A Question of Equality

For all but the last few ticks on the human time clock, the quality of healthcare or medical care mattered little. If someone developed a serious affliction or became critically injured, in all likelihood they were headed toward their rapid end. Indian or chief, royal or rube, you were lucky if your medical practitioner knew enough not to clean open wounds with river water, didn’t administer killing amounts of mercury or arsenic or blood-let you to death, not to mention passing on to you some nasty, lethal infection.

The threat of serious illness or death has always been the great equalizer. The high-born and the rich never fared much better than anyone else, and no amount of wordly goods could save you.

The modernization of medical care accelerated rapidly only during the mid 19th-Century. In one of the cornerstone achievements of mankind--along with the widespread use of fire, writing and the exodus of out Africa--we began to observe, discover and understand the things smaller than we could observe with the naked eye: our building blocks, our essence. Discovery of this micro-world drove development in the three basic sciences of modern medicine: biology, chemistry, and physics, and fueled the modern medical revolution.

Barely a-hundred-and-fifty years removed from the childhood of modern medicine, the average life expectancy has roughly doubled in areas with access to modern healthcare. The availability of quality prenatal care is the single largest factor in raising the live birth rate and reducing infant and early childhood mortality.

What could be more basic to, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness...”, than our health and longevity? Denial of healthcare or pricing it beyond the means of many essentially shortens the lives of those left out.

This is a statistical no brainer, really. If you have health care, on average you live longer than those who don’t. A new kind of inequality suddenly appears, a direct result of our misplaced, market-based system: some of us will have a right to expect a longer, better quality life; many of us will not.

Only the federal government can remedy this inequality by assuring health care access for every citizen, every indian and every chief.

I look on those who would deny universal healthcare access with pity. What kind of folks would deny their fellow citizens an equal chance at life as a political statement or to maintain their profits.

We should take the model of our one true socialized governmental function: defense and security. We aren’t left to hiring our own police or private armies to keep us safe. Since national defense and local laws apply to everyone, it is much more effective and better managed through the public sector, supported by our taxes.

Healthcare, so basic to our freedom and a core issue for every citizen, from every walk of life, demands the same level of national effort and attention.