Mr.
Speaker: "The crisis in American health care is real and getting worse."
Those words appeared in an editorial today in The Washington Post, written
by two distinguished scholars, former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop
and John C. Baldwin, vice president for health affairs at Dartmouth College.
I
hope my colleagues will take a few minutes to read about the state of health
care in our nation. Dr. Koop and Dr. Baldwin pointedly stress that universal
access to health care must become a national commitment and will require
a national investment. As important, they argue against the idea
that health care should be treated as a commodity, saying that "(w)e must
rid ourselves of the delusion that it is a business, like any other business."
At
a time when 16 percent of Americans have no health insurance, health care
costs are skyrocketing, and medical decisions are made by HMO executives
beholden to shareholders, bold solutions are needed. As Dr. Koop
and Dr. Baldwin State, "(o)ur problem is a failure of distribution, a failure
to extend care to all of those who need it and a failure to recognize the
importance of applying scientific rigor to the problems of broad-based
health care delivery. If state-of-the art American medicine were
offered to our citizens in a comprehensive way, our levels of public health
would be unexcelled."
They
also recognize that we can not continue on our current path, to spend more
than any other industrialized nation in the world while providing less.
Correctly, they conclude that "the movement over the past few years to
turn health care into a 'business' through health maintenance organizations
and other stratagems has not worked to the satisfaction of most Americans."
Indeed, it is time for a new direction.
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