Thursday, December 03, 2009
If life is a basic right, isn't health care?
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John M. Koelsch
Koelsch retired on disability from a 30-year career in local government, mostly in city management. He uses both the VA and Medicare health systems.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
In the Declaration of Independence, our Founding Fathers defined what the United States would be. The right to life is primary. The most important responsibility of government is to secure that right for each and every one of us.
While you read this, someone in our country will die from lack of access to basic health care. One of us every 12 minutes, five of us every hour, 122 of us each day and 44,784 of us every year.
These figures are from "Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults" in a Sept. 19 e-publication ahead of print in the American Journal of Public Health. The study was conducted by the Cambridge Health Alliance in affiliation with Harvard University.
If this number appears high to you, consider that the Census Bureau's annual report, released Sept. 10, reported: "The number of Americans without health insurance rose to 46,300,000 last year."
The number who die from lack of access to basic health care is less than .001 percent of the 46 million who are not insured according to the Census Bureau. Approximately 1 in 1,000 is not an unbelievable number of deaths in a group this size. The bottom line is that human beings are dying due to the simple fact of not having health insurance. The fact that each and every one of us is not screaming in outrage over these deaths is astonishing.
A friend of mine recently lost his job. He continued his insurance only to get turned down by the insurance company for a needed hip replacement because it was "a previously existing condition" measured from the point when his coverage changed to COBRA. Even purchasing coverage is increasingly ineffective.
Every industrialized nation in the world, except the United States, provides health care for all its citizens. None of these health systems functions without problems and issues of concern. But not one of these other nations allows people to die for lack of access to health care.
Shame on us.
People, government is not an entity separate from us. We are the government. We have only to speak out firmly and earnestly to our representatives that the status quo is unacceptable to us. You and I need to confirm that the situation must be remedied or those we have elected will be replaced.
The situation can't be left to the health insurance companies, which have demonstrated that they won't resolve the problems. In fact, they create many of the problems. They exist only to make money, not to provide responsible access to health care. Without a viable alternative, such as an effective and competitive public option, they will not change their modus operandi.
Two ways exist to provide a positive alternative. A public option would work. Stop with the "government can't handle it" nonsense. The Veterans Administration and Medicare give the lie to such foolishness.
If your concern is how to pay for it, the simple solution would be to institute a single-payer system for everyone under Medicare, negotiate fair and responsible payments to all health care providers, remove the maximum salary limit for paying into Social Security since everyone will have immediate, current benefits, and continue charging a reasonable and lower price to all employers and employees in lieu of their current payments for health insurance.
All other objections to the operation of such a system can be resolved if we insist that they be resolved.
The second way to accomplish this is to break up the health insurance cartel and regulate health insurance to make it work. Regulation is overdue in any event. An absolute, non-negotiable requirement is that citizens in our country will no longer be allowed to die because they don't have access to health care.
