Health Insurance: The Bottom Line

The Bottom Line

by Ligorano/Reese

Speculating on Health

“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Susan Sontag, Illness As Metaphor

What is the cost, say, of a good society? One that factors in the health and well being of its citizens?

Today, that answer seems to be lost.

It’s almost as if the response, instead, is turned on its head, mired in a calculus of recursive equations never to end.

A series of derivatives to spread risk, to distribute the cost of illness to the widest segments of our population so that illness becomes affordable.

In fact, the achievement of such a system, it seems, is to set an affordable price for illness.

Absent from this kind of arithmetic, is the human cost.

It is lost in the figures emanating from the budget offices in Washington; it is mute in the pronouncements from hospital CEOs; almost erased from the balance sheets of insurance assessments and policies.

The notion that there is human cost to the problems created by the current healthcare system in this country seems to be a vague side effect of something else.

The metaphor of illness today, unfortunately, is one of economics.

Instead of abstracting numbers from people, from illness, the approach should be to transmute human forms from numerical figures – to see the human dimensions of the bottom line so that health prospers, instead of discounting sickness.

That is why we are making this effort to draw attention to the need to support the Public Health Insurance Plan Option. Real health care reform in our country starts from that.

We encourage you to follow the links on this site to find out more about health care. Support the Public Option.

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Ligorano/Reese

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