Will we ever address health-care crisis?

It seems that health care as a national issue has once again been moved to the back burner. The latest crisis demanding attention, of course, is the collapse of our financial markets and the urgent need to commit $700 billion to "grease the mechanism".

This amount is less than one-third of what we spend on health care each year. So why don't we focus on this priority and do what is needed? I think the answer has to do with the fact that health care is only of major importance if you are sick. Most of the time, most of us are not sick. Policy makers and legislators have insurance, paid for by taxpayers. If they get sick, they have good insurance. (You're welcome.) They are well cared for. The problem, while significant, does not constitute an emergency for them.

So how will this health care crisis be fixed if it is always to be No, 2 or 3 on the list of priorities? Well, it seems that individuals of the Rand Corporation, the well known think-tank, given the assignment to come up with a realistic answer to this question, have concluded that it won't be fixed until it breaks - until we are forced to fix it, it won't get done.

The question then becomes one of defining "broken". To the people who are the movers and shakers in the U.S., broken probably means a time when their mother or father can't get in to see the doctor because not enough doctors are participating with Medicare due to low reimbursement rates. It may be the time when their working adult children lose health care benefits at work and are driven into bankruptcy because of illness. Maybe it will be when a spouse succumbs to a terrible end-of-life illness that exhausts the lifetime benefit of health coverage and the cost spills over into their personal assets.

Do you think these things will ever happen? Will we ever address this problem?

Richard L. May

HuTech Resources, LLC

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