Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

One of the reasons people join a tribe is to be taken care of if they are sick or injured. Healthcare for its citizens at the national level was first introduced in 19th Century Germany, and in fact, during the early 20th Century in the United States one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Party platforms was universal healthcare. Slowly, the advanced nations of the world stumbled into universal healthcare over the next century, most after the Second World War, but America waited until recently to provide not healthcare, but health insurance, to its citizens.

The distinction between healthcare & health insurance is an important one because the only people without universal healthcare in America is the Middle Class: the “poor” have it, the rich have it, public employees have it, the military & veterans have it, the elderly have it, even prisoners have it. Only wage-earners must pay monthly premiums & after a high deduction, insurance will cover the cost of catastrophic healthcare. It's more a lottery than healthcare, and makes little sense except in political terms. There were simply too many players: doctors, insurers, lawyers, administrators & entrepreneurs who are complicit in the status quo.

Socializing healthcare would be the best solution, where healthcare costs are paid out of regular taxes with no insurance middle-man. This works in other countries but Americans are suspicious of socialism & prefer a Market Forces solution. However, Market Forces only work when there is an adversarial relationship among all the parties involved: workers, owners, customers, to keep each other in check. A Market solution for healthcare has not been forthcoming for the simple reason that healthcare is not a voluntary commodity: you will pay any amount of money if your son is going to lose his eye. And the knowledge required to make informed, considered choices is extraordinarily arcane, not to mention that medicine is all mixed up with mysticism, making healthcare choices highly subjective and subject to exploitation.

Liability issues in healthcare are also unreasonably avaricious because of the emotions involved, and healthcare union workers use the same exploitative rhetoric. The stakes are so high and the players so entrenched that healthcare is a virtual trust, impossible to break, and also impossible to ignore.