by Bob Balhiser
Queen City News
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
To the Editor:
With Barack Obama as our new president, Americans will never have a better opportunity to take our political system back from the lobbyists who are in control now. An ideal place to start would be with health-care reform. To illustrate just how ripe the opportunity is, ask yourself why the health-insurance lobby is spending $1.4 million every day running scare ads designed to prevent meaningful health-care reform.
Even Max Baucus recognizes that our health-care system is the most expensive in the industrialized world. For this, we can thank health-insurance companies that siphon off nearly 30 cents of every health-care dollar for administrative costs and outrageous executive salaries, not to mention the huge collateral costs they impose on doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies, which must pass them on to patients. Isn’t it time we said enough?
The trillion-dollar question before us now is whether we will let lobbyists continue to run health care, or will we regain control? We CAN change the way we pay for health care, and we don’t need to invent a whole new system to accomplish this. I have Medicare and, except for the “parts” managed by private insurers, it works quite well. Let’s upgrade Medicare, make it a “pure” government entity, and make it available to all American citizens. In doing so, we should incorporate some best practices from other successful systems to create an affordable, “world-class” universal health-care system that is the envy of the world.