Health Care: Will It Take a Catastrophe?

Recipe for Disaster: Start with an annual flu epidemic. Add a good portion of the workforce without paid sick days. Mix in about 47 million Americans without health care coverage.

The Result: Catastrophe!

First, workers who deal with the public—waiters, teachers, school bus drivers, child care givers, store cashiers—get the new flu bug. Then they come to work sick because they don’t get paid when they miss work. When their kids get sick, they have no option but to send them off to school or day care. You can’t afford to stay home, when working every day of the week brings in just enough to feed and shelter your family.

And since you can’t afford health care, you don’t see a doctor and don’t get the advice to stay home. Even if you hear the advice, how can you afford to follow it? Some companies not only dock pay for missed days, they let workers go if they miss a certain number of days. So some people have no choice but to work while contagious.

But wait, don’t forget the whack jobs on hate-radio and websites telling the least informed and least educated not to vaccinate: It’s a government plot!

Why all this talk about disaster? Because even though the companies we work for provide great pay, plenty of sick days, and Cadillac health care coverage, we don’t want ourselves or our children meeting the public workers who don’t get these kinds of perks.

Unfortunately it might take a catastrophe to remedy this situation.

It took 9/11 to put a lot of necessary security procedures in place. Who would have tolerated all the hoops we have to jump through at airports and public places, had they been imposed before the attack?

Some time ago on “60 Minutes,” Steve Croft presented “Sabotaging the System,” which warned that essential parts of America’s and the world’s infrastructure—our military arsenals, power grids, water works—have been attacked and are susceptible to more devastating attacks.

Toward the end of the report, Retired Admiral Mike McConnell, once the nation’s top spy, lamented that we probably won’t address this threat, “until we have some catastrophic event.”

In the blog attached to the “60 Minutes” report, one information technology professional warned that our current efforts may be “too little too late.” Another commented on the danger of outsourcing tech jobs.

I don’t want to walk through the sneeze cloud of an infected public worker. For me, it’s a no-brainer. What about you?

When will the rest of the country wise up enough to understand that the better we treat everybody, the better we treat ourselves? Let’s hope it’s not after a catastrophe.

Labels: 60 Minutes, Admiral Mike McConnell, catastrophe, disaster, flu, outsourcing, Steve Croft, waring