World Affairs

Health Care and Water

I’m pretty adamant about the need for universal health care in America.  It’s a self-evident fact that we can afford it and should give it equitably to all Americans.  Currently, the wealthy receive it and the poor do not, a fact we should be ashamed of.  There is nothing worse than sitting with a young person who has cancer and listening to how he cannot get treatment and keeps getting shuffled around by “healthcare providers” who will provide nothing without an insurance card or a gold Mastercard.  That moment crystallizes the face of a system that is deeply flawed and deeply in need of repair.

Oh, but wait, care about humans and the world – farther and broader than American borders.  I want to say that health care is a right, but in Africa, tens of thousands of humans cannot get clean water.  “Safe and clean drinking water and sanitation is a human right essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights, the General Assembly declared today, voicing deep concern that almost 900 million people worldwide do not have access to clean water.”  28 July 2010 –  “Studies also indicate about 1.5 million children under the age of five die each year and 443 million school days are lost because of water- and sanitation-related diseases.”  (United Nations General Assembly 2010)

How luxurious is health care in comparison to the need to get clean water?  Water is a matter of daily survival, while health care is a matter of exceptional survival, we need health care as an exception – water we must have no matter what.

Here is what is the same about both issues:  We have enough of both, health care and water.  What we do not have is an equitable means to distribute them.  What is lacking is the saddest fact of all, the way to equitably distribute water and health care- that will save MILLIONS of lives each year is to redistribute wealth, because with wealth, anyone can buy health care and an African village can buy anything, including clean, fresh water.

For more info: blogactionday.change.org

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