Portsmouth Herald Editorial
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Major health-care reform has become an urgent political and economic issue that, along with energy policy, likely will dominate the domestic agenda battle in the 2008 electoral campaign.
Of course, there is no news here. Major health-care reform has been an endless headline loop stretching back for more than five decades. What is different in 2007 is the culmination of evidence that the 20th-century innovation of an employer-based health-care system has reached its latest exhaustion point.
According to a variety of government and private nonprofit reports, between 44 million and 47 million Americans are without health care. More revealing, according to the U.S. Census bureau, in New Hampshire an estimated 135,000 people, including 17,000 children, are without health insurance. According to government estimates, in 2005 some 41 percent of moderate and middle income Americans went without health care for part of the year — while 53 percent of those earning less than $20,000 went without insurance for all of 2005. And the number of uninsured full-time workers has continued to grow across the country, either because insurance premium costs have become too expensive for employers or their employees.
Not unlike the recent call by some major energy companies for federal mandates on carbon dioxide emissions to combat global warming, a newly formed coalition of major corporations, labor unions and bipartisan activists has set a goal for universal health care because the current system is proving to be a competitive economic drain on American business.
In an era of rapid globalization, this matters to businesses small and large and it crosses all state borders. The United States is ranked 37th in the world for health system performance by the World Health Organization and pays twice as much for health care than are the other developed countries while getting fewer benefits.
The oddity of our system is that if one has a comprehensive and economically viable insurance plan, the system works just fine. But for those on the financial edge, the scenario is less pleasant — which is why medical-related bankruptcies continue to rise at an alarming rate. We can no longer afford to fit a predominant free market solution circle into the complicated square peg of health care — or allow entrenched financial interests such as insurance companies to determine health-care cost and access.
We all pay one way or another for the massive inefficiencies in the system through higher premiums and higher costs.
“The path we’re on now is not sustainable,” said Thomas Clairmont, a physician at Portsmouth Regional Hospital, at a local health-care reform presentation last month.
Clairmont is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program, a group that advocates a publicly financed, privately delivered health-care program available to all U.S. residents.
This is but one of many plans being debated across the country among doctors, citizens, health-care industry experts, insurance companies and elected leaders in Congress.
Some plans take an incremental approach and others call for bolder reform. President Bush’s latest reform plan calls for using the tax code to broaden access to health care. Democratic presidential candidate and former Sen John Edwards of North Carolina told the Herald recently of his plan to enact “transformational change” to create universal health care for all Americans with competing public and private insurance plans as a foundation.
We expect all the presidential candidates will present their own comprehensive plans to voters as the New Hampshire primary campaign unfolds. While we withhold advocating a specific approach, we encourage our readers to use the unique access we have to the primary candidates and not let them off the hook.
We need to engage — or “grill,” as Dr. Clairmont said — the candidates and our congressional delegation with specific questions. What is their plan? Their philosophy? How will they finance it? What sacrifices will be asked of every individual and their families?
Acting and speaking out now does not insure necessary reforms to a dysfunctional system. Not speaking out guarantees an unaffordable and unhealthy path to more of the same.
— Herald Sunday