Guaranteed Healthcare

A government takeover? 

The collapse of the U.S. financial system may present single-payer advocates with a strategic advantage.

What until recently was only whispered about behind closed doors--a government takeover of the U.S. healthcare system is now being openly discussed.

Two new studies The New York Times is reporting on today are causing renewed new alarm that the United States is facing another perfect storm, the full meltdown of the healthcare system. One study is from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the other from the Center for Studying Health System Change.

Two studies released Wednesday morning provide further evidence of the toll health care is increasingly placing on working families, even for those who have health insurance. And as employees are paying more medical expenses out of their own pockets, they are having a harder time coming up with the money.

The studies, by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Center for Studying Health System Change, were completed earlier this year before the financial markets reached their current state of crisis. But policy analysts say the findings underscore the mounting additional strain that medical care is placing on working Americans.

In a word, the United States is deep in the throes of a catastophic meltdown of our healthcare system. A situation not at all dissimilar to the the meltdown of our financial markets.  The possibility that in the not-too-distant future the government may have to step in to stabilize and nationalize the private for-profit insurance industry, is an idea that cannot be taken off the table.

You say this won't happen in the United States. Well, the study estimates that 57 million Americans live in families struggling with medical bills, and 43 million of those have insurance coverage.

The crisis has burrowed deep into the wallets of the middle class. Tens of millions of Americans are choosing every month between gas, food and health insurance premiums. And as we make these exorbitant payments to insurance companies which for decades have played fast and loose with our lives, we know that it is only a matter of time until this industry will come begging to the taxpayers for its own bailout.

 “The problems people are having paying for health care and health insurance are a central dimension of the economic and pocketbook concerns right now,” said Drew E. Altman, the president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health research group that conducts an annual survey of employer medical benefits.

The studies, policy analysts say, underscore the need for the government to address the growing unaffordability of care, despite the distraction — and cost to taxpayers — of a proposed $700 billion bailout of the financial sector.

“This makes clear the cost of doing nothing is high and growing,” said Len Nichols, a health economist at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan policy group in Washington that advocates universal medical coverage.

While policy analysts acknowledge that finding any new money to expand coverage may prove difficult, some also say the terms of the debate may be changing as policy makers and the public rethink their positions on the need for regulation and the role of the government in industry — including the health care system.

“We can now imagine a government takeover that we could not imagine before,” Mr. Nichols said.

I agree, the events of the least two weeks should be a wake up call, which we ignore at our own peril.