U.S. health care in ‘critical condition’
September 16, 2003
BY JERRY DAVICH, Times Staff Writer
If America’s ailing health care system was a hospital patient, it would be in the intensive care unit. And a chaplain would be waiting outside the door. “The system isn’t dead yet, but it needs to be saved,” said Dr. Quentin Young, a Chicago internist who’s been practicing medicine for half a century.With no miracle cure in the works, a transplant is needed, Young and thousands of doctors agree.
The country’s current system — infected with swelled administrative costs, inflamed malpractice suits and cancerous private-pay greed — needs to be extracted and replaced with a single-payer national health insurance program, Young said. As national coordinator of Physicians for National Health Care, he is encouraged that nearly 9,000 U.S. doctors endorsed his proposal, published Aug. 13 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Saturday, Young hopes to encourage other doctors and lawmakers during a health care reform conference at Indiana University Northwest. The public forum is sponsored by The Northwest Indiana Coalition for Health Care for All, made up of unions and environmental, religious and community groups.”This forum is the first step in building a regionwide coalition to see a health care system that takes care of all of us,” said organizer Ruth Needleman, an IUN professor.
Sponsors like Needleman admit they don’t share a single vision for what the system should look like, but “we do understand that our current system has failed completely,” she said.The forum, open to the public, will include sessions on local, state and federal action, information on health care bargaining, facts about the successful Canadian health care system and an update by U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Ind., about congressional action on this issue.During his 1 p.m. talk, Visclosky also will receive a widely circulated petition for health care reform from the United Steelworkers of America District 7 office.
Dr. Linda Murray, chief medical officer of the county-run clinics in Cook County, Ill., will explain why the country’s health care system has failed and what feasible alternatives there are for the future.The proposal Young coauthored states that the United States treats health care as a commodity — distributed according to the ability to pay — rather than as a social service to be distributed according to medical need.It’s a market-driven system where insurers and providers compete by avoiding patients who can’t pay and shifting costs back to patients who can. This, Young said, creates the paradox of a health care system based on avoiding the sick.
“This issue is rising to the top of the national agenda with 44 million uninsured Americans leading the way,” he said.
What’s needed, Young said, is a critical mass of legislators to lend a hand with the operation of saving one state at a time, which could lead to national reforms. About a half-dozen states are in the process of enacting health care reform legislation, Young said.
“It’s not the best solution,” Young said. “It’s the only solution.”
Jerry Davich can be reached at jdavich@nwitimes.com or (219) 933-3376.