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What Do You Do When You
Join the 50,000,000 People
Without Healthcare?  Now It's Our Crisis. 

Hint as to why you should read this article: In the old days you wouldn't have needed to. People with education and jobs like you and me didn't end up as charity cases in emergency rooms.  They didn't find themselves hiding from healthcare bill collectors. Now this can happen to our children, our friends--to us.  Getting medical help for everyone is as important as police and fire protection.  Healthcare in the U.S. is presented as a political issue--it's really about your life.

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The healthcare crisis is spreading like Martian space alien invaders in a really bad sci-fi movie.   It's killing businesses saddled with healthcare costs.   It's an unsustainable burden on employees who pay the premiums and fight the claims.  Healthcare has become like a disease itself. There is no way the present system of employer-provided healthcare can work.

The U.S. must find some other system to deliver healthcare to its citizens and to the 50,000,000 people who don't have it.  Failure to devise a system that works will be a nationwide, ongoing Katrina. 

Employer-provided insurance no longer works, because the average person will likely hold over 20 jobs in a lifetime.  It's a cinch that when people are between jobs they won't have healthcare.  Many companies can't or refuse to provide it anyway. 

Meanwhile, outside of losing your job or losing your house, healthcare is the number three fear.  It's a pathetic situation but I know many people are holding on to a job that they hate that pays little because the spouse and the rest of the family are depending on the health insurance.

Just a few years ago, in what seems like another age, education linked to hard work equaled steady employment with a stable company.  All that added up to health insurance and thus healthcare.  In today's world, not so.  The link between employment and healthcare is broken.  And that alone severs access to care for millions.

Healthcare reform is a survival issue for businesses and their employees.    Healthcare costs put companies on the brink of financial disaster.  Families can't afford healthcare.  Physicians can't earn an adequate income from what insurance companies pay for procedures.  The only people who profit from this broken system are the people who manage it. 

So how do we fix healthcare?

As a nation we have the following choices:

Stay the course with the present healthcare "no system."  We can "stay the course" of our present healthcare system with the cost to employees continually increasing and the benefits declining.  It will be a system where people between jobs and out of COBRA or with pre-existing conditions are shut out of the system.  We all know horror stories--and may have lived them ourselves:  Cancer survivors who can't get coverage, families ruined by a single health episode, healthy people shut out of the system because they are self-employed and over 40, people forced to choose between prescriptions and heating bills.  If we continue with the present system,  we can be sure that when small businesses create jobs, they will most often not include health insurance for employees.  They may want to do so, but the premiums are ruinous. 

In the present "no-system," nobody is looking after your health.  You don't get physicals included in your insurance and no preventive care.  People skip colonoscopies and other gold-standard screening procedures because they can't afford them after they've paid their health insurance.  Care for the 50,000,000 uninsured will continue to drive your payments through the roof and slap business with crippling premium increases. 

National Single Payer Healthcare.  (Horrors!  Does It Make Us a Bunch of Socialists?)  We already do have national health insurance, in fact, for a few privileged people--namely me!  I happen to love it.  It's called Medicare.  I walk into the doctor's office like Middle Eastern royalty, get whatever I want done, and walk out without paying.  The system is not cold and heartless as I would have thought.  When I called on my last birthday to ask a question, the person there wished me a very heartfelt happy birthday.

National healthcare is the solution I least prefer.  Without getting into a conservative rant, few doubt that the system will be clumsy, wasteful, expensive and frustrating.  Having said that, we're already a nation that has to take off our shoes and belts in airports.  Life in a modern civilization is a series of accommodations, many of which we don't like, but which collectively "beat the alternative." 

Even for the most free-enterprise entrepreneur, however, I would think that not having anything to do with sourcing and paying for healthcare would cause a roar of approval across the U.S.  I believe, however, that national single payer insurance would be one of the most hugely divisive issues we're ever seen in a nation cracked with divisions and for that reason alone it is unlikely to happen.

Healthcare Reform of the Private Sector Parts of the Current "No-system."  By parts of the system I mean doctors, hospitals, insurers, etc.  Right now, as I have said, we have a "no system"  because even middle class people can't access it on a sustainable basis.  We have the healthcare "parts" that are the envy of the world.   The powerful, rich, and well-born come to the U.S. when their lives are threatened by disease, because they know that their best opportunity for a cure is here.

Government coordination through regulation is as important to healthcare as police and firefighters are to a city simply because there is no economic motivation to provide healthcare to the majority.  Government must convene experts in the field of healthcare and mandate a system from insurance companies that stipulates insurance for everyone and databases that keep individual health records.  This is the likeliest form that meaningful reform will take.

And What Can Each of Us Do?

Now is the time for an historic reform of healthcare.  When politicians change the subject to whatever they're trying to distract us with at the moment, we the people must return the subject to healthcare. 

Healthcare (or "no-healthcare")  in the United States can no longer be considered "the care of health."  What is called healthcare in the United States can better be defined as catastrophic care.  As a physician or a medical institution, my revenue stream runs out when my patient gets healthy.  I am incented to do procedures, not to promote health. 

We the people must do what it takes to transform "catastrophe care" into healthcare. 

Carol Kallendorf, Ph.D.

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