Give Kucinich His Props: He'd Fix Healthcare
Originally published in Newsday
Marie Cocco
Give Kucinich His Props: He'd Fix Health Care
October 16, 2003
Now that Dennis Kucinich has formally entered the presidential race - and before he fades away - comes a moment to give the Ohio congressman his due.
He is the only candidate who would really fix the country's broken health care system.
He would end the confusing, expensive, inefficient and immoral mechanism through which the world's richest nation rations care according to a person's ability to pay. He would do away with the private health insurance industry, with its contraption of copayments and deductibles that are taxes on the sick.
He would break the standoff between employers trying to stem the rapid escalation in their health insurance costs and workers trying to keep these costs from being shifted to them - a payroll tax by another name.
He would put an end to the notion that giant health care corporations answering to Wall Street investors (and Justice Department investigators) are just the medicine sick people need.
Kucinich would create a single-payer health care system under which private medical care is paid for with public dollars. Medicare, Part E (for Everyone).
You may know Kucinich as the most exuberant Democrat at the debates. He is an unconflicted opponent of war with Iraq. He wants to pull the troops out.
He opposes most trade pacts, which he says penalize American workers. He promotes a "Department of Peace" and has called for "the goddess of peace to encircle within her arms all the children of this country and all the children of the world."
In short, he's not going to be president. But that doesn't mean he's got no good ideas.
The other Democratic candidates, spooked by the ghost of Bill Clinton's doomed effort to reform the health insurance system, repeat what can only be seen in hindsight as the same mistake. They are trying to "build on" the employer-based health insurance system.
They refuse to see this foundation is crumbling.
The number of uninsured Americans increased by 2.4 million last year - the largest jump in a decade - mostly because workers lost coverage provided by employers. Employees either lost their jobs or businesses dropped the benefit because of huge price hikes. This is no temporary by-product of a sluggish economy.
Even in the 1990s, when employment was growing, the proportion of people with health insurance wasn't: Much of the job growth was in small business, which is far less likely to offer the benefit. Today, about half the working poor remain uninsured either because their employer offers no coverage, or they can't afford to buy it.
Benefit-enrollment packages arriving in employees' mailboxes this fall will include the fifth consecutive double-digit hike in insurance prices, along with new devices to shift costs to workers. State programs like Medicaid, that are supposed to pick up the insurance slack when the economy slows, are themselves scaling back coverage to meet budget crises.
If the privately run, employer-sponsored, health-care system were a government program, politicians would line up at microphones to declare its failure.
Its costs are spiraling out of control. Its inefficiency is spectacular. The United States spends $294.3 billion a year on health administration, according to 1999 figures published in the New England Journal of Medicine. On a per-capita basis, that's more than three times what Canada spends.
The alleged efficiency of managed care is an advertising claim, not a fact. The percentage of U.S. health care workers dedicated to administration only - filing forms, navigating among multiple insurers - has climbed since the managed-care experiment began.
Government studies have shown that the administrative savings of moving to a single-payer system would free up enough funds to pay for expanding coverage to all. This is, in essence, what Kucinich wants to do.
There may be nothing else about Kucinich's candidacy that appeals to the national political mood. But on health care, he offers hope. It's something to think about when you open that benefit envelope this year.
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