Health Care:The Cure Is so Simple

ou know the health care crisis is serious when the insurance industry itself conceives a plan to cure it. Why should it bother? Things have been going bountifully its way for a long time. It famously seeks out the well-heeled as clients and tightly limits what procedures and medications for which it will pay. Its new plan may say "universal" on the cover, but, basically, it's just more of the same.

So why propose anything at all? Well, insurers are smart. They notice that each year voters are getting a bit grumpier about our current system, and the recent election, while not a revolution, carries seeds of change. It's good business to get out in front of that change and grasp control.

After all it's profit, not wellness, that American health care is all about. Connecticut's own General Electric Co. of Fairfield, for example, has just bought 186 nursing homes. It turns out there's more profit in them than in toasters or refrigerators. What a revelation! The HMOs and drug companies figured that out long ago.

But what's ominous for insurers are the much-touted government actions in Maine and Massachusetts. Each of those states has conjured up its own form of universal health care. That's a little hard to pull off on a single-state basis, and neither yet really supplants the insurance companies, but the trend toward change is clear.

As well it should be. The latest figures show that Canada pays only 60 percent as much per person for health care as we do, and Britain a mere 40 percent. Plus they live longer than white Americans do. The main reason is that neither country wastes money on insurance companies. Government itself is the insurer, which means that every citizen is covered and there are phenomenal savings on overhead.

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A parallel proposed scheme in this country is called "Medicare for Everyone." Contriving such a plan hardly requires dazzling insight, only dazzling courage.

Neither Jodi Rell, nor John DeStefano, nor Dan Malloy offered anything that simple, direct or effective in the gubernatorial campaign. They knew they'd get blistered by the medical-industrial complex if they did. Fortunes are riding on this.

Naturally, if either the United States or Connecticut did move to universal care, some one would have to pay for it, and Americans are more resistant to taxes than most. Luckily, we already enjoy a tradition of employers pitching in on health care, a tradition that they are now trying desperately to unload. Well, not so fast.

A new universal health-care system could work quite well if it were set up much like Social Security. The worker would pay a percentage of income and the boss would too. Every boss. Government would help fill the gap. So too would a new tariff on imported goods for which foreign producers had not contributed to the health care of their workers.

And with no more wasteful HMOs to kick around, we could also stop swiping nurses from the rest of the world. Having cut bureaucracy in half, we wouldn't need them. And think of the savings just from closing United Health Group, an insurer whose CEO makes $80 million a year.

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Our present trend of health care, unfortunately, is in just the opposite direction. It's the workers, not the HMOs, who are getting dumped, along with the poor.

And doctors, being human, mostly focus on serving those who can pay. Who wouldn't?

So the obvious solution is to make sure that everybody can pay, and that everybody with resources contributes. "Medicare for Everyone."