Only a single-payer system will keep all of us healthy
By Dr. Joseph E. Birnbaum
Times Herald-Record
February 05, 2007
I write as a health-care provider and user of the broken system of health-care delivery that has evolved in America, driven not by our medical needs but by the insidious influence of powerful, profit-driven corporate forces that influence our elected representatives on both sides of the aisle.
Consider these facts:
- We lag far behind most other industrialized and some emerging nations in typical health-care indicators such as infant mortality and life expectancy rates, despite spending much more of gross national product for health services.
- Forty-seven million of our citizens are without health insurance and 50 percent of all bankruptcies are a result of health-care debts.
Primary care in the United States ranks far behind England, New Zealand and Australia in almost every measure of care, including access, patient/physician relationships and quality control.
- We are squandering the American health-care dollar in administrative costs levied by for-profit, third-party payers that utilize 30 percent of your health-care dollar to do what a single-payer system like Medicare does for 6-7 percent of that dollar.
- American business can no longer compete easily in the global market because of our unique history (that began during World War II) of asking industry to provide health insurance to their employees. We are the only industrialized nation in the world that does this. American businesses are cutting their health plan coverage in a desperate effort to compete globally.
Health savings accounts are not an equitable reform of the system and will serve primarily as tax shelters for the wealthy. Shopping in the open market (the American way?) for your own health care, as you would for any other commodity (is health care a commodity, like a new car?), assumes that the average American is fully informed and able to manage the complexities of purchasing health care.
The realities are different. Studies have shown that when people must pay a larger out-of-pocket amount for their heath care, they often cut back on necessary care.
Most Americans now agree that the only viable solution to these problems is a universal, single-payer health-care system for all. Every industrialized nation in the world makes this available to their citizens; only our country lags behind.
What to do?
Become knowledgeable about these issues. Use the Internet, your health-care provider and citizens organizations, the library and media resources to fully inform yourselves and then communicate with your elected representatives across the political spectrum to demand that they free themselves from the Big Pharm and Big Insurance industry’s financial largesse and move not incrementally but directly to the only solution that has been proven successful: universal single-payer health care for all.
Dr. Joseph E. Birnbaum lives in Monroe.