Health Watch

Universal Health Care, Anyone?

 

by Thea Hagepanos

 

The tail has been wagging the dog for so long, we're all a bit lost. Citizens of these United States have been suffering from declining health, increasingly convoluted third party health care plans and reduced overall quality of care for decades. Add to this the cumbersome Medicare Part D launched earlier this year, and looming insolvency of the Medicare trust fund (now estimated by its trustees for the 2018), and you have a rising tide of anxiety.

Let's look at a few facts about the state of health care in this country, today.

Of the top twenty-eight industrialized nations on the planet, the United States is the only nation that does NOT provide its citizens with universal health care. Our country is NOT even very impressive in terms of the longevity of its adult citizens. We rank thirty-fourth in the world, behind countries like France, Spain and Iceland.  Our child mortality rate is higher than Korea and Cuba, according to the World Health Organization). The one thing the U.S. is very good at is spending health care dollars without apparent effect (see above!). We bear the dubious distinction of spending almost TWICE what Canadians pay per capita (with poorer results) and theirs IS a national health care system! Cynics among us would swear that employers, pharmaceutical manufacturers and insurance companies are in cahoots, conspiring to sicken American workers with overtime, convince us that pills can fix it, and scaring us into forking over higher premiums.  

The topic of health care reform has been getting much more press since March, when Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney signed that state's universal health care bill into law. This package allows for subsidized payments for health insurance for the state's poorest citizens, with a graduated reduction in subsidy for higher income brackets. For instance, folks who make less than the federal poverty level ($9,800 per year) would have all premiums paid by the state, at about $3,600 per year. When incomes go up, the state's portion of the insurance bill decreases.

Massachusetts would cover about eighty percent of premium costs for residents who earn between $10,000 and $20,000 a year. Are you making between $20,000 and $29,400 annually? Then, Massachusetts would only chip in forty-seven percent of your premium cost, or about $1,680 a year. How well the plan will work, and whether it can be transferred successfully into states with a much higher percentage of uninsured residents will be known only in the fullness of time. 

One of the real victories of the Massachusetts plan is the full cooperation of both political parties toward its enactment (Democratic legislature, Republican Governor). The big picture is that the USA must tackle this issue head-on, in just such a creative, bipartisan fashion. While we're at it, we may want to look at what we do as a country to get ourselves sicker than our British cousins across the pond. According to The Journal of the American Medical Association, in a widely-reported study (which controlled for ethnic origin and income levels), the richest one-third of Americans is still sicker than the poorest one-third among the British.

 

Hmmm... sounds like another column?!

 

                                 Be well!

                                 Thea

Carolina Civic Voice

                             Summer 2006  Vol.  6, No 2