By Ed Weisbart, M.D.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 3, 2012
Many of my patients will benefit from the Affordable Care Act: A 25-year-old with sickle cell disease can keep his insurance. A 32-year-old mother can get contraception. And a 47-year-old hemophiliac doesn’t have to worry about being too sick for health insurance. I’m celebrating these things and others.
But now is not the time to breathe a sigh of relief. We haven’t fixed the crisis in health care. And we won’t, as long as our health care system remains dominated by private insurance companies.
Insurance companies limit our choices of doctors, drive Americans into bankruptcy and shorten our lives. None of this is necessary if we’d just improve Medicare and give it to all Americans. Our broken system is even deadlier if you’re poor. Now that it’s optional, our state House leadership has declared that it is not going to expand the roles of Medicaid, even with the federal government paying for it (“Medicaid expansion? Missouri GOP balking,” July 1).
This means that 300,000 of our friends and family members will not get even the minimal access to health care that Medicaid provides. Aside from being morally repugnant, we all pay for their strokes instead of their blood pressure pills. Those pills are cheap; recovering from a stroke is not. We need to demand our legislators expand Medicaid as provided under the ACA. We can save even more lives and money by fixing Medicare and providing it to all Americans. This isn’t about politics; it’s about our lives.
Dr. Ed Weisbart is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program – St. Louis. He resides in Olivette.