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Health Care Reform

The state of medical services in the United Prefectural Directorate is, at best, almost nonexistent beyond small, private affairs using scavenged Pre-War chems and dubious concoctions cooked up in haphazard chemistry stations to treat the sick and injured of the UPD. This state of affairs is plainly unacceptable, from both a moral and pragmatic perspective, and a number of functionaries and secretaries have stepped forward with a proposal, backed surprisingly by Commissar Samuel Palmer of the Commissariat. Speaking before the Presidium, the Commissar emphasized just how much the medical cadres and sections of the Commissariat contributed to the combat effectiveness of the soldiers under his command. Without them, his troops would have been much less effective and their expansion of the Directorate would have been nowhere near as timely. That the Directorate had come as far as it had without the same sort of treatment for its civilian population, its workers, farmers, mechanics and administrators, was perhaps nothing more than a divine miracle. By the end of his speech, the hearts of the Presidium had near-swelled to bursting with righteous indignation and passion, with the Director and Lieutenant Secretaries promising a swift enactment of the proposal.

In order to attend to the medical needs and health of its citizens, the United Prefectural Directorate has enacted the Universal Health Care Plan. Starting immediately, in every Prefecture, every Municipality would begin constructing a central hospital to tend to the inhabitants of each one, with each hospital logically being tailored to its needs and size. While at first these hospitals would be, by necessity, staffed by whatever preexisting medical amateurs these settlements had, they would be soon replaced by professionals trained by a medical academy and instructed in various medical fields by the finest of these amateur physicians, eventually building a truly professional core of doctors and physicians. To justify this immense expense, however, it has been decided that in order to partake in this program, the population must pay for it as is proper. To that end, they will pay a fee with the new currency earned from their occupations and delivered to the local Functionariat branch in their Municipalities. This medical tax will be small so as to not be unreasonable even for the least wealthy worker and farmer, but sufficient to ensure the overall economic viability of the program. Regrettable as it is to tax the people for so simple a thing as basic healthcare, everything required payment in the world.