Between 65 and 80 percent of the American public backs a public option. You wouldn't know that from talking to beltway insiders, as they're convinced this is still 1994 and that arguments that worked to kill health care reform will work again. As always, beltway insiders are behind the times and out of touch with the struggles of Main Street.
Beltway insiders call up their doctor, are seen that afternoon, and don't have to worry about the bill that comes three weeks later. Average Americans have to wait weeks for urgent medical appointments. We have to pay our copays up front to even see the doctor. And the prescriptions we're given to treat our ailments can bankrupt us.
We've sat in emergency rooms with broken limbs or some other ailment and heard the horror stories in the next stall. We've heard asthma patients who need a breathing machine to sleep, but are uninsured and can't afford such an expensive piece of equipment, who have to frequent the emergency room to get breathing treatments. We've heard patients with serious, but treatable, ailments which went untreated because they didn't have the copay or the insurance to cover expensive prescriptions. Sometimes, we've heard of these patients dying needless deaths.
We've dealt with needing a specific treatment--be it a surgery or a medication--to cure an ailment which hampers our ability to function. And we've dealt with insurance companies randomly denying our needed treatment, and forcing us to go through a rigorous, and stressful, appeals process in order to live a healthy life.
And we're sick of it. We're sick of being stressed so that insurance CEOs can be paid 2.8 billion dollars per year. Even the CEOs of so-called non-profits rake in seven figure salaries
Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) is a progressive who I respect. But his idea of Kaiser for all, which is what the co-op option is, wouldn't stop a few getting rich off of a regime of delay and denial. And that regime costs us billions more in the long run.
The problem with the American health care system--which is ranked 37th in the world by the World Health Organization--is that we put off expensive preventative care and end up with super-expensive acute care, and sometimes wasteful chasing of miracles.
Americans are fundamentally hopeful people. We don't want to believe that a loved on will deteriorate to the point where medicine cannot save them. We want to keep a relative alive by using artificial means--such as placing feeding tubes in Alzheimer's patients--even if their living wills explicitly prohibit such treatments.
We do these things because we want the best for our relatives. We don't want our relatives to die painful deaths, but in our well-meaning ignorance, we force them to endure years of waiting at nursing homes. And we pay billions for it. Nursing homes generally run $50,000 a year, an amount which is not covered by Medicare.
Reform that cuts costs would increase access to preventative care and make sure that we have the ability to be productive members of society for as long as possible despite our chronic illnesses. To do that, Congress and the President need to take on the regime of delay and denial that causes serious, but treatable, illnesses to morph into deadly diseases where we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep someone alive in an institution.
Such a reform would also allow the public option to bargain for the best rates on procedure and medicines. The reason drug prices are cheaper in Canada than they are in the United States is that the Canadian government bargains with the prescription drug manufacturers.
Take the case of colon cancer. It is highly treatable if it is caught early. But the test that best detects colon cancer--the colonoscopy--is expensive. The regime of delay and denial doesn't like that high cost, so it has been curtailing the ability of average Americans in high-risk groups to be screened for colon cancer.
But such reform also wouldn't grant six figure experimental treatments to stage 5 cancer patients who have literally weeks to live. Instead, it would encourage using such things as Hospice services. It would enable us to have memories of enjoying our last moments with our loved ones instead of the painful memories of loved ones as drugged vegetables in nursing homes.
This model, a model which the WHO says is the most efficient model in the world, is the European model. The countries at the top of the list: France and Italy. It is a model of universal access to preventative health care, which enables us to manage our chronic illnesses and be as healthy and productive as possible. But it is also a model which curtails access to redundant and unnecessary care at the end of one's life.
Enacting such a reform is politically difficult. But leaders like Kent Conrad and Ted Kennedy weren't sent to Washington to do easy things. They were sent there by the people of the United States of America in order to do hard things, like enacting a real public option which will reduce costs and improve access to health care for all Americans.