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Highlands Today

Public health care

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Linda Farnes

Published: July 4, 2009

Today 46 million Americans (and growing) are without health insurance. The vast majority of them live paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford a simple doctor's visit, let alone an illness, even a treatable one.

The hands-off policies that brought our financial markets to their knees have also allowed corporate hospital chains and insurance corporations to hold the health of Americans hostage for way too long. Profit-driven insurance companies and hospital corporations have been making our health decisions for us, based on their own self-serving interests.

The salaries of the CEOs of these corporations have risen to obscene levels over the past few years, while hospital employee wages have been cut and many outright replaced with low cost foreign "guest workers." Nurses' case loads have increased, limiting their ability to care for their patients and emergency room doctors are more often than not employees or subcontractors to the hospitals.

These same big business insurance companies decide how long you can stay in the hospital and to drag their feet about paying out legitimate claims. Yet they are trying to scare us, trying to convince us that a public insurance option would take away our choice. The truth is a public plan will give us more choices, not less, and will give insurance companies real competition in place of price fixing.

They want us to believe that we cannot afford universal health care; but just the opposite is true. So many illnesses, if left untreated, can move a person from the working, productive, tax paying pool, over the line into the total disability pool. Glaucoma, if left untreated, will cause blindness and diabetes can lead to blindness, amputation and any number of other disabling complications.

Likewise, early treatment of conditions like emphysema, asthma, atherosclerosis, heart disease, high blood pressure and many types of cancer can allow a person to remain productive and independent, whereas these illnesses left undetected or untreated can result in total disability or death. Often the death or disability of just one parent puts an entire family on welfare. That we cannot afford.

The elderly and the poor already have access to health care, as do the rich. Aside from the obvious humanitarian concerns, from a purely fiscal perspective, it is simply in our country's best interest to keep our working class healthy. To do any less is not only inhumane, it is just bad business.

Please write and call your Senator and Congressman and tell them to pass health care reform including a public insurance option.

Linda Farnes
Lake Placid

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