By Eric Salk, M.D.
Emergency Physicians Monthly, Letters, March 2012
Re “The Wrong Right” [by Dr. Mark Plaster, executive editor of Emergency Physicians Monthly]: Dear Mark, I enjoyed another of your columns for its excellent writing and unique perspective, but had to dial up my Nipride drip for what your politics do to my BP.
As the primary purveyor of the Fox News, “fair and balanced” approach to emergency medicine journalism, you have published many articles attacking health care reform and regulation, single-payer proposals, and the idea that access to health care is a right. In this most recent column, you describe your debate with a young, idealistic Ph.D. student who maintains this latter position.
Your main argument that “health care, if it is a right, involves requiring someone to do something for me, and by definition, that makes the person rendering the care a slave to the person with the right to that care,” is a classic straw man argument that approaches absurdity.
Of course, guaranteeing reasonable access to health care does not make us, the providers, “slaves” of our patients. If so, then police, firemen, public school teachers and even postal workers are already our “slaves,” since we have decided as a civilized society that safety, protection, education and postal service are all rights that should be enjoyed by ALL of our citizens.
The fact that, unlike every other developed nation in the world, we have not decided to include access to health care as one of those universal rights is the real absurdity here.
No one is saying that it is the sole responsibility of doctors to provide universal access to care. The question is, why can’t we, as a country, provide a large enough health insurance pool that there would be room for everyone, with no one left out?
We already have such a pool available to all of us when we reach 65 in Medicare, so a single-payer health insurance model is not such an un-American idea. Why do we continue to pay double what other countries pay, and to hand over our health care resources to the corporate entities that are currently sucking the life out of our health care system for the sake of investor profits?
Like you, I am proud to be an emergency physician, proud that we treat everyone who comes to us for care equally and without screening for payment. But the fact that this guarantee of access to health care — a guarantee tacked on as an amendment to a 1986 budget bill, in reaction to patient dumping practices by private hospitals — should be the only real guarantee of universal access to health care in our country is not something I am very proud of. I think we can do better.
Eric Salk, M.D., M.P.H., resides in Torrington, Connecticut.
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