A pre-existing condition

We all know what that phrase means. (I've been reading Keith Olbermann's Special Comment on health care reform, available here.) Health insurance companies famously don't pay out for pre-existing conditions, don't take on customers if they have pre-existing conditions. (I don't know if some do, but the accepted wisdom is that most if not all don't.) And you can see the sense of that. Mr Sneakley signs up for health insurance, and then suddenly whips off his cloak and laughs evilly as he reveals his congenital kidney disease that will cost so much more to maintain, let alone to cure, than the premiums he's paying will ever cover. He's conned the company. He's taking away from their profits. And the purpose of a private company, even the brightest, shiniest, most well-intentioned private company in the world, and I'm really sorry but this is true, is to make a buck. To balance the books. To store up profit either for their shareholders, if they have shareholders, or to finance future expansion, because nal komerex khesterex, as they say in the Empire. What does not grow dies.

Which is why, in the end, health care does not belong in the hands of the private companies. It needs to belong in the hands of an organisation that doesn't komerex or khesterex, that doesn't need to expand, that is already as big as it's going to get, that does not need to pay out to shareholders because it doesn't have any (or because everyone is one and the dividend is extended health and life), an organisation whose profitability consists not in the money it makes, but always and only in the good things it does. So that it can deal with pre-existing conditions, because we've all got them. Life is a pre-existing condition. The pockets of health care need to be as near bottomless as we can make them, and the only thing that can be allowed to come out of them is money for health care.

I can't think of a better argument for full, universal, single-payer public health care, or any argument against it. Can you?