We've Been Trapped Inside a Bad Health Care System So Long, We Don't Even Know How Much We're Missing

By Sara Robinson, Campaign for America's Future. Posted June 26, 2009.

My neighbors seldom go bankrupt. The Canadian bankruptcy rate has soared in the past year to 4.3 per thousand. In the U.S., it's 11.1 per thousand. The entire difference between these two figures is accounted for by the fact that 62 percent of all U.S. bankruptcies were driven at least in part by medical expenses.

But tidy numbers like this elide a harder reality: Bankruptcy doesn't just cost us financially. It also destroys the foundations of our social capital. When the house, the dreams, and the future are gone, very often the marriage is the next thing that goes, too. Bankruptcy travels in close company with domestic trouble, divorce, drug use, homelessness, and broken families. (After medical-bill refugees, the second most common people in bankruptcy courts are recently divorced women.) If, as conservatives like to remind us, the family is the basic unit of civilization, then our health care system is directly making its profits by pulling down our social foundations -- and ultimately undermining our ability to hold our civilization together.

My neighbors have never seen anyone die because they didn't have health care. With 22,000 Americans dying every year due to a lack of health insurance -- that's one every 24 minutes -- there aren't many of us who don't know someone who lost a loved one because they couldn't get the treatment they needed. (For me, it was my father.)

But when I share this factoid with Canadians, they invariably do a long double take. They lean back, squint, stare, and pause to reassess my credibility (if not my sanity). It's literally unbelievable. They can't even process it. I must be making it up, or at least exaggerating. It's just beyond the realm of imagining that a rich nation like America would let that kind of thing happen -- let alone let it happen sixty times a day, for years on end.

And yet, they know things are bad down here, because everybody who goes South buys travel insurance before they cross the border. Everybody has heard scary stories about people who got sick or hurt and ended up in an American ER with a five-figure bill to pay. It's just a stupid risk, and they're not willing to take it.

What would you have done differently if you'd never had to worry about health insurance? How would life be different now? How would it change your plans for the future?

Go ahead. Think about it. Let yourself get good and angry. The current system has robbed an entire generation of Americans of their full potential. It has made us serfs. It has narrowed our horizons. It has undermined our families and communities. It has deprived us of the chance to save, to own a home, to educate ourselves and our children, to see the world, to retire in comfort, and to live to a healthy and robust old age.

It has left us in this swamp, chin-deep in alligators. And the first step in getting back out is getting very clear in our own minds that there are other places where people don't live this way -- and then angry enough to lean on our leaders, and make it just as clear to them that we don't intend to live like this any more, either.

Because your future is still out there -- and the most important thing you need to get there is a health care plan nobody can ever take away.

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Sara Robinson is a Fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006, and is a founding member of Group News Blog.

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