Health coverage for all needs solving here now

Sure, the rest of the world despises the United States over Iraq. How could it not? But we’re also held in low esteem for our health care. The happy difference is that while the war has a malevolent impact on nearly every nation, our health-care system hurts only us.

Even schoolchildren realize that 45 million Americans have no coverage at all; that coverage for poor people is crummy; that major employers are unloading costs onto their employees; that doctors who treat the poor are poorly treated themselves; that drug companies and HMOs are serious profiteers; that many young healthy folk skip coverage altogether in order to save money; and that HMOs don’t want you if you’re sick.

Schoolchildren don’t fathom all that yet, but they will soon. Their elders fathom it now. That’s why health care runs just behind Iraq as an issue for 2008. It is No. 1 because most candidates are still edgy about discussing the war. It’s a lot safer to conjure up some complex health plan that no one will really understand. It’s also important to be assertive in promoting it. Makes you sound like a real leader.

Unfortunately, existing health coverage remains in cynical corporate hands, or will through 2008. This has forced some states to take a crack at implementing universal insurance themselves. Massachusetts, Maine and California, serving as laboratories of democracy, are all giving it a go. Too bad each one has a different plan.

More surprising, normally tardy Connecticut is debating a universal plan, but HMOs and drug companies are likely to make short work of that in the Legislature. Still, it’s nice to have it on the table.

Health costs here are astronomical; our Husky program for poor kids is broken down; Nutmeg Medicaid is haphazard; and finding reasonable coverage has become a nightmare. Even lush Fairfield County suffers pain.

Naturally, all this trauma mystifies Europeans, Canadians, Japanese and othes of the Western World. "We always thought Americans were smart. How can they be so stupid about health care?"

All those other countries simply let government be the HMO, much like Medicare. This saves them the 25 percent of total health costs that America squanders on our system of duplicative insurance companies. Other lands also put screws to pharmaceutical companies. Having vanquished HMOs, they’ve freed up countless doctors and nurses from paperwork jobs and reassigned them to patients. Worse hours, but better care.

Having solved their health care problem, European Union (EU) leaders have more time to argue over banana imports and other crises.

Those nations have higher taxes than the United States, and so pay for most of health care out of the public treasury. We have a different tradition. Here workers pay into Medicare and would surely pay into a similar federal pot with universal coverage. Employers (often) pay for some coverage for workers. That would continue, but instead of paying insurance companies, they’d pay the federal pot as well, like Social Security. Every employer would have to contribute. Government would pay the rest.

Simple. Effective. Cheap. Ppoliticians all know that, but they’re afraid to go for it. The leeches that prosper from the present health care system would go ballistic. So it seems the Euros are right — we are stupid.