Time to think big on health care
Editorial
Brattleboro Reformer
Tuesday, March 17
Today in Burlington, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Vermont Gov. James Douglas will co-host the second of five regional health care forums sponsored by the Obama administration.
It’s only a 90-minute event, and it seems more for show than actual discussion and the gathering of information. Still, health care reform advocates believe this event is important, since Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine are seen as national leaders in this area.
Vermont’s accomplishments in health care are considerable. Catamount Health, while imperfect, showed how to subsidize private health insurance and expand coverage to the uninsured. The state is working on an electronic network for medical information. Its chronic care initiative is a significant step forward in reducing costs. The Blueprint for Health has helped to shift focus to prevention and healthy living rather than treating conditions after the fact.
All this is well and good, but even if these programs were adopted nationally, it would be just nibbling around the edges of a huge problem.
There remains 46 million uninsured and 25 million underinsured Americans. Health insurance is tied to one’s employment, and because of the rising unemployment rate, about 14,000 Americans are losing their coverage daily.
Many Americans are one illness away from financial ruin. Every 30 seconds, someone in the United States files for bankruptcy because of medical bills.
An estimated 18,000 Americans die each year for lack of health insurance.
The United States has the most expensive health care system per capita of any nation in the world, yet we lag behind many developed countries in virtually every health category from infant mortality to life expectancy.
No, nibbling around the edges won’t deal with the threat that more and more Americans face — that they will go broke or die because they haven’t got health insurance. And the one plan that can solve this problem, some model of a single-payer system — where the government collects taxes to finance national health insurance that covers every citizen and pays the bills for medical care — is not being seriously discussed by anyone in the Obama administration.
Oliver Fein, president of Physicians for a National Health Program, has said that a single-payer program would offer $400 billion in annual administrative savings and would bring “effective cost containment provisions such as bulk purchasing and global budgeting.”
The single payer-system delivers big cost savings because there is only one insurer — the federal government — negotiating bulk purchases of drugs, setting fees with health care providers and drafting global budgets for hospitals and large clinics. Doing this eliminates the profits of private insurers, the drug companies and for-profit health care providers — the biggest drivers of health care costs.
While the cost would be publicly financed, the care would still be privately delivered. Every hospital and doctor would be available to everyone, without the worries about whether your provider is in your current private insurance plan. There would be no “cherry picking” of healthy people or rejection of the chronically ill.
This is the system used by nearly every other industrialized nation in the world. This is the system that the private health insurance industry, the drug companies and every other entity that benefits from the current system fears — for it means the end of their gravy train of profits. That is why every attempt at overhauling our nation’s health care system has met with vehement opposition by these forces.
If today’s forum is to have any value beyond public relations, it will come if Vermonters deliver this message to President Obama: If he is serious about health care reform, single-payer has to be part of the discussion.
President Obama has already said that he is not afraid of taking on the lobbyists and political action groups. Let him prove it to Americans. There is no lobby more entrenched than the medical-industrial complex, which killed the tepid attempts at reform by the Clinton administration in 1994.
We want to see the president stand up to the forces that have created a system that is wasteful and inefficient and turned medicine into a for-profit commodity. We want him to state, without equivocation, that health care is a human right and that every American must have access to quality, effective and timely health care. We want him to support real reform, and not just nibble around the edges. That real reform is single-payer health care.
http://www.reformer.com/ci_11930733