The Need for a New Health Care System
Ronald E. Fox
The plain fact of the matter is that the American healthcare system is broken and in serious need of a major overhaul. Most voters now understand that something needs to be done. According to a recent reputable national poll, 65% of the American people favor a single-payer health care system and are willing to pay more taxes to get it! However the political will of many politicians in Washington to change it still lags far behind the wishes of most of their constituents. Instead of the critical changes that are required, we are being served tepid proposals to increase incentives for taxpayers to establish health savings accounts and take more control of their own care. To be kind, such a change is not the kind of fundamental shift that is required. The number of Americans unable to afford even the most basic health insurance is rising rapidly. In addition, the number of those below the poverty line is exploding while the level of family savings is at an all-time low. Let me repeat: an all-time low. In the face of these facts, a proposal to solve our health care crisis by providing incentives for enhanced savings is the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig! Other countries are in the process of developing innovative, less expensive systems with better outcomes. Our government is building an express lane to further disaster!
Our current system of care tied to employment was designed in the wartime economy of the 1940s. It should be obvious that the economic realities of the world in which we now must live and compete have been turned upside down over the past half-century. In the 1940s employers offered cheap health insurance incentives in order to attract workers in the face of manpower scarcity and government controlled wages. That wartime expedient has become institutionalized practice in the US. But over the intervening decades, the world economy has changed. The US must now compete for customers with other countries whose industries are not saddled with the high cost of health care. We cannot win such competition. Industries in which the US has traditionally led the world, steel and automobiles being but two of many examples, already have lost the battle with foreign competitors.
We need to free our industries to compete on an equal basis and we can do so with some combination of single-payer and private offerings. Informed estimates by competent analysts have determined that such systems would be far cheaper than what we now have. For example, it is popular for many politicians to clam that government programs are far more expensive than those run by private industry. That simply is not true. The overhead costs of our system far exceed those of any other country in the industrialized world. The overhead costs of private insurance companies in the US run about 25%, mostly in the form of expenses incurred in efforts to lower costs by shifting them to someone else. That rate far exceeds the overhead cost of other countries. In our own country, the 25% overhead for private insurance compares to a mere 2% cost for Medicare!
Something must be done. We have the most productive workforce in the world for the simple reason that our workers work more hours than those in other industrialized nations. We cannot sustain that effort. Already we are seeing the effects on levels of stress related illnesses, on families, on the quality of life and on our ability to afford health care. We have a growing economy without the kind of prosperity that penetrates to the average worker. Our benefits largely fall to those whose incomes do not come from wages. We cannot truly prosper as a nation as long as we tie ourselves to a system that serves the greed of the few at the expense and well being of the many. The lack of affordable health care is a pressing national need that is crippling our human resources, pricing our industries out of the market and stifling true prosperity. We need bold actions from our politicians, not pseudom solutions served up with misleading labels that disguise their true nature.
The lack of affordable health insurance is a huge sea anchor on the national economy. Look at what we have created for ourselves as a result: the US is dead last among developed countries in fighting poverty; dead last in percentage of citizens living on half the median income or less; last in functional literacy; the lowest life expectancy of all industrialized countries except Ireland and Denmark; first among industrialized countries in the percentage of population without access to health care, and bottom of the pile in terms of life expectancy in the developed world. These are grim figures and they are getting worse, not better. We must elect and energize politicians who have the guts to develop real solutions for a growing national disgrace. We can and must do better.
Originally printed in the AAP “Advance” and reprinted with kind permission.
