Politicians limited in health debate
Dr. Bill Davidson Jr.
North Annville
Lebanon Daily News, PA
With health care the leading domestic issue facing our country today, one would have expected the leading presidential candidates to have presented the nation with serious, viable solutions. Unfortunately, none has been willing to look at this issue without the lens of party ideology or special-interest politics, and as a result the American people are unlikely to see any relief from soaring health-care costs, a million annual bankruptcies, 47 million uninsured and less-than-anticipated medical-quality outcomes.
John McCain, on the occasions when he acknowledges that there is a health-care problem, asks our electorate to let the “invisible hand” of the free market work its magic on our health care system. The fact that it is the “free market” that has brought us to our present state of distress doesn’t deter him from advocating for health savings accounts, consumer-directed health care and other investment-industry solutions that only deepen the problem. Just as the best physicians are not necessarily the most rewarded financially, health care is a social good and requires a mixture of financial incentives and true American compassion.
The Democrats have also let us down by allowing the financial interests of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries to narrow our options for solutions. Neither Sen. Barack Obama nor Sen. Hillary Clinton has been willing to divest themselves of the campaign support of these industries. They have, therefore, presented Americans with very flawed solutions.
Clinton’s plan of individual mandates will force people to buy health-care insurance even to the point of jail or attachment of wages for those who refuse. Obama’s solution is less confrontational but keeps the same old players in place, and so we can expect little real change of substance.
Obama tells us he personally prefers a Canadian-styled single-payer system but doesn’t feel most Americans are ready to give up our present system based on private insurance. With 65 percent of Americans favoring a universal, government-financed system (CNN Poll, May 2007) one has to ask to whom he is listening — ordinary citizens or lobbyists who represent the drug and insurance industries? Only a universal, single-payer system can deliver quality health care for all Americans at an affordable price.
Eventually, such a system, enjoyed by most of the industrialized world, will come to pass here. It seems a shame that so much suffering has to take place before our politicians can feel empowered enough to take on the special-interest groups that stand in the way.