Universal Health Care: The Compassionate Cure
By Janet Kira Lessin with Minerva – June 2025
If a benevolent extraterrestrial race were to visit Earth, they would marvel at our medicine—the tools, the surgeries, the vaccines. But then they would look deeper. They would see children with fevers turned away for lack of insurance. They would see diabetics rationing insulin. They would see hospitals filled with the bankrupt, not just the sick.
And they would ask: “How can a species with the knowledge to heal allow its members to die for profit?”
The answer, of course, is complex. But also simple: greed, fear, and a system built not on wellness, but on billing codes.
The Problem: A System Designed to Deny
In the United States and many other nations, health care is a commodity—a service you pay for if you can afford it. If not, you suffer. You wait. You die.
Meanwhile, insurance companies record record profits. Pharmaceutical companies inflate drug prices by thousands of percent. And entire communities avoid care altogether, not because the cure doesn’t exist, but because they can’t afford it.
The Consequences: Human and Economic Collapse
This isn’t just a moral failure—it’s economic sabotage. Treating preventable diseases at the emergency room level is astronomically expensive. Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Small businesses often struggle to survive under the burden of employee health costs. Workers stay in abusive jobs out of fear of losing coverage.
And still, the system creaks forward—bloated, bureaucratic, broken.
The Alien Reaction: “This Is Madness.”
From a Galactic Federation perspective, Earth would appear dangerously inefficient.
“Why would a species invest so much in developing life-saving tools, only to restrict access to them?”
They would not understand a world where pharmaceutical patents are protected more fiercely than human lives. They would not understand how compassion became conditional on cash.
They might even flag our civilization as unstable, at risk of collapse due to institutionalized neglect.
The Solution: Health Care for All
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Countries like Canada, Norway, and Japan provide universal healthcare with better outcomes and lower costs than the U.S. Preventive care reduces ER visits. Nationalized drug purchasing lowers medication costs. Administrative simplification saves billions.
Health care can be free at the point of use. It is not a fantasy. It is a choice—a moral and economic decision to treat healing as a right, not a product.
The Vision: Healing the Healers, Healing the World
Imagine a world where no one hesitates to see a doctor, where young people are taught mental wellness as a life skill, where communities celebrate health, not bankruptcy.
Where alien visitors look down and say:
“These beings care for each other. They are ready.”
Universal health care is not just a policy change. It is a shift in values. It is the moment we choose love over ledger lines. Life over ledgers. Future over fear.
We have the technology. We know. Now we must find the will.
Series Title: EARTH: A PLANET UNDER REVIEW — Would We Be Invited to the Federation?
Full Article Series Index:
- Through Alien Eyes: A Report from Earth
- Universal Health Care: The Compassionate Cure
- Mental Illness on the Streets: The Legacy of Reagan’s Cuts
- The Cost of Abandonment: Homelessness in a Land of Excess
- Undocumented but Not Unworthy: Health Care Without Borders
- Criminalizing Poverty: Turning the Poor into Profit
- When Wealth Becomes a Sickness: Hoarding as Mental Illness
- Pain for Profit: The Business of Suffering
- A New Deal for Renters and Workers
- Trauma-Informed Justice: Ending the Cycle of Hurt
- Healthcare for the Planet: Connecting Environmental and Human Health
- From Emergency Room to Living Room: Community-Based Care
- The Cost of Apathy: Why the Federation Might Say No
- A Civilization on the Edge: Final Evaluation from the Galactic Council
Tags: universal health care, health for all, medical bankruptcy, compassionate economics, interstellar ethics, Galactic Federation, ET perspective, Earth civilization review, healthcare systems, public health policy, planetary healing
Facebook Description:
Would an alien race with advanced ethics understand a world where the sick are denied care because they’re poor? Universal health care isn’t just humane—it’s logical. Here’s why it’s time.
X (Twitter) Description:
Aliens would be stunned by Earth: we have the cure, but not the will. It’s time for universal health care. #HealthCareForAll #GalacticPerspective #EarthUnderReview
References:
- World Health Organization: Universal Health Coverage (https://www.who.int/health-topics/universal-health-coverage)
- OECD Health Statistics (https://www.oecd.org/health/health-data.htm)
- PNHP: Physicians for a National Health Program (https://pnhp.org/)
- Common Dreams: “Study: Medicare for All Would Save $450 Billion and Prevent 68,000 Deaths Each Year”
- The Lancet Public Health, 2020: “Improving the U.S. Health System with a Single Payer Model”
