Addicted to Health Care

From Psychology Today:

What is missing from our health care debate—even as conducted by our most insightful and radical critics of the dysfunctional American health care system—is a recognition of what, underneath it all, drives the system. It is Americans' insatiable lust for health care. What Americans possess in overwhelming abundance is the urge to be treated for their maladies. Witness our massive formal addiction and mental health disease treatment and support system (as opposed to the informal community supports offered more readily around the world). And our most forward-thinking health care advocates can only imagine expanding this system exponentially (e.g., parity in health care coverage between physical and emotional illness).

American health care costs are driving America into the ground. These costs stand at from 2-3:1 compared with other nations (like the UK), and the chasm is widening since virtually all other nations have stablizied these costs, while we are only beginning to tackle the rate at which they increase. But Republicans can still run on simply resuming lock, stock and barrel the same old private care system, Americans in general dislike Obamacare, and Obamacare itself is built primarily around expanding coverage without controlling costs. This is because any effort to rein in such costs is met by accusations like “death panels” or “rationing,” which immediately kills them like glassy-eyed dead fish floating on the surface of the stagnant pond that is our care system.

More from Stanton Peele here.