Employer-Based Health Care, Meet Massive Unemployment
The coronavirus pandemic is exposing a central flaw in America’s health care system.
By Jeneen Interlandi, a member of the editorial board.
Amplifying vulnerabilities...
Nothing illuminates the problems with an employer-based health care system quite like massive unemployment in the middle of a highly contagious and potentially deadly disease outbreak.
For one thing, uninsured people are less likely to seek medical care, making this coronavirus that much more difficult to contain. Also, people with chronic or immune-compromising medical conditions are particularly susceptible to this new contagion — which means the people most in need of employer-sponsored health benefits are the same ones who can least afford to return to work at the moment.
In other words, America has created the most expensive, least effective health care system in the modern world, and the most vulnerable Americans have been paying for that failure with their lives since long before the coronavirus came to town.
In many ways, of course, that system is no system at all. It’s a patchwork in which access to care depends on a roster of factors, including age, employment status and state of residence.
It’s a free-for-all in which the prices of life-or-death essentials like insulin and heart surgery are set at whatever the market will bear, and efforts to check those prices are routinely bludgeoned by interest groups that hold enormous sway over lawmakers. It’s a labyrinth in which consultants, billing clerks and administrators vastly outnumber medical professionals.
And it’s a voracious beast that feeds American households with well-paying jobs, then devours them with insurmountable medical bills — often at their weakest moments.
Any of these reforms will be politically difficult. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, Republicans are still trying to gut the Affordable Care Act, and Democrats are still divided over how best to respond to that threat. But if there were ever a time to take bold steps — or to finally undo the mistakes of the past — it’s now.