The Urgency of a National Health Plan
It is hard sometimes to separate our duty as Christians from our duty as citizens, but in this instance our duty is the same from either perspective. We need a national universal health care plan to ensure adequate care for all our citizens.
There is not much dispute that health care in the US is a real mess—overly expensive [$8000 per person, twice as much per capita as is spent by countries with universal health care], randomly available [46 million Americans are uninsured and that number is growing], inefficient and wasteful [40% of insurance premiums go to overhead and profit, untold millions are wasted on unnecessary tests and duplication of resources] and uneven in results [lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than other western countries].
Health care is not a luxury, it is a basic human right and necessity that must be available to all citizens. The time is right for us to develop a workable national health plan that covers all Americans based on Medicare, a government plan that is a model of efficiency with a 5% overhead rate.
The notion that private enterprise can do things better, more efficiently and smarter than government is an old myth continually repeated without factual basis and easily debunked by mentioning the incompetence, mismanagement and fraud of HMOs, bank failures, highway projects, the housing and financial industries, AIG, the defense industry, General Motors, pharmaceutical companies and Halliburton.
Continuing to place responsibility for medical insurance on employers is unreasonable and anti-competitive. Employment-based medical plans result in disparities of access and quality and result in anticompetitive costs not paid by business entities in other countries.
The existing Medicare system could provide basic medical coverage for illness and accident with private insurers offering supplemental plans using standard policy forms for options beyond the basics through competitive premiums.
The cost of universal health care coverage would be no more than we spend now for health care.
There is enough money already in the system through premiums now paid by individuals and businesses, state and federal Medicaid payments, public health programs, indigent payments, worker’s comp premiums, VA hospitals, uninsured payments to medical providers, tax payments to hospitals and medical providers, government subsidies for medical research and charitable gifts and services to medical entities.
We can obtain significant cost reductions by reducing duplication of services and equipment by hospitals and physicians, cutting out the 40% overhead costs of insurance companies, consolidation of medical records to a central registry for efficiency, avoiding duplication of tests, reducing redundant facilities and programs, ending billions in advertising for drugs, bidding for the most effective drugs and equipment, reducing the number of specialist physicians and increasing the numbers of general and family practitioners, and making better use of skilled practitioners [physician assistants, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, etc.]
The need, challenge, and opportunity for universal health care are awaiting bold leadership, citizen involvement and community support.
8 April 2009