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GEN - thoughts for this election yearFrom: art fougner, md (evsono@pipeline.com)Thu Aug 17 07:29:09 2000
This editorial was taken from today's "Newsday." When Will We Get Sick of Our Health Care? ROBERT RENO YEARS FROM NOW, those of us still alive will surely look back with dumbstruck awe at the health-care debates that tied the nation in knots around the end of the 20th Century and even beyond. Surely by then it will seem as simple as it did to even the pigheadedly conservative Winston Churchill, who summed it all up as early as 1944 when he declared a health-carepolicy based on the notion hat "disease must be attacked in the same way that a fire brigade will give its assistance to the humble cottage as readily as it will to the most important mansion." How deeply stupid it will seem to future generations that Congress was then dithering ineffectually over such trite details as whether old people should be provided with the prescription medicines they need to stay alive just as generously as Medicare will pay to have their gall bladders removed or their gangrenous feet amputated. Among the absurdities we will contemplate are: How long it took the doctors of this nation-particularly the shop stewards at the American Medical Association-to admit that universal, government-guaranteed health care was good for doctors because it was good for patients. How long it took the hugely influential leading employers of America-now groaning under the cost of their health plans-to get thoroughly fed up, unload the system on the government and admit that providing health care was no more naturally related to employment than providing a lawyer, helping people with their tax returns or fixing their car so they can get to work. How long it took the nation's hospitals to realize that they had become unintelligible centers of cost allocation in which medical care was in danger of becoming an afterthought. How long it took Congress to sort out the system by playing the stern referee among the well-financed and self-seeking lobbies competing for the health-care dollar and, in the process, obstructing reform. How long it took Americans to realize that they were spending vastly more on health care than any nation and still living shorter lives than people in most advanced countries. How long it took the insurance companies to admit anything. A recent report by the Urban Institute's health-policy center goes a long way toward explaining just what is happening to the health-care system, which is basically that it is slowly falling apart. Not surprisingly, it found that getting people off welfare has caused a lot of former Medicaid patients to become naked of any health coverage. But it also found increases between 1994 and 1998 in the number of upper-income people without health coverage. Given a booming economy in which more people should be able to afford coverage, the opposite should be true. It is hard to imagine that a nation of grown and prospering voters will put up with this for long. After all, miracles of science and technology have made the electric toaster, the affordable refrigerator, the VCR, even the computer as ubiquitous as dust in most American households. Surely there is a way to make a science-driven convenience like health care as universal and as affordable to every cottage and mansion. Copyright © Newsday, Inc. Produced by Newsday Electronic Publishing. art
-- art fougner, md
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