Concern about the growing number of uninsured Americans has led Mahesh Somashekhar GS to begin rallying students to fight for universal healthcare.
Somashekhar’s agenda includes organizing students to do a variety of healthcare-related activities, such as volunteering at local hospitals, facilitating panel discussions, launching letter-writing campaigns and demonstrating at the New Jersey State Legislature.
“Good health is precious,” Somashekhar, a graduate student in the sociology department, said in an e-mail. “For almost one out of every six Americans, a good doctor is beyond their reach. Those who live paycheck to paycheck are one heart attack away from being out on the street.”
While his plans are still in the infant stages, Somashekhar’s calls for an organized student group that fights for healthcare have been well received by faculty who have expressed their dissatisfaction with the current state of medical care.
Wilson School professor Adel Mahmoud said in an e-mail that “universal health is a fundamental human right” and “a question of respect for human life.”
“Student involvement should pave the way to a new generation of leaders with social conscious and understanding and possibly influence the political process,” he said.
Wilson School student Elise Schlissel ’09 echoed Mahmoud’s belief. “I think that one of the major problems with the current state of health care in the United States is inequality of access,” Schlissel said in an e-mail. “Health care should be viewed as a basic right and should be accessible to all.”
Economics professor Elizabeth Bogan, however, said that economic incentives can play a central role in understanding healthcare.
“People make wrong decisions when medical care is free,” Bogan said, explaining that analyzing healthcare decisions using supply and demand shows the “need to get the prices right to the consumers.”
“Subsidizing one input to health makes people overuse that input and underuse more productive inputs that appear to cost more,” she explained.
In terms of healthcare costs, focusing on dietary choices could be the best way to reduce obesity and diabetes, Bogan said.
Bogan stressed the importance of rational economic decision-making for healthcare choices.
“We need to put more competition into healthcare and more cost consciousness,” she said. “I would prefer to see Health Savings Accounts extended, so that the first few thousand dollars would be subject to cost consciousness. I would go for subsidies to get the rest of the people covered.”
Though there may be a variety of policy proposals that emerge within the student group, Somashekhar does not think these disagreements will prohibit action.
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