Can We Afford NOT to Pursue Health Reform?
Posted on October 10th, 2008 by Brigette Courtot, National Women's Law Center in From Our Partners
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As I settled into the back of a taxi headed to the Tampa airport on Tuesday, the cab driver—eyeing my plastic name badge and the brand new screen-printed tote bag on my lap—asked what had brought me to his city. In the course of explaining the conference I’d just attended, I mentioned that my work involved health reform—“you know, changing the health system so that we all have good health insurance, and so that we all get high-quality health care.”
This was met with skepticism—“Sure, it sounds good. But look at what is happening to our economy. Can we afford to do these things you are talking about?” He was right about one thing—the economy is going belly-up, and it seems to be taking American’s retirement funds, hopes of homeownership, and general peace-of-mind with it. But his observation about health reform was off-target. The question is not “Can we afford health reform?” but rather “Can we afford not to have health reform?” Health reform isn’t just a wish-list item that we can save for another day; in fact, the problems that plague our health system contribute in a major way to the economic troubles that families are facing. Nearly 1 in 3 Americans report a serious problem paying for health care and health insurance, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Similarly, our July poll found that a quarter of women are not at all confident that they will be able to cover health care costs for themselves and their families in the years ahead. For low-income women, this proportion doubled, with half saying they weren’t confident at all in their ability to pay for health care.
I have no intrest in universal health care. Many wealthy Canadians buy health insurance in the U.S. and come here for treatment because we have better health care than they do by alot. You can't expect to overun the insurance industry by saying you will force them to cover pre-existing conditions without massive rate increases. This will penalise healthy Americans by adding thousands of dollars to their premiums to cover sick people. Get government out of the doctors office and lawyers too for that matter and health care costs will go down. Sure mistakes happen people are injured by tired doctors that are overworked. But that didn't just entitle them to the lottery jackpot.