Healthcare focuses more on profit than on curing patients
COMMENTARY
By Kip Brown

In social work policy class on Monday, we talked about whether or not every citizen has the right to healthcare.

I answered that we did indeed have a responsibility to care for each other but that there are complicated problems attached with such a sentiment.

First, healthcare is extremely expensive. Making sure that all people are covered would impose new taxes on a country already intensely opposed to taxes. Many conservative economists would argue that the increased taxing required for universal medical care would result in further recession, and thus would prevent people from gaining coverage the ‘natural’ way, through receiving it as a benefit from work or else paying for it yourself. The liberals would counter that making sure people do not die is worth the supposed economic downturn. Yet, there is more to this issue than simply the cost of providing healthcare.

For one, we live in an extremely conflicted society. Consider that the leading killer in the United States is atherosclerosis (hardening of the heart arteries), and that heart disease, along with countless other preventable diseases are caused, primarily, by an unhealthy diet. We stress the necessity of healthcare, but if we could somehow focus on efforts to improve the American diet, we could reduce healthcare costs, resulting in a situation that makes insuring universal health coverage much cheaper and less burdensome on taxpayers. This would ensure that more currently uninsured people with unpreventable diseases could be attended to.

Perhaps it is a bit crude of a statement, but it seems like economic profit is more of a priority than health in the United States. It is considered perfectly acceptable that the amount of commercials advocating nutritional health are far outnumbered by fast-food companies that heavily promote products that contribute to heart disease. I’m not saying we should ban fast-food commercials; I’m just saying there is a conflicting message here. If we believe no one should go without health insurance, why doesn’t it follow that we, as a society, cultivate healthy eating habits?

In addition, many doctors are dependent on the remedial care made necessarily by bad diets in order to profit from their medical practices. Indeed, the benefits to society caused by increased healthiness would, at least in the short term, negatively affect the lives of many health care workers. So, perhaps focusing on the inequality of health care coverage is a too narrow of a focus on this issue. While it is important to ask whether or not everyone has a right to health insurance, it is also seems relevant to ask whether or not our health care system’s focus on profit (and our society’s economic prioritization of profit over health) could actually be impeding a commitment to healthy behavior; behavior that could help avoid the need for painfully expensive health coverage in the first place.

Kip Brown is a senior religion major from Enid, Okla.