BLAME ‘SYSTEM’ FOR POOR HEALTH
Daily Observer
At the same
time that Congress is seeking to socialize medicine, debate rages as to whether
or not
Health
care is not a single entity. It combines
medical care for the ill and preventive care for the well.
To prevent
disease one must start with food, housing and the ecology. The World Health Organization has defined
personal health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well being
and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Seymour
Harris, in “The Economics of Health Care,” page 43, pursues the subject, saying
“Good nutrition and adequate shelter reduce a person’s vulnerability to
disease.”
Budd
Shenkin, in his excellent book, Health Care for
Migrant Workers: Policies and Politics, amplifies the Harris statement. The Shenkin-Biles
draft of Proposed Legislation for Migrant Health Centers (Appendix F) states
that a migrant health organization “Provides for all the residents of the area
environmental health services including the detection and alleviation of
unhealthful conditions of water supply, sewage treatment, solid waste disposal,
past infestation, field sanitation and other environmental factors related to
health --.”
The
above statements confer responsibility and authority on the obvious, which
brings us to New York, as well as other great cities of the nation, all slum
ridden with large congested centers of malnourished citizen living in
sub-standard vermin infested dwellings.
Those
who would dismantle the medical profession to deliver “health care” as if it were a package (and it is indeed a political package) must
carefully distinguish health care from medical care.
The
latter has achieved the highest level of proficiency in the history of
civilization.
Doctors
and hospitals, contrary to bad press, are doing their jobs exceptionally
well. The sick person can receive
therapies ranging from aspirin and antibiotics to kidney dialysis and heart
replacement.
What
many Americans cannot achieve, however, is proper nourishment and shelter,
because they cannot afford these commodities.
The system, not the doctor, deprives them of health.
By
blurring the distinction between medical care and health care, our political
leaders and much of the press guide the public into the erroneous belief that
if there is an equitable distribution of doctors and hospitals, the health
goals of the nation will be achieved.
However,
sociologists agree that by distributing medical care more evenly the quality of
service diminishes. Yet the government
seems determined to socialize the medical profession while preaching pious
euphemisms about free enterprise correctives needed to repair the obscene
conditions that they have permitted to develop in our cities, e.g. to throw
people out of jobs to balance the budget.
This
would be understandable were the medical profession in the same state of
disarray, but the opposite is true. It
functions at the highest standard of excellence.
The
bald fact is that capitalism has failed in the cities and their ghettos will
consume us. The problem with
Landlords,
unable to keep pace with the rate of destruction, abandon buildings in ever
increasing numbers. In the past, the
Why
not take a chance on subsidizing the individual American? Welfare is not a subsidy,
it is a subsistence dole that institutionalizes poverty.
Perhaps,
however, if those who lived in the slums owned the building, had a stake in
their neighborhoods, they would have the incentive to rebuild and maintain
them. Subsidize their fuel, and in
general encourage the volunteerism that welds a community.
Perhaps
they could even be rewarded for picking up their own garbage and trucking it to
whatever heaven garbage is trucked to.
Health
care cannot be delivered as long as cities go unattended. If the cities fail, the capitalist system has
failed.
Free
enterprise cannot be salvaged by socializing its successful components such as
the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry.