A bit about me. Know that I believe in business. I believe in an economy that gives people the incentive to gain financial rewards for providing products and services that people need, at a price that is fair in exchange for the value. I’m a capitalist at heart.

It’s pretty clear to me, though, that profit-driven business will never meet certain core needs in our society. Chasing the divine dollar will never protect us from crime, put out fires, defend us against foreign attack, or provide a basic level of survival and dignity to people who truly can’t provide it for themselves.

These are not the realms of business. These essential needs are best met by gathering money through taxation and putting a capable government in place to make them happen; a capable government that keeps its nose out my privacy and regulates without over-regulating. I suppose it’s a kind of democratic socialism with a libertarian edge.

The health insurance industry resides in a limbo zone of contradiction, funding a core universal need for healthcare while obligated to stockholders to earn profits and pay dividends. This conflicts with their motives, especially now that they’ve have worked themselves into a position of deciding what healthcare someone gets, often trumping the healthcare provider who should be deciding. Insurers will not provide services or cover people they can’t profit from, if they can help it.

The result: none of them will cover me as an individual simply because I am paraplegic from a spinal cord injury (36 years hence). Fortunately, I’ve managed to get myself on a family plan with my wife, currently with Kaiser Permanente. Except that my plan includes no benefit for a wheelchair. That’s right; there is such a thing as an insurance plan that will not buy, or even pitch in to help cover the cost of a wheelchair for a paralyzed man.

Something is seriously wrong with this picture.

I manage to get by pretty well. This is not true, though, for hordes of people whose lives are compromised by this sad state of insurers. Take the person who needs a power chair with custom positioning. They suffer a huge cost when that optimal mobility tool is denied. (Rehab docs tell me that they don’t even bother asking for what they really want anymore, assuming it will be denied.) The consumer is rendered less mobile, less independent, and far more likely to develop secondary health problems like skin breakdown or weight gain and diabetes from the buckets of chocolate they ingest to soothe the emotional pain of their lives being artificially compromised for shallow reasons.

This is actually a hemorrhage of costs, even beyond the expensive medical care they’ll need that they didn’t need to need. It means they are unlikely to work, so they will unnecessarily depend on, rather than pitch in, to the U.S. Treasury accounts that meet real needs.

It means that the creativity and wealth creation they might have given us is lost. It means that family members are also compromised in their ability to work and create. Everyone is denied the simple enjoyment of living free of artificial strains and stresses.

The story is the same whether it’s a wheelchair, a surgical procedure, a pharmaceutical or psychotherapy.

You’d think insurers, being intelligent business people, would see the waste of things costing much more down the line when they refuse the good stuff up front. The problem is, they never pay the price.

By the time the hemorrhaging begins, these people are likely to be on a different plan; a family member’s plan, if they’re lucky, but more likely they’ve been dumped onto Medicaid and Medicare. And guess who pays for THAT? You and me and anyone else who’s gainfully employed enough to pay taxes. If they’re uninsured, we still pay. We essentially subsidize the insurance industry.

The result is more illness, more expense and more denial of potential in the lives of millions of people. More death. Especially for people with disabilities.

Our priority needs to be to invest in health. When we do this, we pay for less care. Disability and health are not the contradiction society believes it to be. Invest in the health of people with disabilities — and everyone else — and our overall economic and cultural picture will be much more, uh, healthy.

Gary Karp is an author and speaker on disability awareness, and a member of the Spinal Cord Injury Hall of Fame. www.moderndisability.com.