THINK WE CAN .com

In my column last week I attempted to make the point that if we fail to comprehensively reform U.S. health care our economy will suffer catastrophic consequences.

I suggested that if we focus on two critical themes, compassion for our fellow man and the frightening mathematics of this problem, we are left with no other choice than to reform our entire health care system.  Serious people who have studied the situation know we must repair this dysfunctional and largest sector of the U.S. economy.

At this juncture, the question is not should we reform U.S. health care, but how do we do it?  Our answer becomes apparent if we examine the basic cause of the problem.  Our privatized health care industry and its army of lobbyists--with the blessings of most of our politicians--have run roughshod over hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens for the past 40 years.

Of course, the majority of people employed in the U.S. health care system are hard-working and honorable.  But the groups involved are saturated with fraud, waste and theft.  The insurance industry, Big Pharma, hospitals, equipment manufacturers, doctors and lawyers, etc. are incapable of controlling their members.

And up to now our politicians have been unable or unwilling to step in and solve the problem.  How can they when we have hundreds of thousands of different insurance policies being managed by thousands of different entities, and all 50 states issuing their own sets of laws in a futile effort at controlling the mayhem?

This snake-pit of health care products produces rising U.S. health care costs so massive our entire economy is at risk.  It is that serious.  Without proper reform our nation is facing medical bankruptcy.

By the time the dust settles on our Great Recession, U.S. health care demographics will break down as follows:  About a third of us, some 110 million people, will be insured through the private sector, another third will be without insurance or poorly insured, and the last third will be under some form of nationalized care.

This astoundingly complex maze of coverage, politicians, insurance policies, waste, regulations, thieves and lobbyists is a blueprint for disaster. Without national, computerized oversight and organization of this entire industry, we are lost.

Those unpleasant facts bring us to the 110 million Americans with good insurance, many of whom think health care reform will result in a loss of part of their coverage.  Well, the grim irony is that these people will be very negatively affected if we fail to enact health care reform.

That’s right, if we don’t accomplish proper U.S. health care reform, those of us on Medicare are going to experience a terrible loss of benefits.  The very industries that have caused this problem have shifted the focus of many people away from reality and onto all the wrong areas.  This situation is not about democrats, republicans, race, socialists, communists, liberals, conservatives or any other diversionary issue.

Nope, what this is about is whether or not we have the collective intelligence to realize that our health care industry, their lobbyists, and our failing politicians have just about drowned us in a sea of theft, waste and fraud.  We must get our minds off the silly issues, and on to what these people have done, and are about to do to us. 

So what are we to do?  In order to determine our direction, our reluctant leaders need not strain themselves with thoughts of compassion, decency, faith and other such moral and religious principles concerning our 110 million neighbors in dire health care straits.  Let’s tell those politicians to do what so many of them do best—look to the money.  All they have to do is add up the existing figures, the actual costs of our health care, plus the scams, and take a little time to apply 3rd grade math to what this terrible mess promises for our future.

The inescapable conclusion is that failure to protect our most vulnerable neighbors will bring upon all of us the very things we are most fearful of.

By doing nothing, or enacting piecemeal reforms--as we have for 40 years--not only will we all be watching 110 million Americans suffer, but most of us will get to join in the pain, and plenty of it, in the not too distant future.  This is not hyperbole; our health care reform movement is our only hope out of a mess that promises to destroy millions of lives, possibly yours and mine included.

We better put our thinking caps on, screw up our courage and try to do the right thing here.  After half a century of failure, it seems like a good idea to try something different.

Health care reform is the seminal principle of the United States.