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Politics as usual?
Just today I came upon this quote I found interesting (I'll get to the reason below):
"The American health care system is approaching a breaking point. Rapidly rising medical costs are increasing the numbers of people without health coverage and straining the system's capacity to provide care for those who cannot pay. The gap is widening between the majority of Americans, who can take advantage of the best medical services in the world, and the rest, who find it hard to get even basic needed care. As the gap increases, the weight of financing care for those without adequate coverage is undermining the stability of our health institutions. Even for the majority, the explosive growth in health care costs is steadily eroding the private insurance system -- the bulwark they count on as their defense against financial risk in case of illness."
Why do I find this quote interesting? It's not because it sounds reasonable, or timely. Many of the issues mentioned in the quote are covered in the health platforms of some of today's presidential candidates, as detailed in our Health Matters in the 2008 Election special.
What I find most interesting here is that the quote is included in the executive summary of The Pepper Commission, a bipartisan commission on comprehensive health care, chaired by the late Democratic congressman from Florida, Claude Pepper, in September 1990. I'll do the math: That was 17 years ago.
And we're still talking about the same problems. Well, sometimes at least. In last night's Democratic debate, there were a lot of attempts to knock Sen. Clinton off her front-runner pedestal, but little talk about health care.
Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich did bring up his plan for a single-payer (government-funded) health care system, but then he also admitted to seeing a UFO, which I think it's safe to say distracted from the debate a bit.
Meanwhile, the voters say health care is still very much on their minds, and it is becoming a fully bipartisan, not just a supposedly Democratic, issue. A recent poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed health care to be the second issue, behind Iraq, that both Democratic and Republican voters want the candidates to talk about.
For the time being, at least, we'll have to wait and see if they listen (and hope it doesn't take 17 more years to get something substantive done).
Sean Swint
Executive Editor, WebMD
"The American health care system is approaching a breaking point. Rapidly rising medical costs are increasing the numbers of people without health coverage and straining the system's capacity to provide care for those who cannot pay. The gap is widening between the majority of Americans, who can take advantage of the best medical services in the world, and the rest, who find it hard to get even basic needed care. As the gap increases, the weight of financing care for those without adequate coverage is undermining the stability of our health institutions. Even for the majority, the explosive growth in health care costs is steadily eroding the private insurance system -- the bulwark they count on as their defense against financial risk in case of illness."
Why do I find this quote interesting? It's not because it sounds reasonable, or timely. Many of the issues mentioned in the quote are covered in the health platforms of some of today's presidential candidates, as detailed in our Health Matters in the 2008 Election special.
What I find most interesting here is that the quote is included in the executive summary of The Pepper Commission, a bipartisan commission on comprehensive health care, chaired by the late Democratic congressman from Florida, Claude Pepper, in September 1990. I'll do the math: That was 17 years ago.
And we're still talking about the same problems. Well, sometimes at least. In last night's Democratic debate, there were a lot of attempts to knock Sen. Clinton off her front-runner pedestal, but little talk about health care.
Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich did bring up his plan for a single-payer (government-funded) health care system, but then he also admitted to seeing a UFO, which I think it's safe to say distracted from the debate a bit.
Meanwhile, the voters say health care is still very much on their minds, and it is becoming a fully bipartisan, not just a supposedly Democratic, issue. A recent poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed health care to be the second issue, behind Iraq, that both Democratic and Republican voters want the candidates to talk about.
For the time being, at least, we'll have to wait and see if they listen (and hope it doesn't take 17 more years to get something substantive done).
Sean Swint
Executive Editor, WebMD
