State of the Union Address
President George W. Bush
The White House
January 31, 2006
Keeping America competitive requires affordable health care. (Applause.) Our government has a responsibility to provide health care for the poor and the elderly, and we are meeting that responsibility. (Applause.) For all Americans — for all Americans, we must confront the rising cost of care, strengthen the doctor-patient relationship, and help people afford the insurance coverage they need. (Applause.)
We will make wider use of electronic records and other health information technology, to help control costs and reduce dangerous medical errors. We will strengthen health savings accounts — making sure individuals and small business employees can buy insurance with the same advantages that people working for big businesses now get. (Applause.) We will do more to make this coverage portable, so workers can switch jobs without having to worry about losing their health insurance. (Applause.) And because lawsuits are driving many good doctors out of practice — leaving women in nearly 1,500 American counties without a single OB/GYN — I ask the Congress to pass medical liability reform this year. (Applause.)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/stateoftheunion/2006/
Comment: By Don McCanne, M.D.
Unfortunately, President Bush once again has failed to address one of the more pressing issues in health care today. How can we continue to pay for the 80% of health care costs consumed by the 20% of individuals with greater health care needs?
Everyone understands that pooling risk is the answer; the large number of healthy individuals pay into the insurance pool so that those with needs can afford health care. The simplest, most equitable and most efficient method of doing this would be to establish a national health insurance program.
It is understandable that the President, as a conservative, is opposed to national health insurance since he believes that funding sources should be private rather than through the tax system. So it seems that the President would support private solutions to pooling risk, but does he?
Health savings accounts break up portions of the pools into individual accounts. High deductible plans remove large amounts of up-front costs from the pools. Association health plans strip out state mandated benefits thereby pulling more funds out of the risk pools. Cost sharing reduces demands on pools by making health care access unaffordable for many.
While ignoring the dramatic increases in actual health care costs, attention has been directed toward making health insurance premiums more affordable. Premiums are lower when the pool has to pay out less. The pool pays out less when the responsibilities are shifted from the pools to the individual participants. The healthy pay less, and the sick pay more. It’s as simple as that.
President Bush’s policies are not designed to encourage risk pooling in the private sector. Just the opposite. His policies are designed to break up risk pools and shift the responsibility to individuals, even if that makes care unaffordable. His policies insulate the healthy from the costs of the sick.
Though the President’s ideology prevents him from supporting national health insurance, why is he supporting policies that inhibit us from joining together, in the private sector, to share health care risks in common pools, so that everyone would always have affordable access to health care?
Private solutions don’t work anyway. The private insurers are doing everything in their power to avoid the market segment that requires more health care. Government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid cover the elderly and poor in that high-cost sector. It’s time for us to enact a single government program that would cover the entire high-cost sector, and the rest of us as well.