Willow Glen, California Since 1992
Opinion
|
The solution to the growing health care crisis is everyone's responsibility and expense 
By Carl Heintze When I was a child, my mother used to tie an old sock around my neck to help cure my sore throat. She also used mustard plasters and sulfur and molasses on occasion. Medical care has improved since then. But medical insurance hasn't. We seem about to head into another medical insurance crisis. Oh, I know we have a lot of crises to contend with these days: terrorism and the way we deal with it; Social Security, which is always in trouble; DVD TV. There's quite a long list. But medical insurance, or really the lack thereof, is causing a crisis that is affecting more and more Americans. We are caught on the twin horns of the medical insurance dilemma - it costs too much (or at least we think it does), and the medical care system just keeps getting more and more fragmented. Everyone can cite stories about its growing costliness. I heard recently of a woman without medical insurance who was single, just over 40 and who had gall bladder trouble. She kept postponing going to the doctor about it because she had no medical insurance. When she finally did, she anticipated she'd have the new arthroscopic kind of gall bladder removal, which is relatively less expensive and easier on the patient than the old procedure. But she waited too long. She had become so seriously affected by a bum gall bladder that she required the older, more costly surgery - costly to the tune of $40,000. To pay off this medical debt, she's taken out a new mortgage on her house when ordinarily she'd have about paid it off. She is working as hard as she can, and there seems to be no end in sight. She's contemplating declaring personal bankruptcy to get out from under the burden of paying for her care. Hard luck stories like this abound. They're accompanied by hard luck prescription drug stories. Most "internal medicine" these days is just the prescribing of medication, and medicines get more and more costly. Often retirees have to compromise between medication and the benefits of retirement. They can't travel. They can't eat out. They can't do much of anything because the cost of the medication that keeps them alive saps their monthly budget of all its frills, or even some of the necessities. These horror stories are going to get worse in the near future. Medical care costs are on the rise again after leveling off for awhile. Drug costs just keep going up, no matter what. The last time the nation was aroused about medical care and its costs came at the beginning of the Clinton administration, when Bill turned over to Hillary the job of devising a solution to the American medical dilemma. Hillary - and a small army of helpers - spent a lot of time studying the problem - too long, as it turned out - and came up with what is inaccurately called "managed care." By the time she'd finished studying the problem, the drug and insurance industries were in full attack. Congress shot down managed care and things reverted to what had been the case all along. That is to say, the status remained quo. Managed care surged forward anyway and ran its course. How managed care is managed varies from HMO to HMO, but in general it is aimed at cutting costs by reducing patient visits and cutting payments to doctors. I know, for instance, of one plan that required a woman who had broken her arm to be transported by ambulance back to her hometown for treatment by her own HMO, so that the HMO could avoid paying for more expensive care in the town where she'd broken her bone. Transporting her took a night and a part of a day, when treatment on the spot would have taken a couple of hours. But stories about what HMO's do and don't do are legion. There's no need to recite more of them. It's a system that doesn't do what it purports to do and never will, simply because it limits care when Americans expect unlimited access to it. When the furor over this and the high cost of drugs gets loud enough, Congress will, in its lumbering and painful way, take the matter up again. What it will come up with this time is as uncertain as it was when Hillary Clinton was trying to shape it. It seems to me, however, that there really is only one solution. It's one we keep avoiding in part because the drug and insurance lobbies have lots of profit tied up in its outcome. Also in part, it's because Congress is divided - one house is Republican and the other is Democratic. And it's in part because we refuse to accept the premise that medical care costs money - our money - and that if we want care, we are going to have to pay for it. My solution is simply to create a single-payer, tax-supported, government-operated system like Medicare. This means the wealthy will have to pay for the poor and the elderly, but they are going to have to do it anyway sooner or later. Keeping the nation healthy isn't the other guy's job. It simply is everyone's responsibility. Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Willow Glen Resident. He can be reached at feodorh@juno.com. |
Feedback, or story ideas for the Willow Glen Resident?
(Close this Window to go back to our home page.)
Copyright © SVCN, LLC. Maintained by GoGuys, Inc.