Drawing Conclusions in the Health Care Debate

In the wake of Senator Ted Kennedy's death, health care reform, what he called "the cause of my life," is being hotly debated around the country. One huge sticking point is the  "public option" in which the government would offer insurance that would compete with private company options. Some say that government will be able to undercut private insurers and that free and competitive markets should be able to work out the best solution.

Operative word: "should." In a recent op-ed piece, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman asked a very fundamental question about the fear of government-run services: What's so bad about it? Free markets have been given ample chance to show how well it could work. Here's how Krugman explains what unfettered markets, mythologized during the Reagan administration, did to the financial world: "politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came."

Many people have opinions about strong government versus market-driven health care. But, likely, many more are just plain confused. There are a lot of false accusations being thrown around (death panels, anyone?).

So to make it as simple to understand as possible, animator Andy Lubershane at EarthlyComics, spells out why we need government-run health care in a stick-figure cartoon. In it, he says, all of our other essential needs like water, mail, fire-fighting are provided by the government. Isn't health care also similarly essential? He goes on to show what would happen if something like fire-fighting was run the way health insurance is now. The stick-figure hero of this pretend scenario ends up with a burnt house, mountains of debt and massive frustration. Turns out crude stick figure drawings can actually be incredibly accurate.

Photo courtesy of Leoncillo Sabino, via Flickr