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Its Time for Our Leaders
to "Get Real" on National Healthcare
by Karen
Porter, West Chester
A March 2 New York
Times/CBS poll reported that Americans are willing to pay higher taxes
for a national healthcare program. It is high time that our leaders
"get real" on national healthcare and admit that, if we are to solve
our top domestic priority, we cannot shy away from the costs of a
solution.
Symptomatic of the real
problem we face are not only the growing ranks of the uninsured, but
the tremendous wastes the current system is costing every American
daily. The American healthcare "non-system" costs the average citizen
a fortune. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on March 4 that growing
numbers of Americans are traveling overseas for cost-effective
surgeries, just as they order prescription drugs from abroad for the
same reason. Many Americans also are strangling with credit-card debt
and bankruptcies just to pay for life-saving healthcare. Instead of
paying higher taxes into a national healthcare system for all,
Americans are lining the pockets of rich pharmaceutical companies,
healthcare insurers, and some providers with profits, while destroying
American businesses that cannot compete with foreign businesses
operating in countries with national healthcare systems. American
businesses can no longer afford to be healthcare providers/insurers if
they are to compete with foreign businesses and provide American jobs.
Additionally, we citizens are not even getting "what we pay for" in
that the U.S., for example:
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Suffers an extremely low
rate of "consumer satisfaction" with its healthcare non-system
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Has a much higher infant
mortality rate than similar countries Has no control
over exorbitant health-care prices
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Spends a much
higher share of gross domestic product (GDP) on healthcare than
similar countries
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Ranks very low (24th
place) in terms of life expectancy
State leaders, such as our
own Gov. Rendell, correctly focus on healthcare as the pivotal
domestic issue; but the state "mini-program" approach is a tragic
waste of resources. State leaders should refocus their energies on
pressing the federal government for a national program. Conservatives
used the same scare tactics in the 1950s-60s to characterize Medicare
as a "communist plot" and today to thwart a Medicare-for-all program.
What they fail to realize is that national healthcare is a fait
accompli. It's what the American public wants.
Finally, healthcare is a
moral - not just an economic or political - issue: The Feb. 28
Washington Post reported that a 12-year-old boy in the D.C. area
recently died from a tooth infection. For lack of medical/dental care,
a tooth infection sent bacteria into this child's brain and killed
him. But what really killed this child was not a tooth infection, but
this disastrous "healthcare system." That dead child is what this
debate is all about. It is a sin and a shame that, in the richest
country on earth, we can spend billions on all kinds of things, but we
can't save a 12-year-old boy's life because we did not provide care
for a his tooth infection.
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