Don’t try to argue with me or prove the points. I’m for responsible spending and can make do with very little and survive. But health care for all is a right, not a privilege or a benefit. Preventive healthcare is more important than acute intervention – it prevents later costly intervention. If we treat healthcare as a true business, then just like manufacturing or software development, the earlier in the cycle you discover defects and bugs, the less expensive it is to fix it. The best way to cut costs is to 1) find problems early, and 2) create a reasonable treatment regime taking client dignity into account.
This is why I am going on the record to say that we need to give every single American privatized healthcare – as long as we outsource it all to Kaiser. We can have the best of both worlds, private, but with a single payer.
Kaiser was founded by an industrialist, Henry Kaiser. From the fountain of all knowledge, Wikipedia:
“In 1942, Henry Kaiser built a steel mill in Fontana to supply steel for the ships he was building to help America win the war. When he learned that his workers couldn’t get adequate health care, he built a hospital and medical offices right on the steel mill grounds. It was the first Kaiser Permanente facility in Southern California.”
Wikipedia (of course)
Kaiser is one of the men who helped us win the Big One. He knew that workers who worried about health, (theirs or their families’) didn’t make for good workers. Shockingly, he correlated worker happiness to productivity. If you are worried about survival issues at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, you don’t have time to even envision high achievement and productivity.
If not for Henry Kaiser, it would be a different world. Kaiser was revolutionary in his thinking. So was Tommy Douglas, the longtime leader of the New Democratic party, who along with John Diefenbaker (whose hand I once shook – for another post) and Lester Pearson who helped establish the Canadian national program.
I think I would go as far to say, that if the rank and file American, the worker, the people who want better for their kids had a national healthcare system based on the Kaiser, nonprofit model, life might not be particularly better or richer, economic cycles would still come and go like the tides ebb and flow, but we would be healthier. Palliative care is one of the best programs, in terms of economic savings and customer respect, and overall happiness. If I could come back as anyone, I would come back as Julie, the nurse practitioner because I know her karma is really, really good.
