Print |
E-mail to a friend
OPINIONS
Sharon Peters: Health care reform needed in a civilized society
You are a single mother. Your workplace provides health care benefits, but you are not entirely satisfied because the insurance company insists you use only certain physicians. Your son has a serious, chronic heart condition and his former physician was excellent but not among the insurance company's "chosen," and his care, now being prohibitively expensive, requires you to accept one of those.
Also, you find it does not cover a certain procedure because it is new, although it could offer your son greater qualify of life. Finally, when your new doctor prescribes a specific medication, the insurance company insists another one should be tried since it is the first of its three "tiers" of acceptability. You wonder where the insurance executives obtained their medical degrees. Your doctor authorizes the third tier medication but it is still more expensive. Then you lose your job and with it, your health coverage.
You do not know what to do. Other health insurance companies consider your son's illness a pre-existing condition and will not cover him.
In general the insurance companies:
1) Restrict care to certain practitioners, certain procedures and even have the audacity to prescribe medication. This is precisely the "rationed" care purportedly proposed by health care reform. These restrictions are exactly the limitations a new health care system would be designed to eliminate. It is the current health care system that rations medical care.
2) Make health care exorbitantly expensive for the individual or align themselves with certain businesses, institutions, etc., prohibiting any real "choice" of plans. This is the limited system in place today. Health care reform will offer an alternative to this; it will not be a requirement. You do not have to choose the government plan.
3) Value profit over human life. It is a violation of all basic ethical principles and a repudiation of the dignity of human life to deny coverage to those who are suffering. The government plan won't deny coverage to anyone based on a pre-existing condition.
4) Drive up health care costs. There is not enough competition among them or insurance companies would be scrambling for your business and that of employers. Affordable, quality health care would generate competition, thus driving down cost. There can be nothing more American than a system designed to make business more efficient. This is intelligent government spending, not waste.
You are a single mother. Because of health care reform your son is covered when you lose your job, and he has a necessary operation. He receives the medication the doctor prescribes. You find a new job and you opt to go with your company's health care plan because of its low cost and because it offers an incentive by investing a small portion of your premium in an education fund for your son.
And you become the citizen of a nation that, like ALL other major industrialized countries, provides universal health coverage to its citizens; is no longer ranked 37th by the World Health Organization in its quality of health care; no longer has 45 million people without health insurance; no longer ranks LAST among 23 nations in infant mortality; and no longer has the greatest disparity in quality of care between the rich and the poor. You become the citizen of a civilized society.
"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." Mahatma Gandhi.
Sharon Peters is a Huntington resident.
