American Health Care

It's amazing, really, the conflict between the free enterprise system gone amok and the need of ordinary American citizens to have some modicum of relief from the spectre of devastating health issues impacting their futures in the most deleterious of ways. From being unable to access needed medical treatments because of a lack of adequate insurance - or any health insurance due to its exorbitant cost - to having to pay off hugely expensive surgeries over the life-time of the patient.

A study published in the American Journal of Public Health points out that some 44,000 people may die this year alone in the United States simply because they are without health insurance. People unable to pay for treatments, for pharmaceuticals simply put off going to a doctor, being diagnosed, having to pay for surgeries or drugs they simply cannot afford. Effectively limiting their lives.

There are an estimated 46.3-million Americans without health coverage. Some physicians and surgeons with conscience are lending their professional expertise to temporary, large-scale free clinics, as an opportunity of last-resort for desperate and ill people. These are often middle-income people whose insurance, reaching $1000 monthly with $5000 annual deductibles simply have no option but to cancel.

Less expensive insurance is available, but will often turn down applicants with pre-existing conditions, even relatively minor ones. Those are the people who are living on the edge of hope that nothing will go dreadfully wrong and hurl them into the chasm of desperation. Other, lower-income people rarely visit doctors, and if they do, cannot afford to have their prescriptions filled, fearing crippling debt.

The White House hopes to pass health-insurance legislation that would not permit companies to deny coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. A heart condition leading to treatment with two stents installed will set a patient back $83,000 in medical bills, and if there is no health insurance, and the individual has a limited income the future looks pretty bleak. The family's future sacrificed to crippling debt.

With the downturn in the international financial system and the banks-collapse in the United States leading to huge job losses, the laid-off have lost their company-provided health care insurance, but their situation may not qualify them for Medicaid. Many people belonging to the lower- and the middle-class with vulnerable health were hoping that Congress's new plan would extend Medicare coverage to those not yet elderly, but 55 and over.

That hope now seems a remote possibility with the refusal of independent Senator Joe Lieberman to back that initiative. As the health care legislation now before the U.S. Senate stands, it barely resembles the wholesale plan that President Barack Obama envisioned as a much-needed health-insurance safeguard for his country's population.

As the legislation now stands private insurance companies and their brokers stand to gain, the original proposals now so completely gutted as to appear toothless in their intent and reality. Former Democratic National Committee chairman Dr. Howard Dean characterizes the legislation now before the U.S. Senate as "...an insurance company's dream..."

So much for good intentions, dire need and the power of established, powerful lobbies.