Published Sept. 28, 2003 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
If you expect to need health care sometime in the next 50 years, you might want to brace yourself for some bitter medicine. Our chances of being able to afford even basic health coverage in the future are slipping away.
You might have noticed some familiar stories cropping up in the news lately.
Just like last year, businesses are facing double-digit increases in the cost of maintaining health plans for their employees. Across the board, medical insurance companies and HMOs warn of still higher costs for basic health coverage. State workers are again at a contract negotiation impasse, this time almost exclusively over the cost of health insurance to employees.
How many times do we need to repeat this garbage? How many layoffs and “efficiency measures” spurred by skyrocketing health care costs must we have? How many retirees do we need to see dumped from the health plans of failed companies?
When are we going to say what we know to be true: health care costs in America are too high, the system is flawed and something needs to be done?
How about now?
Right now Americans are paying more money out of pocket for health care than Europeans pay for the additional taxes that fund universal health care systems. A lot more. Try 10 times as much in some cases.
Right now tens of millions of Americans and millions of kids have no health insurance. You don’t need a study to tell you that people think twice about seeking medical attention when a four-figure doctor bill is commonplace.
Right now health care coverage, whether through work, school or a retirement plan, is becoming harder to get and keep. The additional cost for a worker to cover his or her family is becoming too expensive for average Americans.
Businesses, especially struggling ones, are searching for ways to hold down the cost of their health plans. One way they do this is by hiring more part time workers in lieu of full time staffers. It’s hard to prop up an economy, or a family, with a part time job. And part time wages certainly can’t cover the cost of health care, much less the other necessities for life.
You can ask a mining retiree facing a reduced pension plan. Ask him or her how they plan to afford coverage if they aren’t Medicare eligible yet. There is no answer to give. None of the corporate crooks who shortchanged the pension plans thought of this, which is bad enough. But neither did our government, which seems worse.
So many questions about the survival of America’s health care system remain unanswered. There doesn’t seem to be a real plan to fix it. Sure, we hear a little bit about the medical community trying to hold down frivolous lawsuits. Insurance companies blame people who go to the doctor too much. Fingers are pointed everywhere, but no one has a solution.
The time to debate, develop and implement a system of universal health care in the United States is at hand. If we avoid the topic for another cycle we add more hardship to this nation’s health and economy.
By creating a single-payer or universal system, business will get to invest money in growth and workers and their families will be covered no matter what their job status. The only losers are insurance companies and HMOs – and frankly they blew their chance to run things by letting the system get out of control.
Many people have legitimate concerns about the quality of health care provided in a universal system. They are right that we should not embrace a comprehensive health care system that fails to provide choice and reasonable access to doctors and treatment. These and many other issues should be discussed and addressed before a new system is put in place.
But doing nothing is unacceptable. It’s certainly not healthy. We are beyond plugging holes; we need to build a new system.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for The Daily Tribune.