Published by: Patricia Gabow on 1/20/2011 2:42:22 PM
I am CEO of a safety net health system that provides almost $400 million a year of care to people without insurance. I see every day why we need meaningful health care reform.
In the United State, we have almost 50 million people uninsured, spend twice as much as any other developed country, and get a grade of 65 out of 100 on quality. Why should Americans accept paying more and getting less?
With the health reform bill we are beginning to address these problems of access, cost and quality. We are gearing up to insure 32 million Americans with either new sources of coverage or giving them meaningful coverage with the insurance they had. Children up to age 26 can now be on their parents’ coverage instead of these young people finding themselves in the ranks of the uninsured. For those of us already insured, health reform guarantees that we will keep insurance if we get sick instead of being dropped and finding ourselves also among the uninsured. If you have a pre-existing condition like diabetes or asthma you can now get insurance instead of being uninsurable and there is no more life-time cap so you can stay insured and you won’t join the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have had to declare bankruptcy because of a health problem.
These provisions went into effect on September 23, the six-month anniversary of the health reform legislation—so we are starting to see the benefits now. And there is more to come in the future: Medicaid expansion for the poorest, subsidized health care premiums for those who still can’t afford coverage, no co-payments for preventive care, preventive care visits for seniors, funding for innovations in the delivery models that coordinate care, better information technology so patients and providers have the information they need, and many other improvements to American health care.
So, if important changes are happening why do 30% to 40% of Americans not want reform? Well, most of us are afraid of change—even if it makes things better. Second, health care is complicated and fixing it is complicated so it’s hard to understand and those of us in health care have not done a good job explaining why this is important. Therefore, all of us who are part of health care—doctors, hospitals, clinics, insurers, drug and device manufactures, professional societies and others—need to do a better job of explaining this reform and work to make the reform a success. Do we really have another alternative? Keeping things the same isn’t really a choice unless we want to keep spending more and getting less? Fixing only a few things like not excluding people with diabetes but not having healthy people in the system only makes insurance more expensive , also not a good choice.
The current bill is not perfect. How could one bill perfectly fix such a complicated system? The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will need some fixes, just like Medicare and Medicaid needed some fixes after they were first enacted. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Dr. Patricia Gabow
Denver Health