Uninsured care happens in this country, and here's the problem. It's not properly accounted for. The people who pay for uninsured care at the moment are the hospitals and the doctors and all of the medical providers.
Medical disenfranchisement is fueled by a host of factors that include worsening shortage of primary care doctors in needy communities and a troubling scarcity of providers willing to treat the uninsured or publicly insured. Adding to the trend are fewer medical students choosing primary care over more lucrative and specialized fields.
Congress mandated that health care providers in emergency departments and ambulances provide emergency care to anyone in need, including the uninsured and underinsured.
But no conversation between doctor and patient can magically turn an uninsured patient into an insured one. Doctors are just as helpless as patients when it comes to solving the problems of the uninsured.
When I hear my friend John Boehner say that we have the best health care in the world, I don't dispute it for a moment. If I were sick, this is the country I want to be in, with these doctors, these hospitals, and these medical professionals.
In the Affordable Care Act, Congress provided access to medical care for nearly 30 million uninsured Americans. Access is critically important, but offering access to an already broken system won't provide a lasting cure. We need to ask and answer the underlying question: Access to what?
I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net. Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care ... it is another story altogether.
I think that we have a number of different health care challenges in our country, and certainly addressing the uninsured is one, and the second is making sure that those with health insurance actually get the care that they assume they'll have available to them if they get sick.
America has the best doctors, the best nurses, the best hospitals, the best medical technology, the best medical breakthrough medicines in the world. There is absolutely no reason we should not have in this country the best health care in the world.
Too many Americans who are uninsured or under-insured do not receive regular checkups because they can't afford coverage or their insurance doesn't cover enough of the costs. The lack of preventive care results in countless emergency room visits and health care disasters for families.
Uninsured people don't just slink off into a corner and die. They seek treatment, but usually when it is an emergency, and this will be the most expensive kind of care available.
While the federal government is committed to paying 100% of the cost of new people in Medicaid, I cannot, in good conscience, deny the uninsured access to care.
As long as we decline to allow sick, uninsured people to just lie down and die on the side of the road, everybody has to have insurance for the health care system to work sanely.
As long as we decline to allow sick uninsured people to just lie down and die on the side of the road, everybody has to have insurance for the health care system to work sanely.
It is taken for granted that workers should receive their pay partly in kind, in the form of medical care provided by the employer. How come? Why single out medical care? Surely food is no less essential to life than medical care. Why is it not at least as logical for workers to be required to buy their food at the company store as to be required to buy their medical care at the company store?
In turn, more physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers are severely limiting their practices, moving to other states, or simply not providing care.
We don't have a business model for health care in this country, We just have a business model for care. The way doctors and hospitals get paid is something bad has got to happen. It's a pure reactive model.