The health care debate rages on

By Daniel Lai
Four years from now, there's an excellent chance some of us won't have the same health insurance we have (or don't have) right now. That's because members of Congress are gearing up to reform the U.S. health care system, and unlike in 1993 when then-first lady Hillary Clinton tried her hand at changing the medical system, this time the important players –– doctors, insurance companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers –– seem to be on board.
I’ve heard a lot about health care reform this week, and I'll be hearing even more in the months to come. It's an incredibly confusing, complex issue.
There's little debate that health care reform is necessary –– President Obama, Republican and Democratic members of Congress, the American Medical Association and America's Health Insurance Plans, which represents the insurance industry, all have agreed the system needs to be changed, although they disagree on how to do it.
Fewer and fewer Americans have health insurance, and therefore cannot afford good medical care. Nearly 46 million Americans have no insurance, and 25 million more are underinsured. One major reason for this crisis is that many employers have stopped offering insurance to employees because of the high cost. In the United States, total health care spending was $2.4 trillion in 2007 –– or $7,900 per person –– according to an analysis published in the journal Health Affairs. The United States spends 52 percent more per person than the next most costly nation, Norway, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
If we’re in that bad of shape, I would think fixing a broken system would be a good thing. I have to tre lightly here since those that support a change are now conviently being labeled socialists or Nazis.
The fear about health care reform comes mostly from not being able to understand the wording of the bill. After speaking with Congressman Mark Schauer, who represents Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, I took him up on his challenge and read the 1,000-page bill online at the Library of Congress’ Web site.
Unforunately, I only got thru the opening statements befor all the legal jargon left me more confused than ever. I was left with no choice but to find another non-partisan source that could explain it to me.
A central point of the president's plan is to create a government-sponsored health insurance program that would be an option for all Americans, similar to how Medicare is now an option for Americans over age 65. He has also said he'd "like to see" prohibitions against insurers discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions, and incentives for people to use preventive services and wellness plans.
This is a strong selling point for me because I know first-hand that seniors, such as my grandma, are having an extremly hard time affording their medicine and doctor bills. I also know firsthand how much a doctor’s office visit can cost without health insurance (both my brother and sister work part-time and are not offered insurance).
Besides saving thousands of lives by providing health care to the uninsured, health care reform has another huge advantage: it can drastically reduce future federal budget deficits. The vast majority of our government's long-term shortfall is due to exploding health care costs in the private sector. These spill over to the public sector, which currently finances about half the nation's health care costs. The United States spends about twice as much per person on health care as other high-income countries, and yet has worse health outcomes, including life expectancy and infant mortality.
The main economic reason for this colossal failure is that our system of private insurance and powerful monopolies is vastly more wasteful and inefficient than the health care systems of other developed countries.
Insurance companies spend tens of billions trying to insure the healthy, avoid the sick, and deny payment for claims. Pharmaceutical companies take $350 billion of our health care dollars for drugs that cost a small fraction of that sum to produce.
The Obama health care plan won't eliminate most of these perverse incentives and waste –– eventually we will need a truly national, single-payer system like Medicare to accomplish that. But it would be a big step in that direction, creating a nearly universal insurance system and laying the foundation for a sustainable system that can contain costs.