Column by Jordan Covvey

Health care can be a royal pain, no pun intended. On one hand, many of us are blessed with the wide availability of modern medicine. Most students on campus come down with a case of the sniffles and head over to Student Health Services for a free checkup. And when we head to the pharmacy, the four-dollar gods often bless us with cheap medicine. As college students, most of us are still able to tag onto our parent’s insurance coverage. It’s almost easy to think that health care like we receive is a general human right provided to everyone.

On the other hand, things aren’t so easy in the real world. Step outside the college bubble, and over 40 million Americans are currently uninsured, with the numbers continuing to grow. It would be easy to say these people are lazy and jobless, but the reality is that three-fourths of them are employed and simply cannot afford or are not offered health insurance. The National Coalition on Health Care reported that total national spending on health care was $2.3 trillion in 2007, with total national health expenditures expected to rise 6.9 percent last year (once the figures are in), twice the rate of inflation.

Statistics like these became popular in the midst of the 2008 presidential election, but regardless of who you voted for, the question still remains: how do we fix a broken system? How did it happen that our country spends more per capita on health care than any other industrialized nation, but unlike these other nations, we fail to provide health care to all of our citizens?

There are several key issues that need to be addressed, but the most important fix requires a change in how we view and administer health care. We have been attempting to fix the problem by throwing more money at it, but what we truly need to change is our attitude toward what well-being is. We have come to the assumption that should we live poorly and fail to take proper care of ourselves, modern medicine will undo the damage we have done. However, the numbers don’t seem to add up. For instance, in his book, “Overdo$ed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine,” Dr. John Abramson notes that among 23 industrialized nations, the United States by far has the greatest per person health care expenditures, but strangely has the second lowest healthy life expectancy. It seems that our latest and greatest health care isn’t necessarily translating into longer lives.

Of course the correlation can be argued, but serious problems remain. Pharmaceutical companies started selling their products to clinicians by feeding them free lunches and glowing clinical research. Patients started going bankrupt scraping together hospital bills. And if current trends have any reflection upon the future, my guess is that the baby boomers will be the last generation to hear the word “Medicare.”

I’m not saying the health care industry is embedded in failure, but I do believe that our system will continue to suffer without an overhaul in how we make health care decisions. We need to strike a balance between what is best for the individual patient versus what is best for a population of patients.

This involves greater government investment in drug research to reduce the monetary hurdles in getting a drug to market. It also involves a stronger emphasis on preventive measures in medical practice and a system that gives patients an incentive to stay healthy. It involves insurance coverage individualized to a patient’s affordability and personal need. Most importantly, it requires that medicine and the pharmaceutical firms act less like industries driven by profit and more like innovators driven by care.

But don’t let the problems of health care cause you too much of a headache. All you’ll probably end up with is a $20 co-pay and a bottle of aspirin.