar salaries, and then there are the advertising expenses. Don't forget the investor class, they get their share too.
Ed is afraid this lovely system will collapse if there is a public option. It might, and I don't care.
I am tired of seeing the outrageous, double-digit increases in health insurance premiums that we paid year after year after year. I am tired of seeing my friends limp around in pain or go without medication for lack of money to go to the doctor. A couple years ago I attended the funeral of a woman my age who died because she had no health insurance, didn't get care and died, alone in her room.
Let's just say that woman needed $6,000 worth of care a month, Ed. Let's say she got it, and was alive to make more money, pay taxes and premiums, to bear and raise children, for many years to come. Would her contribution in life make up for the financial loss to her insurer? Obviously the health care companies -- being privately held, for profit corporations -- had no vested interest in keeping her alive. But America did. America could have benefitted from her preservation. America lost.
It is sad and ironic to me that health insurance for all is where my conservative friends have drawn the line in the sand. They trust the government to run our beloved Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines, at a cost of dizzying billions annually. They trust the government to insure their bank deposits. They trust in the roads and bridges and waterways we all pay to build and maintain. Yet they cannot fathom that it is a democratically elected government's right or responsibility to step in and offer a solution -- to just pay the damn bill -- when the free market refuses or declines to provide care to their fellow Americans.
Ed seems to worry that the elimination of the profit motive from the health care industry will lead to the ruin of America. I say the profit motive has ruined health care, and is killing America as we speak. I say, let private insurance companies perish. That's what they've been saying to millions of Americans, like my late friend, for years.