It's time to act.
U.S. Already Spends $2.2 Trillion Annually on Health Care
This isn't a problem of money, this is a problem of will. A failure of leadership. We already spend $2.2 trillion a year on health care in this country. My colleague, Senator Ron Wyden, who's recently developed an interesting new health care plan of his own, tells it this way:
"For the money Americans spent on health care last year, we could have hired a group of skilled physicians, paid each one of them $200,000 to care for just seven families, and guaranteed every single American quality, affordable health care.
So where's all that money going? We know that a quarter of it - one out of every four health care dollars - is spent on non-medical costs; mostly bills and paperwork. And we also know that this is completely unnecessary. Almost every other industry in the world has saved billions on these administrative costs by doing it all online. Every transaction you make at a bank now costs them less than a penny. Even at the Veterans Administration, where it used to cost nine dollars to pull up your medical record, new technology means you can call up the same record on the internet for next to nothing.
But because we haven't updated technology in the rest of the health care industry, a single transaction still costs up to twenty-five dollars - not one dime of which goes toward improving the quality of our health care."
Simply Inexcusable
This is simply inexcusable.
And if we brought our entire health care system online into the 21st century, something everyone from Ted Kennedy to Newt Gingrich believes we should do, we'd already be saving over $600 million a year on health care costs that we could apply to providing coverage for more peoople.
It's not a problem of lack of ideas. It's a problem of political will. The federal government should be leading the way here. If you do business with the federal employee health benefits program, you should move to an electronic claims system.
If you are a provider who works with Medicare, you should have to report your patient's health outcomes, so that we can figure out, on a national level, how to improve health care quality.
These are all things experts tell us must be done but aren't being done. And the federal government should lead.
Record-Breaking Profits in the Health Care Industry
Another, more controversial area we need to look at is how much of our health care spending is going toward the record-breaking profits earned by the drug and health care industry.
It's perfectly understandable for a corporation to try and make a profit, but when those profits are soaring higher and higher each year while millions lose their coverage and premiums skyrocket, we have a responsibility to ask why.
At a time when businesses are facing increased competition and workers rarely stay with one company throughout their lives, we also have to ask if the employer-based system of health care itself is still the best for providing insurance to all Americans.
We have to ask what we can do to provide more Americans with preventative care, which would mean fewer doctor's visits and less cost down the road.
We should make sure that every single child who's eligible is signed up for the children's health insurance program, and the federal government should make sure that our states have the money to make that happen.
And we have to start looking at some of the interesting ideas on comprehensive reform that are coming out of states like Maine, Illinois, California, Massachusetts, to see what we can replicate on a national scale and what will move us toward that goal of universal coverage for all.
