During our journey across America I adopted a phrase “Kindness Abounds!” After Googling “Community Health Care” it appears that abounds as well. I was going to report on individual community health care efforts but that would be daunting if done comprehensively. This hits home a point I’ve been realizing of late. We don’t have a health care problem so much as a health cost problem.
The family in one of the homes we were invited in had complaints against immigration. Fueling those complaints in part was the health care treatment illegal aliens received. First, this is not entirely true. Second, even if true access to health care and immigration are separate issues. Since I don’t want to distract from the main topic I’m not divulging my own position on immigration right now, but our hosts could have been against immigration and for universal access to health care. Rather than be upset that illegal aliens are receiving health care, the ire should be caused by Americans who aren’t.
There have been as many as a quarter of Americans uninsured in our recent history; that figure does not reflect the amount of Americans denied access to health care. Community health care centers and similar initiatives, many of them precisely targeting the uninsured, narrows that gap. Now this does not mean the actual health care part is all hunky-dory in this country; we are 38th in the world in life expectancy. But I do think that curing the health costs problem of our overall system would increase health care further and get at the systemic affects on life expectancy.
Your last sentence sums up the problem. The difficult part is the question – how to reduce health care costs? Community health care (clinics?) are great for getting people with out emergencies out of emergency rooms which is the most expensive care. But how do we decide on the expensive highly technological treatments that may extend someone’s life a little, but many times decreases quality of life?