|
|
 Health Insurance Coverage The current system of healthcare insurance is what a C+ economist might doodle out after an all-night bender: all the right principals, all improperly deployed. I have seen what the cost of a single a prescription can mean to a family, steadied a mother trembling with a bill she couldn’t pay. The antibiotic needed to treat her child’s recurrent ear infection was $100, nearly a quarter of her weekly gross income. It’s not that she didn’t want to pay, it’s that she was $19 short. I have also been that mother, crumbling in the Walgreen’s, scared out of my mind, wondering how I was going to pay for my daughter’s prescriptions, every month for the rest of her life. It’s not that I wanted a free ride. On the contrary, we have insurance. Blue Cross Blue Shield no less. There are goods we have collectively agreed to as “non-negotiable,” such as Social Security and Medicare. I believe the case for universal health insurance is similarly well founded in terms of measurable and beneficial social and fiscal policy and in terms of basic humanity. At minimum, a consensus has developed that government, at some level, must address the gaps in our current system of health care, which leave too many needlessly vulnerable and without access. Government and other institutions need to exercise leadership to demonstrate that attending to unmet health needs, in the long run, is not simply a matter of ideology, but saves the taxpayers’ money. A patchwork of state-run systems is troubling from both consistency and inefficiency standpoints, and without a federal commitment, states are limited in the type of programming they can self-fund and self-manage. However, until there is broader federal coverage, such as a single-payer system, states have to step up. That's why I support the All Kids program and its expansion, though I am concerned that the Governor’s hard-hammer approach to expanding the program is eroding the confidence and broader consensus that will be needed to take the next step into more universally available health insurance. |
