Health-care, pension solution
The recent Associated Press series correctly identified rising health-care costs as a cause of the looming state-pension crisis but left the impression that our only choice is to raise taxes or cut pension benefits.
If the cost of health care is the problem, isn’t reducing those costs the obvious solution?
Ballooning pension liability is only one result of our health-care crisis. Here are others gleaned from recent articles in American medical journals:
* 46 million Americans have no health insurance.
* We spend twice as much per capita on health care as other advanced nations, yet we consistently rank near the bottom in public-health indicators.
* Medical bills are our leading cause of personal bankruptcy.
* Most Americans bankrupted by medical bills had health insurance.
* Most Americans would be bankrupted by a single serious illness or accident.
* Major manufacturers are locating plants in Canada instead of the U.S. to save money on employee health care.
* Our poor get too little health care. Our wealthy often have poor outcomes because of lucrative excessive testing and unnecessary procedures.
* One-third of every dollar spent on health care is consumed by insurance bureaucracy and paperwork.
We can solve all of these problems as well as the medical-malpractice issue by joining the rest of the industrialized nations with a single-payer “Medicare for all” system. Otherwise, we will continue to lose our health and wealth at the hands of insurance, pharmaceutical, and medical corporations.
Paul K. Simpson
State College
Editor’s note: Paul K. Simpson is a physician in State College.
Original Link: http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/opinion/16340988.htm