COLUMN: Health care system already socialized

University Wire

10-04-2007

(The Crimson White) (U-WIRE) TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- Back before I returned to graduate school, I was an employee at a Fortune 500 company, and health care was simple.

I had a few hundred pre-tax dollars a month deducted from my paycheck for some very good health insurance. My company paid for the rest.

My contribution was about 40 percent -- theirs was about 60 percent. I figured the system worked for most Americans since it worked so well for me.

Then I came to graduate school at the university. Suddenly, health care for my family of four quadrupled.

I didn't have the corporate lollipop in my mouth any longer. I suddenly realized what other people meant when they talked about the "health care crisis."

But I still had my 401k retirement account invested in my old company, so one day -- after studying physics -- I looked through the annual report for that company and dug up a bit of their finances.

The truth hit me like a prostate exam.

My very generous Fortune 500 company -- along with every other major U.S. corporation -- deducts their employees' health insurance contributions from their corporate tax bill.

In a sense, they weren't actually paying for my health insurance. Along with all the other corporations, they pass that cost along to the general U.S. taxpayer.

Workers that have employer-contributed health insurance get a sugar-sweet deal because all the other shmoes in the world -- the fast-food workers, students, bartenders and generally everyone who doesn't get health insurance from their job -- are paying for all of that corporate health care in the form of higher personal taxes.

When I hear people debate socialized health care, it gives me a little smile. Because guess what? We already have socialized health care in the U.S.A.

The poverty class gets Medicare, and most middle-class and upper-class get their version of Medicare -- taxpayer-supported corporate health insurance.

It seems the only people who don't get spoon-fed, tax-supported health care are those who work for companies that do not offer group plans. And if you've read this far, you probably are one of these people or know someone who is.

So should we have a national health care plan? Too late -- we already have one.

U.S. corporations now pay less than 15 percent of our nation's operating expenses -- individuals cover the other 85 percent -- down from around 50 percent in Eisenhower's era.

And that laughably low percentage for them (and painfully high percentage for us) is in part due to their ability to pass the buck on corporate health insurance costs.

At this point, I only see three options.

We can nationalize everyone's health care, like in Canada and Europe. The big winners here will be working-class and poverty-class citizens.

We can denationalize everyone's health care and stop allowing corporations to deduct a massive chunk of their nearly $400 billion per year health insurance costs from their corporate taxes. The winners here will be working-class people. Denationalization will probably lower the overall cost of health care since the health insurance companies will find themselves in a more competitive, free-market.

Or, we can do nothing; keep everything the way it already is. The winners here will be the same people who already know they have it good -- the employees getting tax-subsidized health-insurance, the corporate tycoons and the health insurance corporations.

I suspect -- as usual in a case like this -- that the third option will be the most-likely scenario, and the second the least-likely.

C'est la vie.

The next time you hear a radio personality drone on about the evils of nationalized health insurance, or the need to keep our health care system free-market, at least have a little laugh -- denial springs eternal.
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