At last week’s American Medical Association meeting, President Obama spoke on healthcare reform to an interested audience. Here is an excerpt:
“Today, we are spending over $2 trillion a year on health care, almost 50 percent more per person than the next most costly nation. And yet, as I think many of you are aware, for all of this spending, more of our citizens are uninsured, the quality of our care is often lower, and we aren’t any healthier. In fact, citizens in some countries that spend substantially less than we do are actually living longer than we do.
Make no mistake: The cost of our health care is a threat to our economy. It’s an escalating burden on our families and businesses. It’s a ticking time bomb for the federal budget. And it is unsustainable for the United States of America.
It’s unsustainable for Americans like Laura Klitzka, a young mother that I met in Wisconsin just last week, who’s learned that the breast cancer she thought she’d beaten had spread to her bones, but who’s now being forced to spend time worrying about how to cover the $50,000 in medical debts she’s already accumulated, worried about future debts that she’s going to accumulate, when all she wants to do is spend time with her two children and focus on getting well. These are not the worries that a woman like Laura should have to face in a nation as wealthy as ours.
Stories like Laura’s are being told by women and men all across this country, by families who’ve seen out-of-pocket costs soar and premiums double over the last decade at a rate three times faster than wages. This is forcing Americans of all ages to go without the checkups or the prescriptions they need, that you know they need. It’s creating a situation where a single illness can wipe out a lifetime of savings.
Our costly health care system is unsustainable for doctors like Michael Kahn in New Hampshire, who, as he puts it, spends 20 percent of each day supervising a staff explaining insurance problems to patients, completing authorization forms, writing appeal letters, a routine that he calls disruptive and distracting, giving him less time to do what he became a doctor to do and actually care for his patients.
Small-business owners like Chris and Becky Link in Nashville are also struggling. They’ve always wanted to do right by the workers at their family-run marketing firm, but they’ve recently had to do the unthinkable and lay off a number of employees, layoffs that could have been deferred, they say, if health care costs weren’t so high.
Across the country, over one-third of small businesses have reduced benefits in recent years and one-third have dropped their workers’ coverage altogether since the early ’90s.
Our largest companies are suffering, as well. A big part of what led General Motors and Chrysler into trouble in recent decades were the huge costs they racked up providing health care for their workers, costs that made them less profitable and less competitive with automakers around the world. If we do not fix our health care system, America may go the way of GM.: paying more, getting less, and going broke.
When it comes to the cost of our health care, then, the status quo is unsustainable.
So reform is not a luxury; it is a necessity. And when I hear people say, “Well, why are you taking this on right now? You’ve got all these other problems,” I keep on reminding people I’d love to be able to defer these issues, but we can’t.
I know there’s been much discussion about what reform would cost, and rightly so. This is a test of whether we, Democrats and Republicans alike, are serious about holding the line on new spending and restoring fiscal discipline.
But let there be no doubt: The cost of inaction is greater. If we fail to act — and you know this, because you see it in your own individual practices — if we fail to act, premiums will climb higher, benefits will erode further, the rolls of the uninsured will swell to include millions more Americans, all of which will affect your practice.”
So, what did you think of his speech? Send your feedback to us!
To read the rest of President Obama’s speech, click here.
