Doctor prescribing national health plan
By Steve Blow
Dallas Morning News
Sunday, October 9, 2005
In the newspaper business, someone is always upset with how we play stories.
Put one on the front page, and it’s called “sensationalism.” Put it inside, and it’s “buried.”
Well, let me join the chorus. When I read a story the other day at the bottom of the business section, I wondered why in the world it wasn’t on Page 1.
The headline: “Fewer firms are providing health care, survey finds.”
OK, not very sexy, I know.
In fact, I have just divided readers into two groups. First, those of you who felt your interest sag. You have good health insurance at work – or through a spouse, a parent or Medicare.
And second, those who felt your stomachs knot. You are uninsured or on the verge of it – and you’re worried sick about getting sick.
That headline made me think about a local fellow in a small third group – those who are well insured and worried about those who aren’t.
Actually, Gerald Frankel of McKinney belongs to an even smaller group than that. He’s a doctor who favors a national health-care plan.
Dr. Frankel – “Jerry” to his friends – is a urologist on a mission. He says we’ve got to face that our country’s system of providing health coverage through employers is broken.
That recent news story documented the continuing decline in companies offering health insurance – down to 60 percent now, a 9 percent drop in just five years.
I asked Dr. Frankel about his reaction to that story. “I had a whole mess of reactions,” he said. “First, my heart goes out to the people affected by this.
“You don’t see the devastation because you can’t put it in a photograph like you can with Hurricane Katrina. But physicians and nurses see families whose lives have been wrecked on a daily basis. The number of families who have their own Katrina every day is just phenomenal.”
Dr. Frankel’s second reaction: “It’s just another nail in the coffin of the current system,” he said. “But at what point do we say enough is enough? What’s the breaking point?”
The surgeon is frustrated that he can’t make others see what is so obvious to him: People are dying because of the broken system of delivering health care.
“How can this country, which is based on the highest principles, allow this to go on?” he asked. By one study, 18,000 people die each year solely for lack of health care. Thousands more suffer needlessly.
Dr. Frankel understands the natural reluctance to get the government involved. “Government drives everyone crazy. They say, ‘The same people who run FEMA? You’re going to let them take over health care?’ ”
But the government can do some things well, he said, and one of those is deliver decent, affordable health care to all its citizens.
It’s done that way in every other developed nation. And it’s not as foreign as it sounds. We already have it here, and I have already mentioned it – Medicare.
Good old Medicare. It may not be perfect, but older Americans look forward to the day they qualify for it. And Dr. Frankel sees no reason why such a national health plan can’t be expanded to all citizens, not just seniors.
If nothing else, the employer-based, private-insurance system offends Dr. Frankel for its inefficiency. He said about 25 percent of all premiums go to pay administrative costs. With Medicare, it’s 3 percent.
But worst of all, our system is bad medicine. We spend more on health care than any other country, but we’re the worst of developed nations in life expectancy and infant mortality, he said.
Dr. Frankel is active in Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org). He tries to spread the message that way.
But he believes change will come only when the middle class is shaken from its comfort zone – only when enough people can’t find a job with health benefits, only when enough families are financially ruined by an illness, only when enough of “us” die unnecessarily.
Dr. Frankel wonders why we have to wait.
E-mail sblow@dallasnews.com
