All options for health care solutions should be on table

Is Wisconsin ready for universal health care? If Healthy Wisconsin, a Democrat-backed initiative added to the state budget should somehow pass intact, our state would leap into the forefront of national health care reform.

Healthy Wisconsin would provide health care coverage for everyone in the state, not just poor residents or those who work for companies that don't offer the benefit.

Proponents claim the plan allows the continuation of existing networks, so each family could pick the network they wanted. Since the coverage is universal, if you changed jobs, your insurance would move with you.

Premiums essentially would come from a tax on payroll or income, but businesses and employees would no longer pay private insurance companies. A private board would run the system with the state serving as the collector of premiums.

The devil is in the details, but they are really moot points at this stage. There is almost no chance anything like Healthy Wisconsin will survive this budgeting process, as an editorial from our sister paper, The Appleton Post-Crescent pointed out on Friday.

The question of universal health care, whether it comes from Madison or Washington, won't go away. It may not be the best solution, but it deserves to be debated without the hysterics that some of its opponents have shown in the past.

The health care payment system – the way we insure and pay for medical services – is in trouble and it is not going to fix itself. The innovations that are touted as fixes, such as Health Savings Accounts, work for some people, but not for everyone.

If a member of your family has a health problem and you are not covered by a group policy, you can pretty much forget about affordable insurance coverage, or any coverage in some cases.

Heaven forbid if you're unemployed, work for a company that doesn't provide health care insurance or don't earn enough to afford even the co-insurance payments. A relatively minor health problem can spell financial disaster.

Unpaid medical bills accounted for more than one-half of personal bankruptcies in recent years. Society pays a high price for having a large segment of the population without insurance. Charity services provided by hospitals, doctors and clinics to patients who cannot pay must be passed on to paying customers or taxpayers in many cases.

Is universal health care the answer? Before it or any other options are dismissed out of hand, we should consider that the consequences of not solving this problem are only going to get worse.

source:www.htrnews.com