More support for a single-payer health-care system; distress over pukey PBS documentary

Among those who responded to last week’s story on Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ health-care reform efforts was Joshua Freeman, MD, a professor and chair of the Department of Family Medicine for the University of Kansas School of Medicine.

We knew and admired Dr. Freeman for his work with the dedicated med students who run the JayDoc Free Clinic at Southwest Boulevard Family Health Care (Pitch staff writer Carolyn Szczepanski wrote about the JayDocs back in September 2006). Now we’ve learned that Freeman blogs about Medicine and Social Justice.

In a media landscape where very few people are seriously considering the politically radioactive subject of a single-payer health-care system, Freeman (and his colleagues at Physicians for a National Health Program) keep making the case — in language that’s all-too-easy to understand:

If health care is a basic right, then we need to provide it to everyone. We can no longer diddle around with partial fixes, tinkering around the edges, covering (maybe) children but not their parents, covering people who are poor — as long as they are children and their mothers and are really poor and not working — but not those who are poor, or nearly-poor, depending on which state you are in. Or, for that matter, working-class, or, in increasing numbers, middle class.

But the problem is most people in power, including most politicians including the President, don’t want to take a position against health care being a basic right. It sounds, well, mean. There aren’t many people, except, well, mean people (and maybe some reactionary ideologues), who are willing to defend this position.

And if we don’t agree that health care is a right, we still have to deal with everyone who doesn’t have insurance. And a few other current problems, such as:

• Folks not getting preventive care but rather incredibly expensive curative care.
• Companies like our automobile companies going bankrupt in some part because of the cost of their health insurance.
• And, oh yeah, people dying in the streets.

In another entry, Freeman discusses the gutting of the new PBS documentary Sick Around America. That’s a whole other story — one that ought to piss off everyone, whether they’re for a single-payer system or not. For more on that bullshit, see Russell Mokhiber’s April 2 report in Counterpunch, PBS’s response and a follow-up by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

With the new national focus on health-care reform, things seem to be getting sicker and sicker. That’s one reason we need docs like Josh Freeman.