Business Group and PNHP both have the right prescription
The Wrong Prescription
Letter to the Editor
The Washington Post
January 16, 2006
I hope that The Post’s Jan. 10 editorial “Certificate of Need? Yes!” helps stop the plan to build another hospital in a city that does not need more hospital beds.
Almost all of the serious health care problems in the Washington area require more effective disease prevention and primary health care; better access to doctors and nurses for routine and early-stage problems; better nutritional counseling; access to affordable healthy food; and an array of health services that are either unavailable or available only on a fragmented and dysfunctional basis to low-income families.
Employers and employees pay on average more than $12,000 a year for family health coverage in the District. Unnecessary, costly additions to an expensive health care system will drive up costs more. Some employers will drop coverage as a result or move jobs out of the high-cost city. Either way, the poor and others with low incomes will suffer most.
The District has too much high-tech health care and too little good primary care. The worst step that the city could take is to waste $400 million on an unneeded hospital, which undoubtedly will cost even more than that before it is done.
Helen Darling
President
National Business Group on Health
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/15/AR2006011500691.html
Comment: Health care reform is often presented as a divisive issue. In articles on the topic, the single payer model of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) is often presented as a government solution which has been contrasted with private sector solutions such as those supported by the National Business Group on Health. But are private business interests and public insurance interests really incompatible when it comes to health care reform?
Without commenting on the advisability of a new district hospital for Washington (which should be based on an assessment of need), this letter by Helen Darling could have been written by a member of PNHP. Look at the points on which we agree:
- Capital improvements, such as new hospitals and bed capacity, such be based on regional planning responding to identified needs.
- Excessive, ineffective high-tech health care should not be funded.
- Our deteriorating primary care infrastructure should be dramatically reinforced, which can be done by improving resource allocation.
- Prevention should be a primary goal using public health measures such as disease prevention, better nutrition with access to affordable healthier food, earlier access to the health care delivery system, and removal of impairments in access to other health services - impairments that are partially due to the fragmentation of our public and private systems of funding care.
- Current trends are resulting in a further decline in employer-sponsored coverage and “the poor and others with low incomes will suffer most.”
What is divisive about this? We agree on these points. Now is the time for all individuals and organizations to come together on reform. This does not mean that we have to enter a process of compromise in which each side gives up maybe half of the fundamental issues they support.
The National Business Group on Health can continue to advocate for higher quality services, for error reduction, for reduction of wasteful high-tech excesses, for provider assessments designed to improve system performance and for other measures that achieve the market goals of higher quality at lower costs. PNHP can continue to advocate for universal coverage, for administrative efficiency in funding care, for improved allocation of health care resources, for an equitable system of funding the universal risk pool in which each individual or entity contributes a fair share, and for budgeting mechanisms that slow the rate of growth in health care spending. These and other important goals can be achieved without having to compromise, but rather by cooperating. Together we can achieve an equitable, affordable, high quality, comprehensive health care system that would meet the needs of every individual while fulfilling the commitment of business and government for better health care for all.
Although the following quote is on war and killing, the affirmation should help us reflect on why we should not let up in our fight for health care justice:
“Now let me say that the next thing we must be concerned about if we are to have peace on earth and good will toward men is the nonviolent affirmation of the sacredness of all human life.”
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.