As I see it: Act now to fix ailing health care system
By DR. COSIMO STORNIOLO
Gazette-Times
November 13, 2006
Everyone agrees that the health care system is broken. Almost 50 million Americans are uninsured; more than 600,000 of them in Oregon. Those who are insured pay higher premiums and deductibles and drug costs. Unpaid medical bills are the number-one cause of personal bankruptcy.
An under-funded Medicare entitlement program (with a new irrational prescription drug plan) will become insolvent in 2018; it will create unprecedented deficits this century. U.S. health indicators — such as infant mortality and life expectancy — fall far below other industrialized nations, despite the fact that we are spending more than 40 percent more per capita than any other country.
I witness this crisis on a weekly basis while working at Community Outreach’s free medical clinic for the uninsured. At every clinic, I see examples of acute and chronic illnesses left unattended by patients who cannot afford or access the health care system. This leads to unnecessary and costly complications.
More than that, I experience how the system is a dehumanizing social injustice and a shameful embarrassment for the most affluent nation on this globe. I have worked in some of the poorest areas of Africa and Latin America that, while lacking resources, still espouse a stronger public health approach and universal human right to health care.
The solution is government-administered national health insurance. Successful models of such a plan abound in countries such as Canada, Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Taiwan.
A single non-profit insurance plan would eliminate our current market-based and employer-based system, which squanders 30 percent of health care dollars on administrative costs, and only profits investors. These systems offer universal coverage, improved access, portability regardless of employment status or medical circumstance, and fewer barriers to choice of physician or hospital.
The health care delivery system that we are used to — your personal provider and hospital and pharmacy — would not change, only the way everyone was paid. Polls show that a majority of Americans and more than 40 percent of physicians support some form of a single-payer system.
So how can we afford it? Every reputable group that has examined the economics of a single-payer system — from the Government Accountability Office to the Congressional Budget Office to independent investigators — has concluded that the money saved from curtailing administrative waste and profits more than offsets the costs of expanding coverage to the uninsured.
What can we do locally?
• Support the Archimedes Movement, a program spearheaded by former Gov. John Kitzhaber. It aims to create public debate and to place a proposal before the 2007 Legislature in January.
• Join the Mid-Valley Health Care Advocates, our branch of Oregon’s “Health Care for All” program.
• Lobby your state and national representatives. There currently are proposals in Washington, D.C.; a new proposal by the Oregon Senate Commission and a plan by the governor’s Oregon Health Policy Commission.
• Read more from the Physicians for a National Health Program at www.pnhp.org, a group of concerned physicians with years of experience promoting single-payer national health care.
• Talk about it in the workplace, in the doctor’s office — to the newspaper.
The elections are over. Let’s turn our attention away from war and terror to a real social and ethical crisis in our country. Let’s put affordable and accessible health care at the top of our state and national agendas.
Cosimo Storniolo is a Corvallis physician.