Sex and health care may seem at first blush not to have much in common, but if you think about it, the two topics are tightly related. And it's not just that sexual health care--everything from STD testing to contraception to childbirth--is an important part of overall health care, though that's certainly important. The two are related on a philosophical level. After all, sex and affordable health care are two things that almost everyone wants, but large percentages of the population just can't seem to get more than intermittently, if at all.
The booty call crisis falls outside the reach of collective solutions, at least for now, but the health care crisis calls for a straightforward solution: universal health care. After all, there's something wrong with a country where exponentially more people stay up at night worrying what will happen if they get sick than worry about whether or not they're going to get laid again. The proportions should be reversed. In fact, ideally the number of people in the entire nation who worry about the financial cost of sickness should be less than the number of people bidding on a random auction for a pair of used cha cha heels on eBay.
Yet thirteen years after the Clinton plan failed to get out of Congress, the nation still seems stuck wondering whether the US should have universal health care at all, when we should be simply debating the details of what plan works best. The well-worn objections to universal health care have been thoroughly trounced in logic-based discussions, but they keep persisting long past their welcome, much like "The Macarena" or the media attention paid to Paris Hilton.
Below, I round up and skewer my favorites!
Oh noes! The bureaucracy! Opponents of universal health care trot out horror stories of waiting months for knee surgery and having to fill out paperwork to get it. This scare tactic never worked well on people whose wait times for knee surgery, not to mention heart surgery, were "infinity," but it did have a bit of a grip on the middle class that rightfully dreads the specter of mountains of paperwork.
It's quickly becoming clear, though, that when opponents of universal health care invoke the waiting-periods-and-paperwork bogeyman, they're mainly referencing your current miseries dealing with insurance companies, and simply pretending the bureaucratic nightmare you currently live in now will only happen to you if we get universal health care. Don't think too hard about the mental acrobatics to get to that point; the Wachowski brothers already have the screenplay rights. Actually trying to file a claim against your insurance company will create seven tons of paperwork and 80 manhours of squabbling over the phone for a good percentage of middle class Americans now; a sharp stick to the eye could win a general election against the current insurance system at this point. Universal health care promises to be a relief from the paperwork nightmare.
Oh noes! The money! Universal health care will cost money. We will all pay varying amounts into the system. Opponents of universal health care will point to that higher tax bill and say, "See? Don't you want that money?"
But they lie. That money wouldn't go to video games and pints on Friday night. That money and a chunk plus would go to your insurance company so they can do you the expensive favor of denying your claim on the theory that you should have known ahead of time that you'd break a bone when you were hit by a car. Yes, opponents of universal health care expect, when they trot out the money woes, that you won't remember that if you have health care from the government, you won't have to pay it to the insurance company, which will help you break even and most likely save money.
Oh, but opponents will say, under universal health care, you have to pay into a system where you won't get your money back if you don't get sick, but someone else in the system will get treatment on your dollar. It's very unfair, this pooling-of-resources-to-cover-our-asses system. In fact, it's a lot like those damn insurance companies, and you know how much you hate them.
Oh noes! Pinkos! But it's socialized medicine. You know what that means--you'll be trying to deliver a baby while all the health care workers around you will be singing "L'Internationale." Which is very distracting, as anyone whose ever had a baby in a commune with a crunchy midwife can attest. Widespread social programs lead directly to totalitarian communism, of course, which is why your average public school-educated child sleeps with The Communist Manifesto under her pillow. They have us there. We might go through our whole lives thinking nothing of the fact that we can get fast, friendly health care without having to go through a hostile middleman known as the insurance company, but in reality we're all trapped in a gulag and don't even know it.
Oh noes! Irresponsibility! If people can afford health care, the thinking goes, they'll just go out and use it without really thinking about the cost of it and doing the necessary legwork of shopping around. Because right now we have legions of Americans demanding a list of prices from competitors when they show up bleeding in E.R. It makes a certain kind of sense. You buy that Lexus because you want to set yourself apart from the working class rabble and their beater vehicles; getting that heart surgery is so much less fun if any old burger-inhaling guy on the street has access to the same surgery.
