Adele Ferguson - Back up and start over again to solve health care problem

THE BEST THING we could do to deal with the problem of reforming our health care system is to back up and start all over again. We’re moving too fast.

I covered our own legislature in Olympia for 30 years and learned that tough, complex problems always required a couple of sessions, sometimes many sessions, to chew on and argue over until all the whys and wherefores had been exposed to public scrutiny.

Why this new president wants to deal with all the ills facing us in his first year in office is beyond me. He’s got three more years to go so what’s the hurry? First he wanted a health care bill in July, then August and now it’s “fall.” I suspect the push has to do with the fact that Sen. Ted Kennedy was dying, and they wanted to give a bill to him before he died.

BUT THIS THING is so screwed up now it’s hard to imagine how a comprehensible and comprehensive bill is possible unless a whole new crowd is enlisted to take a stab at it after a cooling off period and a thorough public airing of everything intended to be in it.

The goal to start with was to make sure every American had health insurance, claiming 46 million of us don’t, therefore are without health care. That’s not true. No American, nobody here, in fact, is without health care as long as the law stands that says the emergency room is open to all whether they can pay or not.

Most people know that, so the pitch for health care reform was changed to health insurance reform where they could truthfully say that even if you have insurance, payment may be denied if what you have wrong with you isn’t covered in the contract.

CONTROLLING THE COST became the issue but when they wrote in their bill that a committee would decide who got care and who didn’t, it transmogrified into a death committee that could decide whether you were worth spending a bundle on in your old age, e.g. if you required some costly treatment such as a hip replacement or a liver transplant.

Actually, having been through this with my husband, the most horrendous cost isn’t for doctors or medicine, it’s for nursing homes which charge thousands of dollars a month. Even for those with Medicare and long term care insurance like us, when the state cut its appropriations for poor nursing home residents on Medicaid, the nursing homes raised our rates to make up for it. Our insurance didn’t always cover our total.

Anyway, let’s dispose of one figure that’s been bandied about too much. That there are 46 million people without health care. The American Spectator spelled that out in its current issue. That’s the figure given out by the U.S. Census Bureau as the number of uninsured in the nation, but 9.7 million of whom are not citizens.

A 2003 STUDY showed that about 14 million of uninsured Americans were eligible for Medicaid and SCHIP but never enrolled. Then there were those who could afford insurance but chose not to purchase any; 17.6 million had annual incomes of over $50,000 and 9.1 million earned over $75,000.

Finally, 18.3 million of the uninsured were under age 34, an age group that determined they are young and healthy and can do without coverage. Putting all these factors together, the 2003 study determined that 8.2 million Americans were actually without insurance because they are too poor to purchase it, but earn too much to qualify for government assistance. That’s a lot, but it isn’t 46 million.

So does that mean that 8.2 million Americans don’t have access to health care? Nope. If they show up in an emergency room, a hospital cannot deny treatment. Neither can treatment be withheld if you’re sent to prison and become ill. So if you want to avoid buying health insurance, rob a bank and walk slow on your way out.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville WA 98340.)