Health care is a RIGHT in 21st century America

Health care is a right in 21st century America! One of the most gut wrenching experiences as an employer was to see an employee or one of their children come down with an illness yet be unable to afford a doctor. I found it utterly incredible that in this country of such great riches and high moral bearing that many of its citizens could not afford even minor treatment.

Most small businesses simply cannot afford to provide health care to their employees, and increasingly even large companies are shifting more of the burden on them. Uninsured workers who fall ill lower a company’s productivity and endanger others by spreading their untreated disease. Even worse, this inability to get health care has a very depressive effect on total company morale. In essence unaffordable health care threatens our free enterprise system and the human capital so necessary to its survival.

This is intolerable and we must not let it continue. While America has wonderful medical capabilities our nearly 48 million of our citizens are unable to access them. In fact, America is the only developed country that does not provide comprehensive care to all of its citizens. This is why the World Health Organization ranked the U.S. 37th in health care, just behind Slovenia, but ahead of Costa Rica.

While those who can afford it get very good care, there is a wide gap between the top and bottom in America. By contrast those in the lowest income group in countries with universal health care get care that is equal to that of our highest group. And they enjoy this level of care while spending half as much per person as do we.

This is because our current for-profit private health insurance system is riddled with inefficiencies. Administrative costs, profits, sales and marketing combine to take nearly 50% of our health care dollar before it even reaches health care providers.

The National Health Insurance Bill, HR 676, provides the solution we seek. HR 676 is a single payer health insurance system that will create huge cost-saving efficiencies by funneling routine administrative functions through one body instead of the complex quilt of for profit private insurers. Hundreds of such companies—each with their own forms and reimbursement procedures—create a multi-billion dollar expense for hospitals and doctors’ offices.

Add to that the insurers’ own overhead, huge executive salaries (the heads of the top five firms made $73 million in 2007) and profits—remember, the prime duty of any business is to make profits— and we can understand how the current system wastes over $400 billion. 15%-25% of each dollar we spend comes right off the top for health insurers who make all that money largely by scheming how NOT to insure people. By comparison, Medicare takes less than 3% for overhead.

The single payer National Health Insurance feature of HR 676 will eliminate this incredible waste, as inhumane as it is inefficient. Such streamlining is a hallmark of successful best business practice. Our best college MBA programs teach it, and the best run companies do it all the time. The American taxpayer should do so as well.

HR 676 essentially expands Medicare, along with Social Security America’s most revered program, so that it covers everybody and everything including prescription drugs, dental care, and nursing home care for less than we currently spend. Never more would there be expensive co-pays, deductibles or exclusions for pre-existing conditions. Never again will any American be forced into bankruptcy because of health care debt. Never again will American businesses be unduly burdened by the anchor of sick but untreated employees.

Best of all we retain the freedom of choice and our doctors will make the health care decisions, not corporate executives whose top priority is profit maximization by service minimization.

Those working in the insurance industry will have new opportunities. Some will take on similar roles in the expanded Medicare system. Others will take advantage of retraining programs and educational opportunities for truly productive pursuits, using our skills to enhance life, instead of figuring out ways to profit by denying life-saving services to those most needing it.

Contrary to critics propagandistic claims HR 676 is NOT socialism. The single payer feature simply takes the collection and distribution of payments away from the private insurers—who are profit, not patient, oriented—while leaving the medical system itself completely alone and intact. This will save billions of dollars each year by eliminating the hundreds of complicated and redundant HMO payment plans foisted upon our doctors and hospitals, thus freeing up their time accomplish their core purpose of providing superior health care services to their patients.

The new National Health Insurance plan, HR 676, will save our free enterprise system both by insuring the health of its workers, and by freeing business to do what it does best, namely the innovation and delivery of goods and services, while allowing the federal government to fulfill its constitutional duty to act on behalf of our greater welfare.

Finally, by passing HR 676 America can reclaim moral leadership in human rights and fulfill our founding purpose to promote “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” which is not possible without good health.

Universal health care is humane, it is economical, it is doable and it is time. Call your Congressperson and ask them to support HR 676.

Richard Frank Dawahare 7/8/09