Missing the Point with Chris Reed

Chris Reed has a post up this afternoon on his UT blog discussing the continuing "media error-a-thon" in regards to classifying those without health care in the United States.  His complaint is that there are not 47 million Americans without health insurance.  Rather, there are 47 million people in America without health insurance.  His gripe so much as I understand it is that immigrants, legal or otherwise, shouldn't be part of the health care discussion in the first place and that including them improperly legitimizes these people as Americans and artificially inflates the health care problems faced in this country.

The problem of course, is that this completely misses both the moral and practical point.  I'll dig into both of those on the flip, but let's make sure not to miss Reed's implicit point: Calm down, there are only 35 million people each year without health insurance.  No sweat.  I'd like to presume that Chris Reed knows better than all that, although the posts of his that I've read wouldn't suggest so.

The moral side of this discussion is simply that people who are sick or injured should be helped.  It's a price of the hose argument.  While opponents sensibly wag their fingers, admonishing that we can't save everyone, I'm reminded of The Constant Gardener.  We can't save everyone, but here are real people, right here, that we can help.  Nevertheless, I don't expect this to be the argument that holds much sway with Chris Reed or anyone else who dismisses the health care crisis as overblown or sensationalized.

The virtue of getting everyone onto health insurance is that it keeps people healthy.  Undocumented immigrants may get plenty of principled panties in a twist for any number of reasons, but in the meantime, germs don't segregate based on ethnicity or citizenship.  More sick people in a society is bad for overall health, it's bad for economic and educational productivity, it slows down our childrens' academic development.

We can talk about better enforcement of the border and we can talk about improving living conditions in the developing world in order to make staying put more palatable.  We can talk about just about everything in between.  But if Chris Reed is concerned that expanding health care coverage would make the United States too attractive a place to live, then I'm not so sure why he's hell-bent on defending the term "American."  If his point is simply a semantic one- that illegal immigrants shouldn't be counted in the number- then he is failing to grasp how health systems work and belittling the crisis of 35 million American citizens without healthcare.

He's not a fool when it comes to this stuff- he's written smartly about the problems with the Massachusetts plan, its implications in relation to Arnold's plan, and promoted the idea of insuring all children.  But splitting hairs of this nature amounts to quibbling over a match on a fire.  It fails to address the issue at hand or reflect the complexity of the issue from outside an anti-immigrant mindset, and deflects attention from the actual discussion that should be taking place.  It's divisive and unproductive, and if Chris Reed is serious about having a discussion about how to make health care work, this stuff needs to go away.