The Health Care Crisis

It's a national disgrace that over 45,000,000 Americans, people who live in the wealthiest country on earth, do not have health care coverage.  And it’s getting worse every day.  We are paying far too much of our personal incomes and our national wealth, and receiving far too little for far too few people, under the current system.

The next Congress must address this crisis as a top priority.  And it won’t be easy to solve – it affects everyone in this country; it pits well funded special interests – like insurance and drug companies – and well entrenched bureaucracies - like the government – against one another and against ordinary Americans and the doctors and nurses who actually provide our healthcare.

Throwing more tax dollars won’t solve it – this crisis requires fundamental and systemic change.

Since the government already controls most health care spending, reform must include the government, and not simply dumped in its lap.

Turning the responsibility for healthcare over to businesses won’t solve the problem either.  Many Americans are either self-employed or retired or work for small companies that cannot afford skyrocketing health insurance costs.  And the financial burden of paying for healthcare makes many of our largest companies – like those in our domestic auto industry – uncompetitive against German, Japanese and Korean companies whose health care costs are a fraction of what ours are in the United States.

It will take new vision and new leadership to build a strong bipartisan coalition to fix our healthcare system.  It won’t be easy or popular.  There is no one single fix that will make it all better.  But we can't keep sticking our heads in the sand and hoping that things will get better – ask any ordinary American, when it comes to health care and its cost, things are getting worse, not better.