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 North Carolina Wants Health Care Reform
by Tom Campbell
June 25, 2009
If you’ve been trying to keep up with the health care debate being staged in Washington you might be like a North Carolina CEO who said, “I’m mad as hell about health care. I just don’t know who to be mad at.” It’s true. Our health care system is broken and needs fixing. And like that CEO, we are mad.
Trusting that solution to a bunch of politicians in Washington (or Raleigh) doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, but the plain truth is that the current players in health care haven’t given us any alternative. This problem has been escalating for decades. Meanwhile, health costs rise exponentially while the players guard their own turf, protect profits and allow a system riddled with poor management, waste, excessive costs, fraud and inefficiency to continue.
Employer health insurance premiums rose 5.5 percent in 2007 and another 5 percent in 2008, twice the rate of inflation. The annual insurance premium for a family of four is now better than ,700 per year. We spend ,900 per person on health expenditures. That’s 17 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, about six percent more than other developed countries. Big spenders as we are there are 46 million uninsured, about one million here in North Carolina. Continued layoffs and plant closings will only increase that number.
It is like watching a ping-pong match as one player, then another places the blame somewhere else. Here’s the message all of them need to hear: We don’t really care how the problem is solved so long as we can get affordable basic health care available to every man, woman and child. Even though she is a first-term Senator, North Carolina’s Kay Hagan, a member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, can play a significant role in developing the plan. She must, however, remember she is working for the citizens who elected her, not lobbyists, insurance companies, labor unions or anyone else.
Whatever your political registration or philosophy you have to agree that we need some new and better solutions to health care. Insurance companies, trial lawyers, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, doctors and all their high-paid lobbyists can be part of the problem (and they have been) or part of the solution (so far they haven’t). More and more are coming to believe that if solutions have to come from government, so be it.
We think Sir Winston Churchill, the great British Prime Minister, had it right. “America will always do the right thing…but only after everything else fails.” We trust we are at the point of doing the right thing and the debate will yield positive results instead of once again building up hopes that are dashed in rhetoric and inaction. |
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