BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | Sick and uninsured in the US.

The article above popped up in my RSS reader this morning while I was eating breakfast. I thought the title sounded interesting so I had a gander. It’s a sad tale, in more than one way. The author’s son was recently diagnosed with Type One diabetes and was treated in a hospital in Washington, DC. Your heart cannot help but go out to the family and hope that a cure is found someday.

The article takes a predictable turn next, one that is almost too obvious, when it talks about the medical bills that followed the son’s treatment: the co-pays for medicine and supplies that insidiously eat away at a family’s budget—no doubt already under great stress from the national financial mess The Current Occupant is leaving to his successor and the rest of us to somehow fix. Then there are the stunningly-high costs of hospital time and treatment ($800 for urinalysis!) that threaten to send the mind spinning in a whirlwind of chaos and incomprehensible insurer-doublespeak. Readers are surely expected to think—and can be excused for it—that these fees are outrageous: designed to pad the pockets of a corrupt capitalist medical industry focused not so much on making people better but making people pay eternally to stay marginally healthy.

A bridging section hammers home the appalling fact that nearly one in seven Americans—including some eight million children, eight times the population of Rhode Island—have no health insurance at all. No security blanket to prevent them from dropping like flies in the street, no matter that the blanket those of us with insurance have is increasingly threadbare as costs skyrocket and coverage withers. The spectre of bankruptcy, that ultimate sign of failure in America, is raised. It’s a valid point—many Americans who were forced to go through bankruptcy before the housing and financial markets self-immolated were sent down that path by medical bills that disrupted their ability to stay financially above water. My mother, who has worked for insurance companies for as long as I can remember, was one of that ever-growing throng and she had insurance coverage.

The story reaches its pinnacle of promise in the sweaty land of South Beach, Miami, Florida, where we’re treated to the example of Carlos and his unnamed female companion who deemed flying commercial “too far”—not that the distance was too far, but that the idea of having to share a jet with the common people was simply too much of an insult to her clearly-superior class. One can easily imagine the scene: our author and his family one one side of the lift; on the other, probably huddling together to prevent the spread of the dreaded middleclassitis virus, we find Carlos (leathery tanned skin, comb-over, hideous beach garb from Canali or Tom Ford, dripping with bling, wishing he could smoke that hand-rolled Cuban his boyfriend-on-the-sly slipped him last night) and his anonymous wife (imagine an even more leather-tanned, skimpily-dressed, viperish version of one of the Real Housewives of Orange County), discussing how they’ll spend a few hundred thousand on a weekend getaway to the latest über-rich scene. Here is the America of the 21st century: the ultra-rich, so disconnected from reality that one wonders if they don’t hire people to breathe for them, contrasted with “the rest of us,” inexorably sliding ever closer to serfdom.

This is the America where the only people who can make healthcare policy are the people who have the least invested in its success; the rich and politicians (who are often one in the same), whose access to healthcare is virtually assured even in the depths of what could become the next Great Depression, don’t want to see affordable healthcare for the rest of us. Why would they want to have to share doctors or treatments or medicines with the poor? Many (if not most) of them believe the poor want or deserve their lot in life; so why should they get adequate coverage?

The article could have presented the many arguments against this sort of divisive policy: adequate healthcare for everyone prevents escalating costs associated with emergency care, to which the un- and under-insured are increasingly being forced; fundamental universal coverage will not (necessarily) result in endless lines at the doctor’s office; a populace that doesn’t have to scramble for money to cover healthcare or worry about whether they can even see a doctor for preventive care is one that is inherently more productive and positive-thinking (which itself is a boost to health); and so on—all the arguments that have been used successfully around the world.

Unfortunately, the author misses the point altogether and instead repeats the (conservative) party line that only a healthcare system based on the viciously divisive capitalist model can assure continued advances in medical care. Instead of arguing for a vigorous new direction in national healthcare policy, one aimed at providing incentives to medical professionals and companies to continue to innovate and push the limits of medicine while putting realistic limits on out of pocket costs, we’re cautioned that Obama needs to essentially stay the course that The Current and Soon to be Former Occupant and his cohorts championed—the one where an increasing number of people cannot afford even basic health disaster coverage.

It’s a crying shame.