It's no mystery to the American people. Our current healthcare system is ill.
Employment-based coverage is under siege, with both employers and employees confronting spiraling premium costs, higher co-pays, and reduced coverage. Meanwhile, literally millions of hard-working, employed Americans are underinsured or have no access to healthcare at all.
Our current system protects some of the most vulnerable among us - the elderly (Medicare) and the poor (Medicaid). We owe at least that much to the hundreds of millions of middle-class Americans and their employers now being squeezed financially by a system that is out of control.
Given these realities, the United States needs a healthcare policy that contains costs while at the same time expands coverage. There are ways that this can be done in a fiscally responsible manner. They include partnerships between government agencies—state and federal—and business and industry. We can look at several successful models: Medicare, the Veterans Administration Health System, several state programs, such as Pennsylvania's proposed PA ABC plan, and, of course, one of the finest medical systems in the world, our military healthcare system.
We must examine all of these thoroughly, including the employment-based system that worked so well for many years, take the best from each, and create a system that is efficient, affordable and accessible for all Americans.
Efficiency and comprehensiveness are the keys. The system must exclude cherry-picking types of proposals like Health Savings Accounts and high deductible plans that favor the healthy, pit generation against generation, and that only the wealthiest can afford.
It must also be a policy that eliminates discrimination in healthcare, that is, prohibits the insurance companies from denying healthcare to people who have so-called pre-existing conditions. These are people who need healthcare most immediately and to exclude them from coverage constitutes onerous discrimination.
No quick fixes exist for overcoming the magnitude of this problem. But the Congress needs to act, something that it has lacked the will to do. My plan brings that will to Congress.
