Joe Trovato?s column (?HillaryCare hides socialist disaster,? Jan. 29) in Tuesday?s Badger Herald has once again raised the 15-year-old issue of universal health care in the United States. While his timing ? leading up to the important Wisconsin primary ? couldn?t be better, his reasons for opposing universal health care are tragically outdated.
Mr. Trovato starts by quoting President Ronald Reagan and invoking Cold War rhetoric that made me question whether or not we were still fighting communism. Socialism, as defined by Mr. Trovato, seems to include any government program that provides basic services to the people of our country. If that were the case, I would cite police and fire departments as evidence of our socialist state. After all, the fire department will come to your house as soon as they?re called, the benefit being you don?t have to shop around for quotes on putting out the blaze consuming your house.
Public schools, highways and even our university are all examples of programs funded at least partially by the government. They are there to ensure a standard of living below which no American should have to live. Can?t afford private school? Send your child to Madison public schools; two of our high schools have had the highest ACT scores in the state for over five years running. Mr. Trovato cites the principle of liberty often in his column, yet neglects to mention one of our nation?s other founding principles ? the pursuit of happiness.
We are the last industrialized country to not provide all of our citizens with affordable health insurance. Almost 47 million Americans are without coverage today, translating to one out of every seven people, many of them between the ages of 24 and 30. Off their parents? health care and without coverage from an employer, young Americans are some of the most vulnerable when it comes to not being insured. An estimated 18,000 uninsured Americans die every year because they lack access to affordable care, according to the Institute of Medicine.
This fall, Congress passed an expansion of the State Children?s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). But President Bush vetoed amendments to SCHIP that would have provided much-needed coverage to 4 million uncovered children, hindering progress in the fight for affordable health care. No child in America should have to go without regular preventive checkups. Yet millions still do.
The point is simply this: If we can find a way to fund public schools that guarantee a poor child will have the chance to be successful and if we can find the resources to fight a war halfway around the world, then what is stopping us from ensuring that every American ? regardless of class, race or prior medical condition ? has access to basic health coverage?
The case for universal health care can be made using both arguments for the common welfare and arguments for a strong economy. As a recent Wisconsin State Journal article notes, small businesses in the Madison area are seeing the costs of health care skyrocket. Park Printing, based in Verona, will see their health care costs rise 42 percent next year. For a small business that?s been operating in Dane County for 55 years, that?s devastating.
Universal health care will help small businesses afford better health care plans at lower prices, simply by increasing risk pooling and by drastically reducing administrative costs. While Medicare uses 1.8 percent of its budget to pay the public employees who run it, private insurers see those costs go as high as 30 percent in order to fund the bloated salaries of insurance executives.
Mr. Trovato?s solution, the one advocated by Republican Sen. John McCain and now by Gov. Mitt Romney, is to provide taxpayers with a voucher from which they can buy private health insurance. The problem is that it does nothing to control the rising cost of health care. Insurers will continue to raise their prices, and government will have to give more and more vouchers to keep pace.
Universal health care doesn?t prevent individuals from purchasing their own insurance, or upgrading the coverage provided to everyone by our government. But it does say that no one will be left behind, and no one will be forced to sell everything they own because they got sick. Sadly, in America today that situation has become all too common.
The time has come to change the status quo, something that former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., knew very well when he started his campaign one year ago in New Orleans. The difficulties of poverty and strife still plague our nation, and Mr. Edwards was committed to bringing those issues to the White House. His candidacy reminded us to always be our brother?s keeper, and it is in that spirit that the dream of health care for all lives on.
Oliver Kiefer ([email protected]) is chair of the College Democrats.
