Address the health-care crisis

As the country and the world cope with the financial crisis, the Tri-State region has seen its economy slow and consumer prices increas, not just in the past month, but over the past year. The number of Americans living below the poverty line has increased by 5 million since George W. Bush won his first bid for the presidency in 2000. Consequently, people are cutting back on all kinds of things in order to be able to afford necessities, not luxuries. One of the things people will cut back on, until there is no other alternative, is medical care of all kinds. Preventative care improves long-term health and quality of life, but it will be moved to the back burner as other pressing and immediate needs such as food and shelter take priority for payment out of shrinking monthly budgets.

Visits to the dentist, the general practitioner or the mental-health professional, will all begin to dwindle. Visits to the emergency room will then increase, since people will be forced to address their health issues only once they are emergencies, when the care is unavoidable. In emergency rooms, patients cannot be turned away, even if they have no health insurance.

In an interview with this newspaper in late September, Sharon Hospital CEO Charles Therrien made it clear that he saw real challenges for the hospital in the next fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, despite its net income of more than $1.7 million in the previous one. Therrien foresees possible cuts in reimbursements from Medicare, Medicaid and insurance companies of between $500,000 and $1 million. The economy may also force area residents to cut back on general health care and that could affect the bottom lines of our region’s hospitals as well.

Whether because of complete lack of health-care benefits or lack of money to pay for deductibles, the recession economy will affect the population’s ability to access health care. Consumers will eschew prescribed therapies, pharmaceuticals and general care not covered by their benefit plans if they do carry insurance, and if they don’t carry insurance, will never even get to the point of seeing a physician. That could result in a real problem not just for medical consumers, but also for our medical community.

The issue of affordable health care is one to which both presidential campaigns have given great importance. Both candidates offered their own answers for fixing the country’s broken health-care delivery system. According to their Web sites and Newsweek magazine, John McCain has proposed removing tax benefits from employers for providing health-care benefits, instead offering tax credits directly to medical consumers for purchasing their benefits themselves. Barack Obama’s approach includes having private insurance available through a national exchange, as well as having the government offer a plan that consumers would pay for directly which could be similar to the one the U.S. Congress uses.

Either approach may work better than what we have now, since employers are less and less able to afford to subsidize medical benefits and so many of those people who work part-time jobs and don’t have access to benefits at work are also not eligible for current governmental health-care assistance programs.

This is one area where change must happen, and sooner than later, yet it will be a hard sell for the U.S. Congress to accept either plan or even any compromise between the two. There’s a lot of money tied into the current structure of health care delivery, money that it will be difficult for medical providers and insurance companies to part with, already battered by the financial crisis as they are. However, they will need to adapt to the changes as they are legislated.

We as voters and consumers all need to strongly encourage our newly elected representatives at both the state and federal levels to fight for change in the health-care system, and to let them know how very critical affordable and accessible health care is to every man, woman and child in their constituencies.