Time Is Right for Universal Health Care

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/04/13/time-is-right-for-universal-health-care/


Time Is Right for Universal Health Care

by James Parks, Apr 13, 2007

In South Central Los Angeles, a security guard loses part of his vision when he can’t find affordable treatment for his diabetes. In the Midwest, a retired meatpacker has to sell his house to pay for medications that keep him and his aging wife alive. These are just two of the people profiled in Jonathan Cohn’s new book–Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis and the People Who Pay the Price.

This week on the TPM Cafe blog, Cohn, a senior editor at The New Republic, and an impressive group of health experts have been weighing in on what’s wrong with America’s system and what ought to be done to fix it. To read more stories about the health care mess, click here.

Cohn began the discussion by urging universal health care supporters to “think big” and not take the idea of a single-payer system off the table.

Other experts, such as Roger Hickey reacted, setting off a provocative discusson. You can read the series of exchanges here. In the meantime, here are a couple of samples.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) says it’s time to enact universal health care now, despite the conventional wisdom that we have to wait until 2009, when a new administration takes office:

…it’s time for Congress to act. Health care has been the subject of enough white papers and blue papers and pink papers and papers of every imaginable color. This matter is urgent, and the American public, as well as Congress, can’t afford to wait much longer.

Hickey, co-director of Campaign for America’s Future, says Americans are tired of tinkering with helath care and want real reform:

Perhaps some people think the problem is not enough careful tinkering with the system we have. But increasingly, the diagnosis that makes the most sense will focus on the structural failures of the private health insurance industry. If insurance companies make their profits by denying care, refusing to cover people who are expensive, spending more money on advertising than they do on wellness, and just passing along increased health costs–then the public may decide that tinkering with the private health insurance system (and subsidizing and regulating them to do what their business plan doesn’t allow them to do) is not the way to go.

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