Health Care Position, Mel Packer, Green Party Candidate, US Senate, PA

March 12, 2010

As a 65 year old resident and tax-payer of these United States, there are some things that continue to baffle my sense of logic. One of those is the idea that in a nation that claims to be # 1 in the world, we have a health care “system” that is just about tops in health care spending as a percentage of gross domestic product, yet ranks 37th in the world’s ranking of health care systems. And we must ask ourselves how that is possible? Haven’t we always been told that the more we spend, the more we’ll get in return? Shouldn’t we expect to have the best system in the world if we’re spending this much of our hard-earned money? Shouldn’t we expect that we would have a humane system in a nation that bills itself as one of the moral leaders in the world of nations?

And the answer to all of the above is, of course, a resounding “Yes”. We SHOULD expect all of the above. And when we don’t get it, we should demand it, as it is our right and our responsibility to the people of our nation from birth until death.

Unfortunately, we are also saddled with a health care system that is fragmented, divided, competitive, and based on the profit model. This model cannot, by its very nature, even begin to serve the needs of our people. The very idea that any corporation should be allowed to make health care decisions based on whether or not it is profitable runs against the way we were raised to believe that we have a moral duty to protect and care for each other.

Let’s look at the facts: Besides our #37 in the world’s health care systems (right ahead of Slovenia and behind Costa Rica), we are 29th in infant mortality, (tied with Slovakia and Poland, and behind Cuba), #24 in healthy life expectancy (ahead of Cyprus and behind Israel), #14 in preventable deaths in developed countries (behind Portugal), and Americans across the nation are declaring bankruptcy due to medical crisis. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now estimates that health care costs will account for 31% of the US Gross Domestic Product by about 2035, making health care costs economically unsustainable.

How can anyone possibly be proud of this? How can anyone crow about health care insurance companies that declare huge and ever increasing profits while raising premiums as much as 39%? How can anyone dare to claim that we have a great health care system when corporations who are thinking of locating new plants in the US decide to go elsewhere based on the expense of worker health care premiums as Toyota did some years ago when they chose Windsor, Ontario over Detroit for a new plant?

One would be hard pressed today to find anyone who can refute the fact that the health insurance companies, while imposing huge rate increases somehow also find the funds to award bankster-style salaries and bonuses to their executive officers AND to find millions of dollars to fund thousands of lobbyists who flood congress with their arguments against health care reform. In essence, our increased premiums are paying for the rope that hangs us.

And if you can’t or won’t believe these statistics, try hanging around an emergency room someday and talk to all of those who come in without insurance because they have no place else to go thereby pushing many of those hospitals toward financial ruin.

Better yet, go up and down your street and talk to your neighbors who have lost their jobs, facing mortgage foreclosure, without health insurance, sick kids, diabetics who only take their meds “sometimes” to try and stretch them out, people with blood pressure readings so high they are at risk for stroke but can’t afford to fill the prescription they got from the Emergency Room where allegedly “everyone can get health care”. No, they don’t get care there, they get enough help to get over the crisis, and that’s not health care.

People who live in this nation are being terrorized, brutalized, and lied to by those who don’t care about anything other than the profit picture of their corporation. But we don’t call it terrorism, we call it the “free market”. Well, there’s nothing free about it, and the market is controlled by those who own the market.

This has to end. The time when we allow our fellow citizens to be terrorized in the name of profit from misery must be brought to a halt. The failure to provide health care to every citizen, young or old, sick or well, is a moral outrage and a stain on our nation’s heritage and is bringing us to a social crisis that is near unmanageable unless we stop it now. We owe this to each other, to our children, and to our communities.

Health care for all without exception, availability of Medicare coverage for all, and use of tax dollars that we save by cutting our bloated military budget to provide this health care. We must serve the people of our nation and not the corporations that prey on our nation’s people.

To do anything less is to justify the immoral, unethical and even economically ruinous standard of continuing to refuse health care to millions of people as a way of life.

And for me, that standard remains unacceptable and should be unacceptable to this nation as well.

Mel Packer, Green Party Candidate for US Senate in PA