Prospects for National Health Care Reform

According to the Wednesday, March 11, 2009 issue of USA Today, “The biggest problem the country has is the cost of health care.” This is a mantra that has increased in volume throughout my lifetime. There have been many efforts to fix all or parts of the problem, but the most recent effort to put in place a national system of health care, which occurred in 1992-1993 during the Clinton Administration, failed.
Some of the data about the current status of the problem presented by USA Today includes that 52% of those unable to pay for health care and/or medicines over the past 12 months do not have health insurance. It helps to be married or widowed. While 15% of married and 16% of widowed could not pay for their health care and/or medicines, 24%, 29% and 32% of singles, divorced and domestic partners, respectively, suffered the same problems. There are disparities. Asians fare best with 13% unable to pay, while larger percentages of other groups, including whites (17%), African Americans (30%) and Hispanics (31%) were unable to pay.
As one would expect, those of low incomes are most likely to be unable to pay for health care and medicines. Thirty-nine percent of those earning less than $2,000 per month were unable to pay. The percentages dropped to 24% for those earning from $2,000 through $3,999, to 12% for those earning from $4,000-$7,499 and to 7% for those earning $7,500 or more. It seems very likely that those earning $7,500 or more per month who had problems were clustered near the bottom of the this category and that they faced catastrophic health problems.
Our health care crisis has grown to the point that many of the stakeholders who helped defeat the efforts of the Clinton Administration’s bill to reform health care are now proclaiming a desire to help the Obama Administration to succeed in bringing about the long needed reform. How optimistic should we be that the diverse interests will actually cooperate in a politically bi-partisan effort to establish a robust national health care system? Maybe it will happen this time. Optimists are hopeful. Pessimists remember how often over the past 60 years we got less than a robust national health system from efforts to address the costs of health care and medicines in our country.