Healthcare and the Value of Human Life

Okay, so is healthcare a universal right or a special privilege?

Is healthcare a commodity, a business product for consumers to individually purchase as they will, or is it a service that the whole community should have access to and therefore collectively support?

Consider our Fire Departments.  The whole community shares the financial burden for supporting the establishment of a Fire Department.  If a house is on fire and the Fire Department is called, the homeowner is not first asked, “Did you purchase a Fire Department Policy from us?  First please show proof that you are covered and then we will come and put out the fire.”

Why is this?  It is so because we believe that fire protection (as well as police protection) is a right for everyone in our communities.  It is not a commodity to be bought and sold in a market system.  It is a necessity for healthy thriving communities.

So, why is this same attitude not extended to the principle of healthcare coverage?

As a homeowner I do not shop around for the best and cheapest Fire department protection policy.  Fire Department services are not seen as a privilege for only those that could afford to have it, nor is it viewed as a product that should be sold on a for-profit base.  So why is medical healthcare coverage handled as a for-profit product?

As mentioned above, no one views Fire Department services as a for-profit business and thus no one sees fire department protection as a product that some can choose to opt-out of, while others are free to choose which type, quality, and degree of Fire Department service they’d like to have or can afford to have—as in fair, good, better, or best Fire Department coverage.

In other words, when it comes to a house on fire, everyone gets the same treatment, however small or large the fire emergency may be; because fundamentally, putting out a house that is on fire is seen as a community problem expecting community ownership, not viewed as a personal privilege to be bought and sold in the open market system.  It seems that the same community principle should apply to healthcare.  But it is not.

Why not?

There are many reasons for this.  Primarily our economic system prevents us from seeing healthcare as anything other than a business transaction—rather than as a collective or social/community service.  Thus, the “business” of health has too much at stake to lose, if we, the people, were to view healthcare as a community right for all.  That is the biggest hurdle.

Yet, imagine if we distributed community fire protection and/or police protection in the same way that we distribute healthcare protection.  Homeowners that opted-out of, or that could not afford fire protection would have to sit there and watch their houses burn down.  People in need of the police, if they could not afford to pay their police protection premiums would have to be told that they are on their own in a police emergency call.  How is the need for medical healthcare not the same as the need to have help in putting out a fire at one’s home?

In short, there are some things in a community that are not to be bought and sold on a product or commodity bases but rather should be seen as a common/community right of service for each and all, and thus collectively paid-for by all that belong to said community.  Good medical healthcare should be one of those services.

But for us Americans, it would seem that financial profit has become more the guiding truth and principle of substance rather than morality and the principle of community and social cohesion, respecting healthcare.

In effect, we have qualified, separated and categorized our human value according to monetary value rather than a common human value.

That is, with respect to our healthcare system, we are not operating as if all of us are as one people, bonded by our human commonality, in terms of our right to respect, dignity, honor, and equal attention to healthcare needs.  We do not see ourselves as one collective body or as a unity of persons deserving of the same attention when healthcare needs arise.

Rather, we divide ourselves into the young and healthy, the old and decrepit, preexisting and non-preexisting conditional, and the payable versus the unpayable—those who have money to pay for healthcare versus those who do not have money to pay for it.

Ergo, we do not see ourselves as a community of equals in this together, respecting our common humanity and our healthcare rights.  So, when it comes to the value of our life and its healthcare needs, we are separate and unequal.

By contrast, if someone’s home is on fire, he, she, or they are treated with total equality by the fire department, no questions asked; and the whole community pays for its service.