Tom Linnell, EdD
The Coloradoan
Health-care reform.
Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon, from Hillary Rodham Clinton to Arnold Schwarzenegger. The president highlighted it in his State of the Union speech. Health Care for All Colorado held a community forum in Fort Collins, in the chill of January, and drew 80 vocal residents.
A wide swath of Americans agrees that the health system needs repair. No one says any more that we have the best system in the world, though we may have the best technology.
We pay double what any other nation pays in costs, and for that we don’t even get ranked in the top 25 in health outcomes. Meanwhile, 47 million citizens have no insurance – the majority of them members of working families.
If we know what the problem is, what keeps us from solutions? We are one of the most ingenious nations on the face of the Earth. It makes no sense to be stuck in this morass of rising costs and failing outcomes.
We actually know workable solutions. Only two things keep us from adopting them.
Ideology.
Business friends of mine acknowledge that a national plan makes sense – to insure every citizen, simplify the administration by establishing a single payer, and remove the burden of health insurance from the shoulders of business.
What keeps us from adopting something like universal single payer health insurance?
Ideologues just say, “The government should not run health care.” Well, ideas have strength, but ideology is dangerous. This is a country of ideas and ideals, but we never built anything on ideology.
So, does the government have a place in health care? Too late! It’s already hard at work in health care, and doing a great job. The Veterans Administration was cited for excellence last year. The Veterans Administration, Medicare and Medicaid all receive high marks for efficiency and quality. Overhead in Medicare runs at approximately 3 percent; overhead in private insurance plans is closer to 30 percent. Call them “government” or “quasi-government,” these programs are already serving America well.
Fear.
We are afraid of change. We fear the unknown. We fear that the new order might be good for the other guy but bad for us. So we say, “We’ve never done it. We could never afford it. We’d get rationing, and waiting lists, and mediocre care.”
The known facts are these. Every other industrialized nation has a national health plan. To an astonishing degree, they spend far less than we do and get better outcomes. Citizen satisfaction with those plans runs far higher than ours. Economists have shown that we can afford it.
We have kept profit-making companies in control of our nongovernmental system, hoping that the free market would create cost-savings, quality control and fairness. The facts tell us otherwise-our costs keep rising, our outcomes keep falling, and more of us are uninsured every day.
Ideas for health-care reform will pepper the news as we march toward the 2008 presidential election. Individual states such as Massachusetts, California and Colorado will devise alternative solutions while political candidates hold forth on the national stage, hoping to sound just the right note to capture our imagination.
Let’s not let fear blind us, or ideologues scare us away from known solutions.
Read, listen, ask, think.
Then, speak to your neighbor, your pastor, your doctor, your co-workers, your representatives.
They seem to have heard us say that health care is our number one concern. Now they need to hear that we are not interested in half-way measures. The profit motive in health insurance is not working for our health – let’s look at single-payer proposals.
Tom Linnell, EdD, lives in Fort Collins.