Public Safety Net—Not Charity—Should Guarantee Health Care

by Mike Hall, Jan 3, 2009

Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC). This commentary appeared Jan. 2 in the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times.

THE MOST heartbreaking e-mail alert that crossed my computer screen this holiday season came from a union which has set up a fund for medical benefits for widows and orphans of their former members.

Reliance on charity rather than a public safety net symbolizes what has become a perversely unique American solution to social problems, especially in the Bush administration era.

In “Critical Condition,” a searing 2006 indictment of the collapse of our medical system, Donald Barlett and James Steele described how pervasive this dependence has become.

Garage sales, spaghetti feeds, livestock auctions, pancake breakfasts, walkathons, bingo tournaments, pie socials, car washes, church suppers, raffles, barbecues, basketball shootouts, even hot-air balloon rides, all to help families drowning with unpayable medical bills.

Rather than a coordinated national system, as every other industrialized country has established, our go-it-alone, you’re-on-your-own society has hit rock bottom in the most basic area of all, the care of our communities.

http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/01/03/public-safety-net%e2%80%94not-charity%e2%80%94should-guarantee-health-care/

Depending on "charity" for fundamental rights, like food, shelter, justice and healthcare is demeaning. And it places a veil of uncertainty and worry on the seeker of charity which is a hard burden to bear.

It's all part of the republican imposition of the "Great Risk Shift" which places the burden on the individual and lifts it from the group which is much better able to bear it...

Insurance is based on a spread of risk and the law of large numbers...the closer we can approximate that in these sorts of dealings, the better off we will all be...