Health care reform bill is pretentious even for South Dakotans
Gordon Garnos
AT ISSUE: As Congress wades into what it calls “health care reform,” people across the country, and that includes us South Dakotans, are being confronted with all kinds of ads, columns and other opinion pieces and “spins” like you’ve never seen before covering both sides of the issue. Well, here’s another one.
A WEEK OR SO AGO that newspaper in that town near Harrisburg wisely asked a couple of former South Dakotans what they thought of the congressional plan to reform health care in these United States. The results were most interesting.
Tom Daschle, former majority leader in the U.S. Senate and author of “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis,” wrote that the basic problems here are a lack of adequate access, poor quality and high cost.
He then proceeded to ask three questions: “How do we improve access?” “How do we improve quality?” and “How do we reduce costs?” His answers, in my opinion, smacked of such terms as “managed care,” “universal health care” and “socialized medicine.”
THE OTHER FORMER South Dakotan was Dr. Julie Gerberding, an Estelline native and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who is now teaching at the University of California San Francisco.
Her opening statement hit hard. “Our federal budget deficit is the focus of intense concern, but Americans are facing a far more dangerous crisis: a national health deficit.
“…We simply cannot afford this–as individuals and as a nation.”
She then posed three questions as well: ”Will the people be healthier?” “Will we achieve health equity–so that everyone has a fair chance to enjoy his or her best possible health?” and “Will we invest in the things that protect our health so that we don’t have to spend so much on treating diseases caused by our unhealthy lifestyles and environments?”
HER ANSWER to all three questions was a big “No.” I particularly liked question three. Part of her conclusion was, “True health reform will create more health and less need for health care.”
A recent opinion piece I read asked the same question in a different way: “If everyone is entitled to universal health care and the government pays for it, will we pay for those individuals for whom health care costs could be reduced if they only would lead a healthy life style?”
There’s no question that health care costs for people not leading a healthy lifestyle are a huge portion of health care expenses. The writer then asks another question: ‘Will there be any personal accountability if a universal health care system is adopted?”
Columnists and talk show hosts have been spinning for weeks now with both the pros and the cons to what Congress and the President, or at least part of the Congress, are attempting to shove down the throats of all of us. This is to such an extent that I would guess most of us don’t know what to believe.
SOME OF US might think that any form of socialized health care is not all bad, especially those who cannot afford to have health insurance. Some of us might think it is ok to make the rich of this country pay for Congress’ health care reform plan. At the same time, the “sum” of us should ask what happens when that top three or five percent of the wage earners say they are tired of paying for the other 97 or 95 percent of us and will they throw up their hands and decide that instead of 60 or 80 hours of work per week, they are going to settle for just 40 hours a week? Who pays then?
South Dakota is a healthy state compared to so many of the others but, at the same time, we learn there are 85,000 South Dakotans without health insurance. This begs of another question. It is true many of these 85,000 cannot afford to pay for health insurance, but how many can afford to buy health insurance, but would rather play a form of roulette with the lives of themselves, their wives and children?
In other words, with the congressional health care reform package before us, the result is there are more questions asked than there are answers. There’s no question that not all is well with health care in these United States, but what is before us is not the pill needed to make it better….
Gordon Garnos was long-time editor of the Watertown Public Opinion, retiring after 39 years with that newspaper. Garnos, a lifelong resident of South Dakota except for his military service in the U.S. Air Force, was born and raised in Presho.
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