Mark Linker
Opinion Editor
The modern world, specifically capitalism, has alleviated many scarcity problems that characterized the pre-modern world. This is a great good that has lifted millions of individuals from poverty and starvation. Getting mass supply at a cheap cost to as many people as possible in a lot of ways brings the collective society away from the natural world. Not to say that the same biological factors that govern human behavior aren’t a factor anymore, but many of the struggles that affected man in the natural world aren’t an issue due to the problem of scarcity of food and other products being solved by the market. However, there are still issues and certain sections of modern economies that capitalism can’t solve. One of the issues that throws man back into a pre-modern world is the need for health care.
Having a for-profit model for medicine certainly has its benefits. Competition drives the price for cost lower and leaves room for medical innovation in the market. With that being said, some products are so essential for human life that competition may be far more immoral than one would think. For products such as water and food, the cost is cheap enough that the vast majority of people can afford such necessities with little hindrance to their everyday lives.
Medical care is a different story, with very little prominent insurance companies, the cost for essential medical care can often drive the prices so high that no lower-class or middle-class individual would be able to afford such things and still live a life where they’re able to buy other essential items. One surgery or cancer treatment procedure alone can throw someone of a lower class into financial chaos.
Then, there’s the whole other issue of people who have very real chronic illnesses that require lifetime medical care, thus making the individual or family slaves to medical bills and debt for their entire lives.
Many proponents of “free market” ideals love to talk about the role of personal responsibility and how poverty is simply a factor of personal life choices that have gone awry. By this logic, the prospect of being saddled with a chronic illness or injury that is completely outside the domain of free choice only to be forced to spend half your yearly income on medical bills throws the individual back into a premodern society without the concept of personal responsibility.
This is why medicare for all is one of the most pressing and important issues of our time. If we truly believe that we have moved beyond the cruelty and privation that characterized life in the natural world, then it is only morally right that a new social contract is formed around the notion of free medical care. In my view, the West can’t claim to be the provider of peace, justice, and rights without coming to this stark realization.