Several weeks ago I tuned into “The News Hour” on my local PBS channel. T.R. Reid, a longtime correspondent for The Washington Post, was discussing his recently published book, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care. He recounted the global quest he had undertaken to study healthcare systems in other counties in the hope of identifying what could be learned from these countries to help improve healthcare in the United States.
When Reid was asked what he had observed that would be of greatest value in the current healthcare reform debate, he didn’t point to any particular feature of any country’s healthcare system, but referred to the term solidarity, which characterizes the moral foundation of all the industrialized nations he visited.
He defined solidarity as a universal belief that all of a nation’s people should have equal access to basic rights, including the right to equal access to medical care. Reid went on to explain that by defining this basic right, the citizens of the countries he visited shared a common purpose in working together to make the difficult decisions necessary to make this principle a reality.
Of particular interest is Reid’s discussion of a 1994 national referendum when voters in Switzerland voted to change the entire healthcare system from one resembling that in the United States to one modeled after those in other European countries.
Reid mentions that Switzerland decided that society has an ethical obligation to ensure everybody access to medical care when it’s needed. Switzerland’s national debate was waged largely around ideals including equal treatment for everyone, we’re all in this together, and fundamental rights rather than around commercial implications for the healthcare industry.
Our country has entered into the monumental healthcare reform debate without having attempted to answer a basic ethical and moral question: Is equal access to healthcare a basic human right?
By not having done so, we have pitted those who currently possess health insurance coverage against those who do not. We give those who see the debate as an opportunity to foster political partisanship the chance to undermine the reform effort for political objectives.
If we can learn anything from the experience of other countries, it is that sharing a common set of ideals and beliefs regarding the moral and ethical right to healthcare is necessary to ensure the success of any healthcare reform.
Mike Stephens blogs regularly at Action for Better Healthcare.