The man whose birthday was celebrated last week, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said it best: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” Lack of access to quality health care is a national disgrace that affects over 40 million Americans on a very real level. How real? Every year, an average of 18,000 Americans die — not “get sick and can’t see a doctor,” they die — because they don’t have health insurance.
It may be too much to ask of our lawmakers in Raleigh take the lead on this critical issue, but hopefully they’ll at least pay attention to proposals the legislatures of Wisconsin and Washington state are considering. Unlike Massachusetts’ law that forces citizens to buy insurance from the usual greedy suspects, the Wisconsin and Washington proposals offer a new model. If the proposals are passed, each of those states would pool all health care spending and replace the insurance vultures with a single statewide, not-for-profit system. The money would come from a payroll tax paid by employees and employers. Patients would pay no insurance premiums, never lose coverage and pick their own doctors.
Analysis of the Wisconsin proposal by the nonpartisan Lewin Group has the state saving around $14 billion in the next 10 years. It would also save business profits, too often eaten up these days by brutal health care costs. And, for the tax hater in all of us, the Wisconsin plan directs much of the state’s savings into a reduction in property taxes.
With the federal government dragging its feet on giving Americans the national health insurance every poll says we want, it seems to be up to the states to jump in and launch more just systems. We are the only advanced country that doesn’t offer national health care, and no matter what anecdotal “evidence” you may hear, those foreign systems — such as in Western Europe and Canada — work splendidly. If the federal government won’t get off its butt and do something about health care access, then let’s urge our state legislators to emulate the progressive states of Wisconsin and Washington. The only losers would be CEOs of health insurance companies, such as UnitedHealth’s William McGuire who earned $1.6 billion in stock options in one year — while his minions were denying coverage to people who need it.
And what about the two million insurance drones whose only job is to turn down as many claims as possible? As columnist Barbara Ehrenreich put it so well, “I have a plan for them: It’s called unemployment. What country in its right mind would pay millions of people to deny other people health care?”
This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2008.
