Testimony of Joe Bak, Ph.D. before the House Judiciary Committee
Presented before the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers, Jr. (MI-14) and Senior Member of the House Judiciary Committee Sheila Jackson Lee (TX-18) In Houston, Texas on July 18, 2008
My name is Dr. Joseph Bak. I am a clinical psychologist in private practice for 25 years and therefore, also the owner of a small business. In addition, I have been actively involved in advocating for universal healthcare since the early 1990s. Most importantly, I am a consumer of healthcare services. It is from five different perspectives, that of psychologist, small business owner, taxpayer, healthcare reform advocate and patient that I strongly support the enactment of H.R. 676. I believe it is the only solution that can comprehensively and cost-effectively address what is wrong with our fatally flawed healthcare system; a system that long ago became too sick to cure.
In my role as clinical psychologist I provide mental healthcare services within a system that routinely discriminates against my patients. Health insurance policy benefits for mental healthcare are seldom comparable to physical healthcare benefits. They are typically severely and differentially capped by placing limits on the number of outpatient sessions, inpatient treatment days, annual and lifetime dollar amount, etc. H.R. 676 explicitly eliminates such discriminatory practices by providing coverage for all medically necessary mental healthcare on the same basis as coverage for other conditions.
In my role as healthcare reform advocate and collector of healthcare horror stories, it is imperative that H.R. 676 be enacted for Melissa, and for unnamed tens of thousands of Americans with equally tragic stories that are unfolding as we speak. Melissa, a vibrant young woman working at a city library in Austin, decided two years ago to sign a one year contract to work in the Japanese school system to teach English. While there she was diagnosed with Stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the same cancer her brother has contracted, for which she is now being treated with chemotherapy in Japan. She was able to extend her work contract for another year but has no idea how or when she might be able to return to the U.S. She would have no health insurance, be uninsurable in the individual health insurance market, and likely be treated as a leper by most small and midsize employers because of the impact she would have on their company’s health insurance premiums. So she stays in Japan with a potentially life threatening medical condition, visited only occasionally by family and friends. Universal healthcare afforded by H.R. 676 would allow Melissa to return to the U.S. to be reunited with her family and friends, and to be treated for her lymphoma without question.
As a small business owner, I want to know that I will be able to obtain health insurance and drug benefit coverage at affordable rates even though I am not a member of a large employer’s risk pool. As a taxpayer, I want to know that my tax dollars are paying for the most cost-efficient system of healthcare delivery possible. As a patient, I do not want to be subjected to double jeopardy. I do not want to discover after the fact of sustaining a catastrophic illness, that I was unknowingly one of the underinsured and now have to file for bankruptcy. I do not want to find out that I am responsible for overwhelming medical bills once my insurance company determines that they are not required to pay for services that I thought my policy was supposed to cover.
For decades now it has proven to be a dismal failure to blindly insist that merely allowing health insurance companies to compete without restrictions in the marketplace will fix the problems in our healthcare system. It has become obvious that private market forces are severely limited in their ability to achieve valued social objectives. However we continue to try to rely upon free market strategies in the healthcare sector to no avail, when measured either by their ability to control costs or to expand services to everyone.
Few people understand that what markets do best is to distribute goods and services according to price. They do a masterfully efficient job of creating winners and losers according to one’s ability to pay. This seems fair and just regarding the distribution of televisions, refrigerators and computers. However, when market forces are relied upon to determine the distribution of healthcare services, the losers stand to lose their wellbeing, or possibly even their lives if they are uninsured or underinsured.
If you believe as I do that healthcare is a right that is central to human dignity, and necessary to preserve equal opportunity in our country, not a privilege or a commodity to be distributed according to one’s ability to pay, then it is essential that H.R. 676 be passed into law as it is designed to embody these beliefs. It eliminates wasteful, cost-inefficient competition between health insurance companies and replaces them with a system based upon single source payment. As has been demonstrated repeatedly in other countries, single source payment represents the “gold standard” in administrative efficiency. Single source payment is the proven method to achieve effective cost containment and rational healthcare resource distribution, which then makes it possible to provide comprehensive and affordable healthcare services for everyone.