Health care is the war at home

By Norman Solomon
Marin Independent Journal
April 3, 2008

MOST PEOPLE in Marin are aware that the health-care system is in crisis. For many - whether living in a city, the suburbs or a rural area - the situation is now dire.

While hospital administrators insist that staffing levels are adequate, the California Nurses Association says otherwise. There are real-life consequences when too few nurses are looking after too many patients.

But even without firsthand experience in a hospital, many Marin residents are up against a medical labyrinth with very uneven resources. A protracted search is on for primary-care physicians, a dwindling breed as they find it less economically feasible to work in the county. These days, family-practice doctors and internists willing to accept new patients are few and far between.

Reflecting a national trend, the problems in Marin are particularly acute for children and less-than-affluent parents who depend on the MediCal program. They are often unable to find a medical practitioner who takes MediCal - because the government reimburses practitioners at a paltry rate. Finding a specialist is even more difficult.

The Bush administration and many lawmakers in Washington contend that budget constraints make greater funding for health care impractical. And that may be true - if we accept the enormous growth of U.S. military spending.

What is Marin County paying for war, and what could we do for our communities if the price tag went to health care instead of warfare?

For some answers, I checked with the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research outfit. The facts are startling - and, in human terms, infuriating.

With their tax dollars, Marin residents "have paid $725.5 million for the Iraq war thus far," the Project concluded. That amount of money could have provided 298,616 people with health care for a full year.

That money, sad to say, has been spent.

But what about the projected spending on the Iraq war in fiscal year 2009? The $193.6 million that taxpayers in Marin are expected to supply for the war during the year could, alternatively, provide health care to 79,669 people.

Facts like these make my blood boil. To add insult to injury, most of us who live around here have been against this war from the beginning, since it was - and is - based on flagrant and unrelenting deception.

The distance between "foreign" and "domestic" policy issues has shrunk; the two are virtually inseparable. The squandering of precious resources for a warfare state is unconscionable. And the stateside results are becoming all too apparent.

Only insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms and their allies in government seem content with the status quo. While poor and moderate-income Americans are hit hardest by the profit-driven system that puts adequate health care out of reach for many, there are millions of well-to-do Americans who find that premiums are gouging them - and, frequently, health-plan coverage turns out to be as full of holes as Swiss cheese when it's needed most.

But the nation's military-industrial-medical complex is doing just fine, thank you. Some firms have profits in the stratosphere due to supercharged Pentagon contracts. Other corporations are posting massive profits from a health-care system that's bad for our health.

Rose Ann DeMoro, the executive director of the California Nurses Association, recently pointed out: "As premiums have ballooned by 87 percent in the past decade, insurance-industry profits have climbed from $20.8 billion in 2002 to $57.5 billion in 2006. During that same period, health-care interests spent $2.2 billion on federal lobbying, more than did any other sector."

The lobbying deftly targets elected officials who - with few exceptions - are unwilling to go beyond niceties to insist on a fundamental reordering of national priorities. A faraway war is taking its toll at home. We must insist on basic change.

Norman Solomon, an author and activist who lives in Marin, is the founder and coordinator of North Bay Healthcare Not Warfare.