Thinking Well-Care & Prevention, not Sick-Care & Reaction

By Alice Yoder

Access to affordable, high quality healthcare is vital to achieve our economic goals as a community.

Access to affordable, high quality healthcare is vital to achieve our economic goals as a community. When people, young or old, do not have access to healthcare, they put off getting treatment until their symptoms are so bad that they need to go to the emergency room. The result can be personally and financially devastating. The cost includes both sick care and the loss of earnings due to missed work days.

As before, we see that "ounce of prevention" outweighing "a pound of cure" Let's provide access to healthcare for all so that parents can take their children for well-child checks, women can have their mammography done as recommended, and you can have a colonoscopy done on your fiftieth birthday and prevent colon cancer.

I will advocate for Pennsylvania accepting federal funding to expand access to healthcare coverage just as West Virginia, New Jersey, Ohio, New York and Maryland have done. Pennsylvania is needlessly losing money and lives every day we reject the funds, all because of political grandstanding.

The failure to expand Medicaid coverage not only means fewer insured patients, it also eliminates the payments hospitals had long received to cover the cost of the uninsured people they treat for free. The hospitals, too, suffer from shameful political posturing. But who ends up paying in the long run? Not the politicians who stand in the way of accepting those payments, but all of us. This is a critical opportunity to help millions of people gain quality, reliable health coverage.