America’s broken health-care system requires more than just tinkering. It needs a major overhaul.
By: Amy Isaacs, Tribune Media Services
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America’s broken health-care system requires more than just tinkering. It needs a major overhaul.
Yet, many are pressuring President Obama to go back on his campaign pledge to offer a government-sponsored, low-cost insurance option in favor of a series of small fixes or doing nothing at all. They say it would be too dangerous to move forward now on a government-financed, privately provided system because of the weakened U.S. economy. They say we just can’t afford it.
On the contrary, we can’t afford not to. Full, responsible health-care reform is an investment in America’s future that protects employers, employees, and, yes, the unemployed who need good health to get and keep a job.
The weakened economy is precisely why Obama needs to address this problem boldly and immediately. Simply making current procedures more efficient will not solve the fundamental problem of the American health-care system: Most of us get our insurance through our jobs or through a family member’s job.
Private health insurance wastes $350 billion every year, enough to pay for high-quality comprehensive healthcare for everyone.
Where does that money go? With private insurance, 30 cents of every dollar pays for nonmedical-related costs: marketing, billing, denying coverage, hassling patients and doctors, profits and astronomical CEO salaries; Medicare overhead, on the other hand, costs just 3 cents on the dollar.
That makes less and less sense every month as over half-a-million additional Americans lose their jobs, adding to the pre-recession
47 million Americans without any health insurance. There was once a sense that our economy was infallible, a belief largely based on the high-flying numbers boasted by Wall Street. What we know now is that no one is immune from job loss — from a GM assembly line worker to Wall Street wheelers and dealers.
If efficiency is all the naysayers care about, let’s compare private insurance to our nation’s premier publicly funded system: Medicare. Medicare wins hands down.
Ironically the cost saving efficiencies advocated as an alternative to full-scale reform by the people opposed to the president’s plan are the same already in use by Medicare, including:
-- Doctors’ only “paperwork” would be billing the government electronically, as they now do for Medicare, eliminating the myriad insurance company forms and processes that have become expensive and unmanageable. Patients and taxpayers would benefit from negotiated prices of prescription drugs.
-- Doctors would place the emphasis on prevention.
The opponents argue this would eliminate choice — a word that gives the aura of freedom. What they don’t seem to understand is we want free choice of a doctor, rather than choice of a costly, and for some prohibitively so, insurance company.
Amy Isaacs is the national director of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s largest and oldest independent liberal lobbying organization.
Tags: opinion, columnists
3 comments
Louis N. Minneapolis, MN 04/25/2009 1:51 PM
Come on Jon, when are you going to give your definition of "Socialistic", we've been writing so we can understand what you are trying to say. The rest of your post is a patently false impression drawn straight from your right wing imagination.
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Jon L. Duluth, MN 04/25/2009 10:18 AM
Ask the retired City of Duluth Union Workers if they would give up their free Cadilac Health Care Plan to wait months for a doctors appointment, and be denied expensive drugs for cancer treatment under a Socialistic system that woul now insure 50,000,000 illegals in this country, and more arriving daily. There is not enough money in the world to pay for the unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicaire, Medicaid, and more retirement benefits for the new crop of Government Inusrance workers. Many Doctors are refusing to take on any new patients under Medicare, as the repayment does not meet their expense of treatment. With a Government System, all law suits for malpractice would have to stop, becsuse we all know the quality of care at many VA (Government) Hospitals. Routine MRIs, diagnostic testing, new drugs for rare disorders, would be a thing of the past. Why would anyone want to live a prudent lifestyle, when the medical treatment is "free" to 75% of the people in this country?
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Rolf W. Deerwood, MN 04/25/2009 2:35 AM
Ask seniors if they would give up Medicare which does allow choice of physicians and other medical services. 99% would fight to keep it. Amy Isaacs is right on. Expanding a Medicare type plan to all would also be a huge boost to the competitive position of U.S. businesses.
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