HEALTH CARE

By Julie Padilla

The United States is the only developed nation in the world without a universal health coverage system, and currently has 45 million of its citizens uninsured--most of them in the paid labor force, and another 22 million uncertainly covered. In addition, there is no real pharmaceutical coverage for the elderly on Medicare, or any effective national mechanism to insure long-term care for those who can no longer care for themselves.

The U.S. spends a highest percentage of its GDP on medical services than any OECD country, and gets the least. Much of the funds devoted to health care end up in the pockets of for-profit insurance, drug and medical-industrial companies. As a result, the general population of the U.S. stands embarrassingly low, given the overall wealth of the country, on global rankings of public health comparison charts, in terms of infant mortality, life expectancy and work/school days lost to illness. About half the personal bankruptcies in 2001 were triggered by medical costs or illness.

While most of us with health insurance rely on their employers for access to quality care, employers are increasingly shifting their rising costs to workers who struggle to pay higher premiums, deductibles and co-payments. At the same time, rising drug prices and drug company profits are driving up health care costs. Workers may find themselves without coverage and access to care as a result of health care and insurance industry mergers, conversions of nonprofit health plans and profiteering drug companies that earn billions on the backs of working families and seniors. Patients deserve better.

We are all in a biological continuum together. Medical care is a necessity no human being can live without. Diseases are frequently transmissible, unforeseen events can occur such as an accident, and there is no "market" in health care; the information needed to gauge the effectiveness and even location of a given medical procedure is often the province of highly trained specialists, and thus difficult to impossible to evaluate on neoclassical economic grounds of price, quality, or availability. In addition, medical care is both capital and labor intensive, and requires long-term planning and financing to be effective.