OK. I digress. But health is important to your business, and health care reform is still a political issue.
Consider: When we are healthy and mature enough (i.e., not children), normally we can be productive members of society. In those earning years, our productivity goes down with ill health.
Restoring the sick to productivity is itself a drain on productivity or savings, not to mention the loss in productivity of the sick during illness.
Medical care is a draining expense. Lack of medical care is more so. The question then becomes, “How can medical care minimize the drain on productivity and savings?”
But that is not the only question. Being human means more than our net economic worth to society. And each of us has an emotional attachment to his or her own survival.
And so we might sacrifice more productivity and savings than is necessary in order to help ensure our health and survival. Valuing human life as sacred and fearing for our own survival might even drive us to support universal tax-supported health care.
The appeal of universal health care is not so much the political mantra that we have a right to be healthy (as if achieving universal health were possible), but more because we fear ill-health and its consequences.
Whatever the advantages of tax supported health care, government cannot deliver on its promises of universal care unless it redefines such care in Orwellian terms.
For one thing, such a system provides incentive to overuse. Someone else’s tax dollars will support me. If I don’t use the system, I’ll miss out on something valuable. Thus overuse leads to waiting lists and rationing, as may be observed where tax supported health care has been instituted. Those who need care can’t get it in a timely fashion if at all.
A shift from private to universal, tax-supported health care also means that government gains greater control over who gets care and even what care is. In the US, such a system would seem to undermine human rights at a fundamental level, the doctor’s and the patient’s.
It also makes medical innovation much more difficult on average. Those with political clout may have the means to institute change under universal health care, but such entities normally have a vested interest in the status quo.
Of course, a private health care system, or the quasi-public, insurance-government-pharmaceutical-hospital system in the US today, each have their own problems. Some treated patients can’t pay. Some untreated patients can’t afford treatment.
There is no ideal solution to ill health. There is only the question of how to minimize ill-health’s damages while appeasing our emotions and valuing being human.
Given the present financial challenges nationally and internationally, health care of any sort is at greater risk than in a vibrant economy. Better business is thus one healthy pill for health care reform.
[...] kill business, any positive change from the government perspective can only be more dubious. Health care reform apart from new 1099 reporting promises to burden many businesses already on an economic brink. Such [...]