Health Care Report from New Hampshire

It has become clear to many in this country how poorly our current health care truly cares for us. While I was in New Hampshire last week, I heard Dennis speak about his plan for a single-payer, not for profit system and how it would work. But first a little scene setting.

We were at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH. The school hosted a Town Hall meeting where a few students had been chosen to ask Dennis questions, which he answered and then he answered questions from the audience. (A report on the following exchange I am about to mention is at the Exeter Times website.) An older gentleman stood up and asked about what Dennis could do for him. It turns out he was a prostate cancer survivor but now his wife was stricken with some form of lymphoma and required an injection every two weeks that cost $10,000 a shot. That is an incredible sum of money and he wanted Dennis to look into this fro him and to see just how the company making this drug could get away with these kinds of charges.

After Dennis promised he would investigate this, another gentleman spoke about what Dennis would do to make sure in his proposed system of health care that there would not be abuses by those who were either malingerers or those who just never took care of themselves.

Dennis, in his own fashion, answered the question. One of the things I came to see was how he would place in context his own reasoning. Answers to questions are not just straightforward rote recitations of facts and figures. There was this constant use of both his own personal experience and how that influenced his ideas. In this case, he spoke of watching his mother die from emphysema. He then moved on to say that of course we would always encourage people to live healthy lives but we would never penalize someone who didn't. According to the world as Dennis sees it, we all could be this woman who ended up with a disease out of the blue that requires this kind of extraordinary treatment. Plus, we are all here for each other. There are those who take excellent care of themselves and something horrible happens. There are those who don't take care of themselves. But the system is there for all of us. This is what a democracy is to Dennis and it made a lot of sense to a lot of people in the room that night.

Then today in the Boston Globe I read the op-ed piece by this doctor who had been assured that his daughter would receive two years of post graduate health insurance on her parents' policy and things didn't work out that way. He said in his piece:
Two important lessons can be learned. First, we need to sever the connection between healthcare and employment. People need continuous, portable coverage that is affordable, comprehensive, and equitable. Second, we cannot depend on the private insurance industry to provide this for us.
Piece-meal reform such as the new law will not work. Both employers and the public support the concept of single-payer healthcare. Big business is starting to realize that a single payer system will be the only affordable way to cover everyone. When will our politicians understand that their political futures will depend on supporting this kind of comprehensive reform?
Michael Kaplan is a family physician and a member of Physicians for a National Health Plan and the board of directors of the Universal Health Care Education Fund.