The Cincinnati Beacon - Health Care: A National Security Issue!

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Health Care: A National Security Issue!

18,000 Americans die every year from a lack of health care coverage. That’s six 9/11s every year. A new poll shows continued support for universal health care from a majority of Americans. The head of the GAO warns that the most serious threat to the US is fiscal irresponsibility. He believes our current health care system is way too expensive, overrated and unsustainable.

Last week on “60 minutes”, Steve Kroft reported that the head of the GAO “has totaled up our government’s income, liabilities, and future obligations and concluded the numbers simply don’t add up. And he’s not alone. Its been called the “dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows” – a set of financial truths so inconvenient that most elected officials don’t even want to talk about them, which is exactly why David Walker does.”

As the comptroller general of the US, David Walker runs the Government Accountability Office. The GAO is the investigative arm of Congress and audits the government’s books. The GAO has a budget of a half a billion dollars. Walker’s been on a fiscal “wake up” tour with an urgent message. He argues that “the most serious threat to the United States is not someone hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan but our own fiscal irresponsibility.”

Asked why, Walker says,

“We promise way more than we can afford to keep. Eight trillion dollars added to what was already a 15 to $20 trillion under-funding. We’re not being realistic. We can’t afford the promises we’ve already made, much less to be able, piling on top of ‘em.”

According to Walker the federal government increased existing Medicare obligations nearly 40 percent over the next 75 years with one stroke of the pen.

“We’d have to have eight trillion dollars today, invested in treasury rates, to deliver on that promise,” Walker explains. Asked how much we actually have, Walker says, “Zip.”

He says that money is going to come from additional taxes, or it’s gonna come from restructuring these promises, or it’s gonna come from cutting other spending. Walker isn’t suggesting that we do away with Medicare or prescription drug benefits, but he believes the current health care system is way too expensive and overrated.

Walker says,

“On cost we’re number one in the world. We spend 50 percent more of our economy on health care than any nation on earth. We have the largest uninsured population of any major industrialized nation. We have above average infant mortality, below average life expectancy, and much higher than average medical error rates for an industrialized nation”.

He says we have promised almost unlimited health care to senior citizens who never see the bills, and the government already is borrowing money to pay them. He says the system is unsustainable.

“It’s the number one fiscal challenge for the federal government, it’s the number one fiscal challenge for state governments and it’s the number one competitive challenge for American business. We’re gonna have to dramatically and fundamentally reform our health care system in installments over the next 20 years,”

Walker told Kroft.

“And if we don’t, it could bankrupt America.”

Kroft said,

“You’re probably expecting to hear from someone who disagrees with the comptroller general’s numbers, projections, and analysis. But hardly anyone does. He is accompanied on the wake-up tour by economists from the conservative Heritage Foundation, the left-leaning Brookings Institution, and the non-partisan Concord Coalition. The only dissenters seem to be a small minority of economists who believe either that the U.S. can grow its way out of the problem, or that Walker is over-stating it.”

It’s a myth that the privatization of health care is more efficient because 25-30% of every dollar spent on health care goes towards profit and bureaucracy. There are better models in every single industrialized nation on the planet. 47 Million Americans are uninsured (10 million of them are children) and millions more are underinsured. Health care costs are a leading cause of bankruptcy in the richest most powerful (now debtor) nation in the history of the world.

In our quest to be the world’s lone superpower, has the US become a pitiful giant? Despite overwhelming evidence and public support for universal health care, the two-party corporate dictatorship will only consider health care reform that includes their greedy insurance company paymasters that say “pay or die”. Tonight many Americans will have to choose between food, heat or medicine. We can choose health care and peace in the polls, but not in the ballot box. The American people have the right priorities on these issues but our democracy is dying. Uncle Sam’s bloated military budget and insecurity system is given priority over the health, safety and well being of our nation and its people. Health care is a human right, not a privilege reserved only for the wealthy.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron”.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953

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Saturday, March 10, 2007