Inside the Head of a TV Junkie

America has a problem… a big problem.  Health care in this country is broken and needs to be fixed.  There are way too many people uninsurned or underinsured.  Someone should not have to decide between eating or paying for medical expenses.  Below are a few excerpts from a paper written for the Agenda for Shared Prosperity .  It is titled Health Care for America .  These paragraphs do a pretty good job of explaining my viewpoint on where health care in this country should be moving towards.

What “Health Care for America” would do:

What Health Care for America would do is simple: every legal resident of the United States who lacks access to Medicare or good workplace coverage would be able to buy into the “Health Care for America Plan,” a new public insurance pool modeled after Medicare. This new program would team up with Medicare to bargain for lower prices and upgrade the quality of care so that every enrollee would have access to either an affordable Medicare-like plan with free choice of providers or to a selection of comprehensive private plans.

At the same time, employers would be asked to either provide coverage as good as this new plan or, failing that, make a relatively modest payroll-based contribution to the Health Care for America Plan to help finance coverage for their workers. At a stroke, then, no one with a direct or family tie to the workforce would remain uninsured. The self-employed could buy into the plan by paying the same payroll-based contribution; those without workplace ties would be able to buy into Health Care for America by paying an income-related premium. The states would be given powerful incentives to enroll any remaining uninsured.

What “Heath Care for America” wouldn’t do:

Equally important is what Health Care for America would not do. It would not eliminate private employment-based insurance. It would not allow employers to retreat from the financing of a reasonable share of the cost of health insurance. It would not leave Americans coping with ever-higher private insurance premiums with an inadequate voucher, or pressure them to enroll in HMOs that do not cover care from the doctors they know and trust. It would not break up the large insurance groups in the public and private sectors that are best capable of pooling risks today. And it certainly would not encourage individualized Health Savings Accounts that threaten to further fragment the insurance market and leave Americans even less protected against medical costs. Instead, Health Care for America would preserve what works in American health financing and replace what does not—through a simple yet comprehensive strategy that holds out the best promise of controlling costs, improving quality, and guaranteeing health security.

What some in this country fail to realize is the following.  The moment you remove the act of paying for health care the patient goes from being a customer to being a charity case.  This is not good.  Being a charity case means you should be grateful to the person/entity providing you the service.  They have no obligation to make sure you are a happy customer.  Their paycheck is not directly affected by your satisfaction.  This leads to all sorts of problems, some of which you can see in other country’s health systems (Canada anyone?).

Every American should be allowed access to affordable health care.  Affordable does not mean free.  Free does not and has not worked in this country.  Anyone who believes that free heath care would become a reality in the United States during their lifetime needs to do more research.  Our government can do great things to move our health care system more in line with the rest of the industrailized world but we need to be realistic and understand that it will not come in the form of free health care for all.