| WASHINGTON,
D.C. – U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) recently wrote in a column
that “…we must make a national commitment to universal health care —
to guarantee that every person has access to comprehensive, quality, and
affordable medical services.” The column appeared in Health
Source, the monthly publication of the Illinois
Primary Health Care Association.
Below
is Schakowsky’s column.
Community
Health Centers: Models for Universal Health Care
The
World Health Organization (WHO) has just released a report ranking the
world’s health systems. Not surprisingly, the United States ranked number-one,
by far, in terms of per capita and national spending on health care. Sadly,
however, being number-one in national spending does not guarantee quality
health care for all. WHO ranked the United States 37th in the quality of
our health system.
According
to WHO, "the objective of good health is really twofold: the best attainable
average level - goodness –and the smallest feasible difference among individuals
and groups - fairness."
There
are now 46 million Americans who are uninsured, 11 million of whom are
children, and these numbers continue to grow. In Illinois, in just one
year, the number grew by 300,000 –almost one-third of the increase in the
entire nation. In Chicago, one out of every four families earning between
$16,600 and $33,200 annually has no health insurance. This is exactly the
disparity and the unfairness that WHO criticized.
Community
health centers have been our saving grace. With limited resources, community
health centers care for the uninsured and the poorly insured with cost-effectiveness
and attention to the medical, cultural, and social needs of those whom
they serve. Already, the U.S. Public Health Services estimates that health
centers are able to serve less than one-quarter of the nation’s medically
undeserved population. Obviously, then, there is a limit to what community
health centers will be able to accomplish in the face of ever-growing demands
if their funding does not keep pace with the skyrocketing numbers of uninsured
families.
That
is why we must make a national commitment to universal health care — to
guarantee that every person has access to comprehensive, quality, and affordable
medical services. We can no longer tolerate a world in which we are the
only industrialized country that fails this test.
We
are entering a new round of debate on how to respond to the growing number
of uninsured. We could take one path: tax credits or vouchers that the
uninsured can use to buy private insurance, which would leave community
health centers and other safety net providers to pick up the pieces. Or,
we could take another direction: meet WHO’s challenge by creating a system
that is both good and fair, using community health centers as a model to
meet that goal.
Two
community health centers in my district, Chicago Health Outreach and the
Howard Brown Health Center, are perfect examples. They emphasize patient
care, not profits. They spend these limited resources on medical care,
not marketing or bureaucracy. As locally based centers, they respond to
the specific concerns and needs of their community. They are not fighting
for high shareholder returns or market share, but for the medical needs
of their patients.
Our
goal must be to make sure that every person has access to health care and
that we leave no one behind. We must stop focusing on being number-one
in spending, but number-one in guaranteeing goodness and fairness in health
care for our people. |
