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Readers Forum: Let's stop counting on charity to pay medical bills
By Rose Ann DeMoro
Guest Commentary
Updated: 01/02/2009 05:05:10 PM PST
THE MOST heartbreaking e-mail alert that crossed my computer screen this holiday season came from a union which has set up a fund for medical benefits for widows and orphans of their former members.
Reliance on charity rather than a public safety net symbolizes what has become a perversely unique American solution to social problems, especially in the Bush administration era.
In "Critical Condition," a searing 2006 indictment of the collapse of our medical system, Donald Barlett and James Steele described how pervasive this dependence has become.
Garage sales, spaghetti feeds, livestock auctions, pancake breakfasts, walkathons, bingo tournaments, pie socials, car washes, church suppers, raffles, barbecues, basketball shootouts, even hot-air balloon rides, all to help families drowning with unpayable medical bills.
Rather than a coordinated national system, as every other industrialized country has established, our go-it-alone, you're-on-your-own society has hit rock bottom in the most basic area of all, the care of our communities.
No wonder the U.S. ranks last among comparable nations in preventable deaths and first in out-of-pocket costs, despite spending twice as much as anyone else on per-capita health care.
Much has been said about Franklin Roosevelt's first 100 days, a period that inaugurated a new standard of social action and set the stage for some of the most important reforms in American history.
It's also worth remembering FDR's 1944 call for a second Bill of Rights, which included the right for all Americans to quality health care and other basics in jobs, education, housing and food that he said "spell security."
Counting on personal check writers or online donors certainly relieves others of their responsibility, most notably the insurance companies who loathe to jeopardize their wealth by starting to actually pay for medical care.
It circumvents the vision of those who think our government should guarantee health care for all of us, much as government already assumes a duty for our police, fire, armed services, schools, libraries, mail service, parks, environmental protections, airport security, national museums and prisons.
Indeed, the government is already in the game of financing or providing medical care for seniors, veterans, the disabled and low-income families, and does it with less administrative waste, less bureaucracy and without rejecting people based on pre-existing conditions or dumping them when they get sick.
But, somehow, a whole lineup of liberal advocacy groups, policy wonks, media pundits and politicians have concluded there is a national "consensus" to fix this broken and dysfunctional health care system by expanding the private insurance system that created the disaster.
That approach, however, would not curtail skyrocketing premiums, deductibles, co-pays, or bills for care denied by the insurance companies.
Perhaps those "consensus" builders are counting on the pancake breakfasts' and orphans' funds to make up for their policy failure.
Or instead, they could channel that giving spirit into the growing campaign for real reform.
Registered nurses will be in the forefront of this movement and nurses know what it would take to guarantee high-quality care for everyone-a streamlined, more effective system than our current nightmare, based on care not insurance, by expanding and extending Medicare to cover everyone.
In an era when our government has already intervened on behalf of Citigroup and AIG and Freddy and Fannie and all those other financial wizards on Wall Street, maybe we can bailout the tens of millions of Americans without having to count on livestock auctions or widows' funds to pay for medical care.
DeMoro is executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee and a vice president of the AFL-CIO and a resident of Contra Costa County.
