Quality health care

Your editorial, "The president's Chicagoland power play," (Our Opinion, March 5), stated that "fully half the country" does not support the health care reform bill. This statement is only partly true.

If one asks the question, "Do you support the health care reform bill?," it is true that at least 50 percent of a properly selected random group will say no. However, if one asks these same persons whether they support the various specific provisions in the bill, the response is very different.

Support for specific provisions in the bill jumps to 65 percent to 75 percent depending on the item (health care exchanges for individuals seeking affordable insurance, prohibiting exclusion for pre-existing conditions, prohibiting insurance companies from dropping plan members that cost too much, etc.).

While opponents shout "big government," the fact is the bill is oriented toward private sector solutions. The bill is no new federal program like Medicare and Medicaid. The biggest hesitation that most of us political moderates have about health care reform is the cost of covering 30 million uninsured Americans. The cost is estimated at $800 billion to $1 trillion over 10 years. That seems like an astronomical amount given the increasing level of national debt.

Those who say we simply cannot afford to cover uninsured citizens no matter what the context fail to realize that we already pay for health care for most of these persons, but we do it in obscure and very costly ways. Care for persons without insurance is mostly provided in hospital emergency departments, one of the most expensive settings in our system. Federal law prohibits hospitals from turning away anyone needing urgent treatment. So, who pays for all of this expensive care? We do - through taxes (or debt) for higher Medicare and Medicaid costs and through higher premiums for private insurance.

Most Americans agree that we must reduce the spiraling costs of health care. Individual policies are already out of reach for most middle-class Americans. High health care costs are a heavy burden for small businesses - and for large companies for that matter. Medicare and Medicaid costs threaten state and national budgets.

If we are going to attack the crippling problem of spiraling health care costs, we must cover everyone in a transparent manner. We can then start cutting back on the numerous federal and state programs that pay hospitals and other providers for "uncompensated care."

Providers and payers will have a consistent health care environment where they can work together to reduce the 25 percent to 33 percent of health care services provided each year that are documented to be ineffective, unnecessary or for which there is a less costly but equally effective alternative.

Health care reform is not the end of the quality-health-care-for-all road. It is the beginning.

ROBERT MORE

Riverview