Week Four and Five (SOC 490)

Do we have control over our health?  Well, yes and no.  When you grow up in a family that can only afford to buy you McDonald’s over something healthier, then no you really don’t have the choice.  Someone else ie: your parents are making the decision for you.  Other things fall into that category too, like secondhand smoke.  Can you control the person standing next you at the train station who wants to smoke a cigarette?  No, but your health suffers if you have to stand at that train station everyday by the same person who smokes.  On the flip side, if you’re the one that is smoking, then of course you have control over that.  You can quit and make everyone around you healthier and yourself.  By quitting, within I believe a week or two, your risk of lung cancer goes down significantly.  With the McDonald’s example, when you grow up and are no longer under the care of your parents or even if you are, you can make a conscious effort to eat healthier, exercise and improve your lifestyle.

However, with each argument in mind, a lot of it comes down to cost.  You could be the healthiest person on the planet and come down with a chronic disease and because of your job, you don’t have the health insurance to cover medicine or hospital visits.  Cowen argues that “Health insurance is linked too tightly to employment, and too many people cannot afford insurance.”  So you don’t have the job to get the insurance that you need so then you suffer.  Even if you’re not taking care of yourself for whatever reason, be it that you can only afford McDonald’s, then it’s hard to get help if you can’t afford insurance.   

But then people say that if we give out free universal healthcare then people will abuse the system.  Gladwell says that “Making you responsible for a share of the costs, the argument runs, will reduce moral hazard”.  People don’t want to be sick and checked into a hospital but if people are worried about the amount of people who are now going to seek out medical attention, making them have copays and deductibles will help drive down the abusers.