Public health care needed

Chicken Little is alive and well. I am getting a little tired of the politics of fear.

Every time an idea to improve the our health care system comes up, there is a flurry of excuses why we should just keep the status quo. I know it will be difficult, and cost money, but we seem to find money to do everything else but improve the condition of people who cannot afford the exorbitant prices for premiums.

We pay taxes for our congresspeople to receive salary, retirement and health care. Why can’t they share their wonderful coverage with the rest of us? I hear some of them talking about how a public, government-run choice would ruin the private companies and I have to laugh. What ever happened to the idea that competition is good because it drives down prices? Right now, insurance companies rule the system. There seems to be fear that if we had a government-run, public choice (and I am not talking about a single payer system) that bureaucrats would be making health care choices. Isn’t that what’s happening now, with paper pushers deciding who gets care, and who doesn’t?

People who lose their jobs or whose employers change policies from one carrier to another face the fact that the new carrier may exclude them because of a pre-existing condition. Small business owners cannot afford the ever rising cost of offering health care to their employees. People who are lucky enough to get a single premium that they can afford get so little coverage with high deductibles for it that they might as well just pray that they won’t get sick and have to pay for it themselves. Doctors pay exorbitant prices for malpractice insurance even though they may never have had a claim filed against them.

The most expensive care you can get is to go to an emergency room for your ailment. Those without insurance have no other choice, because they don’t have coverage for primary care. I could go on and on, but you get the point. We have to do something, and maybe the creation of a government option would force the private companies to lower their prices to a level that’s affordable if they want to stay in business.

If we are waiting for the perfect solution, we will never find it. We have to go with what is possible and try to solve this most pressing problem.

Dolores Waffen

Wasilla