November 18th, 2008

Today the Patriot-News features an editorial - “With thousands in Pennsylvania lacking coverage, let’s act now” -  on the health insurance crisis in Pennsylvania:

Gov. Ed Rendell and his chief adviser on health care, Rosemarie Greco, continue to push the Republican leadership of the state Senate to enact expanded health insurance coverage. Some 767,000 Pennsylvanians lack health insurance, according to the governor, some 1,182,000 according to Kaiser Family Foundation.

Whichever is the right number, it’s too many, and we laud the Rendell administration’s efforts to expand coverage and reduce the physical, mental and financial suffer ing that comes with not having decent insurance in a country where one serious illness can impoverish a family.

Under these circumstances, which don’t get better with age as medical costs soar well beyond the rate of inflation, the governor rightly can make the case that there is no time to lose. And in pursuit of some measure of progress, Rendell has moved a considerable distance away from his all-encompassing Cover All Pennsylvanians proposal to getting enough funds to cover the waiting list for adultBasic, although finding the dollars remains an issue.

But as the governor well understands, health care is a national issue and with the election of Barack Obama, the focus of attention and expectations have turned toward Washington. The nation’s dire economic situation and the mounting federal deficit have convinced some observers that Obama is going to have to pull back on his considerable agenda, including health-care reform.

That view is likely wrong. As Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has noted, Obama was not elected to be a “do-nothing president.” And let’s keep in mind that the United States has the most expensive (based on per capita spending) health-care system in the industrialized world, even with nearly 46 million uninsured and millions more underinsured. That suggests that there are plenty of inefficiencies to be straightened out and dollars saved in an industry that represents one-eighth of the entire U.S. economy.

In trying to persuade Senate Republican leaders in a September letter to provide “some modest level of health care to at least a portion of the hundreds of millions of our fellow citizens who lack insurance,” the governor made this telling point: “It is fair and right that those of us under the dome of the Capitol commit to this goal, if for no other reason than to justify why WE [emphasis in the original] have the best health insurance that tax dollars can buy.”

With that, Rendell has hit upon the most effective strategy for providing quality and affordable health care for all Pennsylvanian and Americans in the fastest possible time — end the gold-plated health coverage that the Legislature and Congress provide to its members until it is available to all. That would enable our lawmakers to understand what it is to live without health insurance, something far too many obviously do not comprehend or do not care.