The way that dominant social practices around illness and dying connect with dominant social practices around dying has to do with making money. Insurance companies and drug companies and many doctors earn billions with the system the U.S. has now. Many people would not have any health insurance without the Obama plan, which Republicans are busy trying to take away. Many people are spending more than they can afford on insurance and cannot afford to go to the dentist because most health plans don’t have dental coverage. Too may people have to go to the hospital’s emergency room, where the cost of care is hugely expensive. They go there because they don’t have a regular doctor. If they had one, they could get all their shots and have preventive care and they wouldn’t need to go to emergency room except in an emergency, which is the whole idea of having them. Regarding elderly people and dying people, we have learned that too many are kept on expensive life support systems instead of being allowed to die earlier but with a better quality of life at home or in a hospice instead of being drugged up and attached to tubes. Timothy Egan says in “The Way We Die Now” that “1 percent of the population accounts for 35 percent of health card spending.” Health care should not be a business that gives care to a few and not to everybody. It should also not make companies and some doctors so rich. If it’s a for profit system, then it won’t be fair because the cost will be too high for most people.
In the same way that poorer people can’t afford good health care, they also can’t afford good food. In inner cities there are hardly any stores with fresh produce and what there is expensive. Healthy food in general is expensive. Junk food is all that is affordable. We learned about the big industrial food companies that put high fructose corn syrup in most processed foods now even though it is a cause of obesity and diabetes. The corn syrup is government subsidized. If the government is going to subsidize something, it should be something good like health care and green markets in poor neighborhoods. According to the Centers for Disease Control, one in three people in the U.S. will have diabetes by the year 2050 if the food situation stays the way it is. Also in Harlem and Northern Manhattan more than 40% of children are obese or overweight and have asthma which is related to obesity. 27% of pre-school children there are obese. These children also don’t get good health care (New York City Department of Health http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/pdf/dpho/dpho-harlem-obesity.pdf )
People should not mind paying taxes to help everyone have good health care. They should be angry at insurance companies and drug companies that are only interested in charging as much as they can. People should not want their taxes to subsidize corn syrup so that huge food companies can get richer. If we think taxes should go for the military to have national security and a safer society, why wouldn’t we want taxes to support health care to make a healthier society.? Even for people who are 100% selfish, shouldn’t they think it would be better to live in a more productive society instead of one where people are diseased and unable to contribute to it?
"The way that dominant social practices around illness and dying connect with dominant social practices around dying has to do with making money." This quote from your post does a great job of summing up the American health care system. Although in places like England, the incentives are actually a bit more noble as far as care distribution goes, it is the perfect way to describe health care in America. Nixon said himself that making sure patients get less care is a good thing if it means more profit is getting reeled in. I also liked the way you connected the illness and dying unit to the food unit that we are doing now Good job!
ReplyDeleteI liked how in your last paragraph you talked about how people should be reacting. I think the big question is, why aren't they? I think though that in America you might come across more people focused on funding the army than their own insurance, because they will take their health for granted. The American mindset at the moment seems to be set more on protecting our "great" country instead of improving it. I wonder if it would be possible to convince the majority otherwise.
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