Rescue Me.
Words. For Your Consideation...
"Access to affordable healthcare in the United States is an entitlement, a perquisite or a fantasy, depending on a seemingly arbitrary matrix of factors. Government insurance programs are available for the elderly, the permanently disabled, people with failing kidneys, the impoverished and children from low-income families. But how poor one has to be to qualify varies from state to state and from year to year. Employees at most large companies and many small ones can take advantage of group insurance plans negotiated by their employers. But millions of people who work in low-paying service, retail or contracting jobs have to seek individual insurance policies, which may be unaffordable or unavailable because of their medical histories. Others obtain insurance with deductibles so high or coverage limits so low that one bad accident or illness could bankrupt them.
It's an irrational system with inhumane and costly results that extend beyond the 47 million uninsured. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than half of the adults without insurance have "no regular source of healthcare" other than an emergency room. They are more than four times as likely as the insured to delay a trip to the doctor, and six to eight times as likely not to get treatment because of the cost. The consequences for the uninsured include more serious ailments and a higher premature death rate; for everyone else, the consequences include the loss of productivity attributable to worker illness, a higher risk of infectious disease and about $50 billion in medical bills passed along by those who couldn't pay them.
...A portion of the uninsured are eligible for Medicaid or Medicare but haven't signed up, often because they haven't been shown how. Another group is the so-called invincibles, typically young workers who could buy insurance but choose not to. To bring them and others into the system, Congress should require adults to carry health insurance for themselves and their children. It's intrusive, but the logic behind the individual mandate is the same as with auto insurance: to make sure that people have coverage when they need it, and that everyone pays a share of the cost of caring for the ill and injured. More important, it deters people from waiting to obtain insurance until they need expensive treatments -- a problem economists call "adverse selection.
...In short, shifting to universal coverage will generate a mix of costs and benefits, with some segments of the economy taking on more of the burden and others less. The biggest potential winners would be healthcare providers, whose services would be in greater demand from the newly insured, and private insurers, who stand to pick up millions of new, federally subsidized customers. In fact, the expansion could yield a windfall for insurers or healthcare providers that dominate a market.
...We can't kid ourselves: Expanding insurance coverage is expensive. It also raises thorny questions about how far to go, including whether to cover illegal immigrants and how to enforce the individual mandate. But the payoff is a real one, with the benefits mounting over the long term in the form of a rational healthcare system that delivers increasing value for the money. It's a price worth paying."
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