The Harvard School of Public Health released the results of a fascinating poll last Thursday. This survey centered on the term “socialized medicine,” and found that about one-third of voters did not understand the term.
The voters who had an understanding of this terminology were asked whether they believed that socialized medicine would be better than the current U.S. health care system. The results were overwhelmingly divided by party lines. Seventy percent of Republicans thought that socialized medicine would be worse, while 70 percent of Democrats thought it would be better. With more than 1,000 voters surveyed in this poll, its general application looks pretty good.
Those of us who are studying health care in any capacity at ETSU should know something about the nightmare that is managed care. We know that under the current system, the cost of prescriptions is constantly on the rise. Doctors and nurses and therapists don’t make decisions about how or when to treat patients, because the insurance companies do.
When the U.S. economy is down, and the only people making any money work for ExxonMobil, there are the drug companies, raking in the cash while America’s sick are going broke.
Our current health care system is terribly broken. This does not seem to be an issue of debate, really.
The debate is how to fix it, and this recent poll shows that the Democrats and Republicans are standing oceans apart.
Interestingly, “socialized medicine” has an uncanny likeness to universal health care. The main difference is that right-wing pundits like to say “socialized” anything, in an effort to tie democratic policies to communism. Yes, anyone who advocates universal health care is nothing but a dirty, evil communist.
People in our country are going without proper medical treatment, and we are pointing fingers and calling names like children in a schoolyard. Republicans in opposition to universal health care seem to fear that this would put America on the track to being a communist nation.
The justification for fighting universal health care seems to rest on capitalism. Many conservatives have expressed the concern that universal health care will be the end of competition among health care companies. This supposedly will hinder innovation and research while driving down the economy.
This is an unfounded claim, and many countries with universal health care are still leading the industry in research and innovation. Moreover, this argument presumes that we must put the priorities of our economy over health care. Which brings me to ethics, ever hear of the Hippocratic Oath?
Well, the Hippocratic Oath is not what it once was. We have discarded irrelevant parts of it, and catered it to modern medicine. What we have kept is the view that in the practice of medicine, the good of the patient must be the highest priority.
So can we set aside the McCarthyism (which I thought we had done in 1958) and consider having socialized medicine in a democratic society? Can we forget about party lines long enough to have an intelligent conversation about how screwed up our current system is?

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