Advocates propose right to health care
Bill’s backers haven’t estimated cost or suggested funding
GARY D. ROBERTSON
Associated Press
RALEIGH – Advocates and patients strapped by medical costs urged Tuesday that state voters be given a chance to decide whether health care is a constitutional right like religious liberty, jury trials or education.
In what has become an annual tradition, Rep. Verla Insko, D-Orange, filed legislation proposing a constitutional amendment that would make health care a fundamental right in North Carolina.
The bill also would order legislators to pass a plan by 2006 that would provide “access to appropriate health care on a regular basis” to every state resident by 2010.
An estimated 1.3 million North Carolinians were without health insurance in 2002. The same year, the state was tied with Mississippi for the largest percentage growth in uninsured residents since 2000, according to the N.C. Committee to Defend Health Care.
Some workers who lost jobs at shuttered manufacturing plants during the latest economic downturn have found themselves without affordable insurance.
Sandra Bailey of Lumberton, who worked at a Guilford Mills plant for 13 years before it closed, said she can’t get health insurance. She needs medicine for a thyroid condition.
“Losing my job, not having any income and no health insurance, it’s been devastating to me,” said Bailey, one of the people who spoke at a news conference and committee meeting held Tuesday at the legislature. “You have to be well to go out in the workplace and find a job.”
Those who don’t have insurance often end up in hospital emergency rooms, where the costs end up much higher than if the patient had seen a family doctor before their condition worsened.
“The United States has the best health care in the world, but among industrialized nations we have one of the worst health care systems,” said Insko, who said she has filed similar legislation every year since 1999.
States such as California and Oregon have considered similar amendments. Maine is starting a program to insure 160,000 people without private insurance or Medicaid.
The bill doesn’t offer any explanation of how to pay for universal coverage. Private insurance premiums to cover the uninsured would likely cost billions of dollars.
Insko said pinning the proposed amendment on a single funding mechanism would generate opposition before the amendment could be debated on its merits, she said.