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Dave Zweifel's Plain Talk: Band-Aid not enough for health care

Dave Zweifel  —  6/25/2008 8:27 am

This may finally be the year that the United States gets serious about its failed health care system.

It's nothing short of shameful that 45 million Americans, all too many of them kids, have no health care coverage at all and millions more have health coverage that's totally inadequate.

Despite all the tinkering and blustering to improve this sorry situation, it has steadily become worse with each passing year. Lack of health care coverage and the enormous financial burden that places on anyone who gets sick have contributed as much to the two Americas we know today -- one of the haves, the other of the have-nots -- as has the disparity in incomes.

But there's an election coming up this fall and the two presumptive candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, have starkly different ideas about how to change all this.

Neither one of the candidates would take the step that would be the fairest and easiest, but, unfortunately in today's political climate, the most difficult to sell. That's establishing a universal single-payer system modeled after Medicare that has effectively insured all American senior citizens for the past 40 years.

Obama, though, comes close. He would make sure everyone has access to health care coverage. He would make it mandatory that all children are covered and expand federal subsidies to help families who cannot afford to pay for that coverage. Plus, he would impose funding requirements on employers to insure their workers, with some tax incentives for small business owners who would have trouble providing coverage.

McCain, however, clings to the keep-the-government-out-of-our-faces argument, no matter the cost to society. He wants to wean workers away from employer-provided health coverage and nudge them into buying their own insurance by giving them tax incentives to do so. That, he claims, would not only keep government out of the equation, but spur competition among insurance companies and health providers and result in lower costs.

There's a big problem with McCain's plan. As Families USA, the national nonprofit health care advocacy group, reported just the other day, many states -- Wisconsin among them -- don't have adequate protections for individual health care policy owners.

While employer groups at least have the leverage of numbers, insurance companies routinely play havoc with individual policies. They cancel for the slightest reason. They frequently decline to cover certain health conditions. They challenge bills and put the onus on the insured to deal with doctors or hospitals. And Wisconsin law doesn't provide the consumer protections that could help.

In other words, McCain's solution is simply more tinkering on the edges of a system that by all rights should have been scrapped years ago.

It's time to quit putting Band-Aids on a broken system and finally come to grips with the reality that every American deserves equal access to health care.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.

Dave Zweifel  —  6/25/2008 8:27 am