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Health care - Commodity or social service?
Featured in: A Patient's Journey
It's time we take a hard look at how we want to treat health care in the US. Is it a commodity or a social service? Vote!There has been an interesting discussion, even a little heated at one point, over at InsureBlog which started out discussing a recent poll conducted by ABC News, USA Today and the Kaiser Family Foundation purported to show that in general people in the US were very satisfied with their health care.
The discussion soon digressed into comparing the purchase of health care/insurance to the purchase of groceries, auto insurance, loans and a few other analogies. I didn't think the analogies were appropriate (actually I called them stupid, which is what triggered some animosity), but it seemed everyone else thought they were appropriate.
I believe, like every other industrialized country in the world believes, health care is not a
commodity distributed according to the ability to pay
rather it is a
social service distributed according to medical need.
Unlike the ability to get a loan or buy gasoline or a car, we don't have nearly as much control over our health. Even when you lead a totally healthy life style, you can still get sick. Plus not having the ability to seek medical attention when it is needed, can create far more serious consequences for society as a whole, than not having the ability to purchase a car, or getting a home loan.
Having originally questioned the demographics of those polled, since the results of the poll are very believable if you ask only healthy people, I thought I would try and conduct my own informal poll to see how everyone who reads my blog feels about the state of health care in the US.
Should health care be treated as a commodity distributed according to the ability to pay, or a social service distributed according to medical need?
NOTE FROM AUTHOR: I apologize in advance for any pop-ups you may experience when trying to vote. It is the inevitable consequence of using a free service that would otherwise have a fee attached.
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I have mantle cell lymphoma, and to be so bold as to quote a line from another blogger "it may kill me." Actually it is killing me, albeit very slowly at this point. In the mean time, I'm still able to function mostly as normal, going to work, riding my bike, playing golf and even planning for vacations.
In fact, if it wasn't for that fateful blood test of March 26, 2002, I still might not even realize I am sick.
But that isn't the case, so I decided to chronicle my life from the beginning (not from when I was born, mind you, but from that fateful day), and remembering it's not just about being sick. Even if you've been diagnosed with a terminal illness, that doesn't mean life ends.
We're all going to die, most of us just have different perspectives on when that is going to happen. It's how we deal with the living part of our lives, that makes a difference.
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Comments (3)
Although I think that medical care should be considered a social service distributed according to medical need, it must also be given in a timely fashion. When the numbers in need outstrips the ability to provide the service quickly, major problems develop, and people that need the service often would rather pay than wait. Then of course, those with the ability to pay get service, and those without don't, which isn't fair. This is the debate that is raging on and on in Canada. Two tier or not two tier.
Although I also agree that even those that lead a healthy lifestyle unfortunately can get sick, I think that if more people took responsibility for their own health and ate unprocessed whole food, exercised regularly, and slept adequate hours in the dark each night, the pressure on the medical system could be relieved greatly.
There isn't any money to be made by the stakeholders in the pharma and food industry so they have no motivation to suggest real food instead of processed etc, sleep and exercise instead of popping a pill. The wellness message is failing to reach the masses partly because it is harder to make money on it.
Vreni Gurd
Health and Vitality Coach
CHEK 3, NLC 2
www.wellnesstips.ca
I concur with Vreni and suggest we ought to be integrating sick-care with well-care, as well as giving consumers/patients incentives for taking better care of themselves through diet, exercise, stress reduction and use of effective coping skills, treatment compliance, etc.
Steve Beller, PhD
http://wellness.wikispaces.com
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Author: Details
First Name
Marc
Middle Name
L
Last Name
Kashinsky
Degrees
BSMME, MBA
Short Bio
I have mantle cell lymphoma, and to be so bold as to quote a line from another blogger "it may kill me." Actually it is killing me, albeit very slowly at this point. In the mean time, I'm still able to function mostly as normal, going to work, riding my bike, playing golf and even planning for vacations.
In fact, if it wasn't for that fateful blood test of March 26, 2002, I still might not even realize I am sick.
But that isn't the case, so I decided to chronicle my life from the beginning (not from when I was born, mind you, but from that fateful day), and remembering it's not just about being sick. Even if you've been diagnosed with a terminal illness, that doesn't mean life ends.
We're all going to die, most of us just have different perspectives on when that is going to happen. It's how we deal with the living part of our lives, that makes a difference.
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Thanks for the heads up, Marc. I just posted the following to the InsureBlog ...
There are many troubling things about this survey. In addition to the puzzling disconnects mentioned by others, patient satisfaction ratings should be interpreted with extreme caution. Consider the following:
1. Despite what the survey says, there is an undeniable healthcare crisis in our country and a serious knowledge void.
2. Just because patients believe they have received good care, it doesn’t necessarily mean the care they received is adequate. That is, patient satisfaction is not a valid measure of clinical effectiveness.
3. As one knowledgeable physician put it: “People don't know what good healthcare is because they don't know how bad healthcare is. People don't know how bad healthcare is because they don't realize how good it could be.” -- Dr. Rob Lamberts. So, the more informed someone is about our healthcare crisis, the less likely they will report being satisfied. My guess is that many of the people surveyed weren’t very informed.
Steve Beller, PhD
http://wellness.wikispaces.com