The United States faces significant health care challenges. Private insurance costs are unaffordable to many, and government health programs like Medicare are financially unsustainable.
Some say that a single-payer, bureaucratic health care system is the answer. Yet, we know the current American system saves more lives than the one-size-fits-all health care plans of Europe and Canada.
For example, it's estimated that this year American health care providers will save 145,565 more fathers and husbands from cancer than the average European country. That's 145,565 fathers still at the dinner table — 867 of them would be Nebraskans. Americans also spend about half the time waiting to receive care than do patients in Canada and Britain, where the wait for treatment can be more than a year.
Our goal should be threefold: decrease costs, increase accessibility and maintain quality. The solution may be complex and will require thoughtful, thorough debate. We must avoid distracting rhetoric that doesn't address the problem.
Our focus should begin on the uninsured: First, why are they not insured, and what can we do about it? Second, we must address rising costs. Our challenge is to make this happen without sacrificing what we value most: the high quality of care and our freedom to choose our own health plan and our own health care professional.
The number of uninsured people living in the United States is 47 million. However, this statistic doesn't tell us why they lack coverage. In fact, nearly 10 million people included in that number are actually eligible for existing government programs, including Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, but are not signed up. Six million more have access to employer-sponsored insurance but have not enrolled. Another 9 million earn $75,000 or more annually yet have chosen not to purchase health insurance. And lastly, 10.2 million do not have American citizenship.
This leaves 12 million Americans, 4 percent of the population, who are truly the focus of our quest to provide affordable health care coverage. Of course, this is 12 million too many. But for a nation of 300 million — 80 percent of whom are happy with the quality of their health care, according to a March CNN poll — a massive, systemic overhaul mandated and controlled by the federal government cannot be the lone viable option.
Another thing we can all likely agree on is that government programs are part of the problem. Medicare and Medicaid currently reimburse doctors and hospitals at 20 percent to 40 percent below private insurance rates. This underpayment shifts costs from the public to the private sector, driving up the price of private insurance for hard-working Americans. Medicaid and Medicare shift a total of nearly $89 billion per year in costs onto private plan purchasers.
As a result, families with pri- vate insurance spend $1,800 more per year to cover the below-market government re- imbursement levels, while many doctors have stopped accepting new patients for these public programs. Without considerable improvements, this will continue until Medicare is bankrupt, projected by 2017.
Some still maintain that the solution to all of this is to expand government involvement and expenditure in health care. Never mind that there literally is no plan to pay for it. Another government-run, one-size-fits-all response would be stifled by bureaucratic red tape, susceptible to the ebb and flow of political tides and further drain the pocketbooks of American taxpayers.
Hospitals and doctors already depend upon the privately insured to make up the cost difference for low government plan rates. If the private sector were eliminated in favor of an overburdened public system, we would risk destroying our ability to provide the high quality of health care we once had.
A careless bypass of thorough debate and thoughtful consideration on this complicated issue would be a gross injustice to generations of Americans. We must consider all perspectives, options and consequences without rushing to conclusions.
When we are gone and our children and grandchildren sit where we do today, they, too, will be thankful for that extra plate at the dinner table. Above all else, we must bridge this health care divide without compromising the high quality of care that has saved so many valuable lives.
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