Fifty years ago, President Richard Nixon declared that the U.S. health care system faced a massive crisis, warning that without prompt administrative and legislative action, the system would break down.
Since then, almost every administration has repeated a similar statement, using such terms as “unsustainable” and promising revolutionary changes.
A Nonexistent Health Care System
Perhaps the reason that we have been muddling along for decades with an unsustainable health care system, perpetually in crisis, is that we have misnamed the entity we are talking about. The United States really has no “health care system.” What we do have, rather, is an illness and injury care system. One typically sees a doctor only when one is sick—sick enough for doctors to prescribe medication, further lab tests, or investigative procedures.
By the same token, Americans don’t have health care insurance, but rather sickness care insurance. That term better describes our situation, in which you pay insurance premiums for benefits that manifest only when you have lost your health by becoming sick or injured.
The way out of our seemingly interminable crisis in health care is to actually focus on health care. We need to establish public health policies that help people avoid disease and promote health as an upstream initiative. At the same time, we should encourage healthy lifestyles and natural medicines that prevent disease and foster health as a midstream effort, while preserving the best aspects of our current pharmaceutical-and-surgery-based crisis intervention and disease care system as downstream medicine.
