Callousness with consequences

Being without health insurance is no big deal. Just ask President Bush. “I mean, people have access to health care in America,” he said last week. “After all, you can just go to an emergency room.”

The above is the lead paragraph of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s op-ed which was reprinted in The Virginian Pilot. The article seems right on point with much of what has been discussed in this thread. Krugman points out many of the fallacies in the arguments against some form of universal health care:

• From Business Week: “… American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living with universal health-care systems.”
• The Commonwealth Fund survey says the US ranks “near the bottom … in terms of how hard it is to get medical attention on short notice…”
• Delays in Canada and Britain are caused by doctors, while insurance companies are the culprit in the US. Reference Mark Kleiman here.
• Americans get faster hip replacements because the majority of them are performed by Medicare, which is essentially a universal health care program.

With so many Americans uninsured, we are beyond the time for serious conversation on some form of universal coverage.