Congressman Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. — Representing the People of the 2nd District of Illinois
 

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Washington DC Office
2419 Rayburn House Office
Building
Washington DC 20515-1302
 Phone: (202) 225-0773
Fax: (202) 225-0899

Homewood Office
17926 South Halsted
Homewood, IL 60430-2013
 Phone: (708) 798-6000
Fax: (708) 798-6160
 
Chicago Office
7121 S. Yates Blvd.
Chicago, IL 60649
 Phone: (773) 734-9660
Fax: (773) 734-9661
 

HEALTH

healthOver the centuries, incremental advancement in the law and human rights has come as a result of a protracted political struggle. The journey of health care in America has been no different. In the United States it formally began with the Massachusetts Health Insurance Company issuing the first "sickness insurance" in 1847, an early form of health insurance.

The Civil War helped advance U.S. medicine. At the beginning, medical care was crude: The Army featured only ninety-eight doctors and assistants, called surgeons. Limited hospital facilities were soon expanded, however, especially in Washington, D.C. The Civil War forced the capital city to become a hospital city, when a population of seventy-five thousand was obligated to care for fifty thousand patients. Twenty-five military hospitals were established in Washington and surrounding townships, while at the peak of the Civil War the area may have boasted upward of eighty-five such facilities.

During the Civil War, amputation was the most common surgery. The Civil War also turned embalming into a science: So many families wanted their dead relatives' remains returned that a whole new profession was created. Surgeons' work during the Civil War also advanced a new idea, that medical personnel were neutrals in war and should not be shot, taken prisoner, or captured alongside fighting soldiers.

In the 1870s, American industrial workers in the North became increasingly dissatisfied and militant in their labor demands. As a way of appeasing these workers, some railroad, mining, and other industries began to provide company doctors, funded by deductions from workers' wages - thus began employer-related health care. Montgomery Ward entered into one of the earliest group insurance contracts in 1910. The National Convention of Insurance Commissioners developed the first model around which states could regulate the new health insurance industry in 1912, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union began the first union medical services in 1913.

With an employment-based health care system, dramatically rising health care costs, less skilled unionized industrial jobs moving overseas, part-time and independent contract and consultant work rising, and without full employment, there has been a significant decline in health care coverage in the United States. Private insurance through full-time employment is the way most citizens secure health care. But a quarter of all working Americans get their paychecks from part-time or temporary jobs, which are far less likely to offer health insurance or retirement benefits. Medicaid insures only about 10 percent of the low-income non-elderly population. Eighty percent of those without health insurance are workers or dependents of workers, with three-quarters living in families with at least one full-time year-round worker - in other words, not poor by official federal poverty standards. Children and people of color are particularly vulnerable, but they are only part of a much larger picture of those in the United States without health insurance.

Since 1990, the number of uninsured Americans has grown by thirteen million - seven million during the eight years of the Clinton administration - and at the start of the new millennium there are approximately forty-five million non-elderly Americans without health insurance (those over age sixty-five are covered by Medicare). Additionally, there are approximately forty-five million Americans with inadequate health insurance. If FDR could speak to the nation today, he would have to tell us that one-third of America is still ill cared for in terms of health.

There is not only a deficiency of health care for children, but also a disproportionate lack of health care for minorities. The disparities in health care leave too many minority communities with a health system that is separate and unequal. The Commonwealth Fund released a February 1999 study that showed, even after taking into account workforce and socio-demographic characteristics, blacks and Hispanics were 21 percent less likely than whites to have employer-sponsored health insurance. The report, "Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance: Implications for Minority Workers," found that minority groups tend to have lower rates of health care coverage because they are more likely to work in industries that do not provide coverage, have lower incomes, and hold part-time jobs.

To date, the state-by-state (states' rights) market approach to providing health care has not adequately met the American people's health care needs. It bears repeating that the federal government is the only entity that can accumulate the financial resources and coordinate a national health care system. Such a system can be run and controlled locally, but the minimum high standards, the overall coordination and administration, and the national financial planning for such a system must be administered and made democratically accountable at the federal level.

While health care is clearly a more complex undertaking, if we can do it for Social Security - the most popular social program in America's history - we can also do it for health care.

There are many incremental, piecemeal approaches to improved health care, which include a patients' bill of rights, small increases in the number of children covered under special state-run programs and Medicare coverage for prescription drugs. I support all of these improvements, but they are a long way from what the American people deserve, what the American economy can afford, and what political leaders ought to be fighting for. We should continue to fight for all of these advances, and a constitutional amendment guaranteeing every American health care of equal high quality. That amendment is the logical conclusion to all of these bit-by-bit struggles and proposals.

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