In an interview with the Kaiser Family Foundation, former US Senator Jim Danforth spoke about the future of the upcoming “super committee” negotiations to reduce the deficit. Senator Danforth was a member of a similar committee constituted in the mid-90’s, also bipartisan, with the same partisan divide which now obtains. One of the things he is reported to have said is “the problem is the cost of health care”.

Well, I must respectfully disagree that *the* problem is the cost of healthcare. It’s *a* problem, to be sure; health care is expensive, and I recognize that a lot of both the national budget, and people’s personal budgets, are going toward health care expenses nowadays. But I think it’s overkill to call it THE problem, when there are, in fact, other problems which are making healthcare prices a larger issue than they deserve to be.

Let’s see. Jobs are the first problem to come directly to mind. In the US, a lot of health coverage flows from having a job, so if many people don’t, health care costs become magnified. Like many people, I was surprised when the administration decided to make health care the first big problem they tackled after the election. In my math, it came about third, after jobs and repairing/restructuring the banking sector. But those problems were, I suspect, both harder than health care. For government, the only way to make jobs quickly is to hire people, directly, or to fund a lot of work which causes businesses to hire people, indirectly. Another argument says that government can reduce regulation to stimulate job growth, such as by repealing environmental regulations or the minimum wage law. This has some merit, but it won’t make jobs *now*, and it has effects in the future which are unacceptable to many. (Repealing the minimum wage will make jobs which won’t pay family expenses nor, likely, provide health care. Repealing environmental laws will have health effects we will, eventually, have to pay for. Guess who will have to pay? If you guess “not the company which made the environmental mess”, take a gold star and feel good about yourself for the rest of the day).

Reforming the banking sector comes second in my personal list of things which needed doing. I’m not going to talk much about that, because others have done a better job, other than to note that until that Charlie Foxtrot is cleaned up to the satisfaction of more people, confidence in the stability of the market will continue to be poor, at best. The only people who are confident that there will not be further banking collapses are bankers, and they have not proven their trustworthiness in this matter.

So health care costs are not the most important thing. They’ve become the most important thing, because they’re getting all the attention, but health depends on more than just “medical care”. It depends on having a job, so you can stop worrying about making your mortgage payment and putting quality food on the table. It depends on having a society around you which is vibrant and self-assured, and which knows it can take care of itself regardless of the shifts of fortune. Because that society is much more likely to care for you when you need care than a society which is terrified of the next economic or natural disaster, knowing that we’ve only barely survived the last ones. And that society is much more likely to foster your continued good health, instead of making you sick enough to need health care.