Health care for all: Now!

I rise early on this Sunday morning and I'm confronted, once again, by the headlines that should make any clear-thinking American cry out for meaningful health care reform -- and the sooner the better.

From today's editions of The Oregonian:
-- "Big hike in store for health insurance"
Bill Graves' front-page story explains why we're looking at fewer insured people and higher costs that threaten the ability of consumers and small businesses to buy insurance. (Christine Chin Ryan, above, president of a Portland software company, will see health insurance rates for her company jump by 33 percent in September, which means it would cost $663 a month to cover employees such as Giorgio Shaunette, left.)

-- "Obama's health care proposals put Canada's system in spotlight"
An Associated Press story on page 2 reports that while Canadians have their complaints about their health care system -- about long waits for elective care; shortages of doctors and nurses, particularly in rural areas; and the growing costs of covering an aging population -- the system enjoys broad political support from the left and right, including the Conservative administration whose views are similar to U.S. Republicans.

-- "Five myths about health care around the world"
In the Opinion section, former Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid presents the facts (facts, imagine that) that give the lie to a number of misconceptions about health care in other countries. Chief among them: that foreign health care systems are all socialist-based, inefficient, bloated bureaucracies that result in limited choice for patients.

From Bill Moyers' Journal:

-- "Money-Driven Medicine"
On Friday, Moyers presented "an investigation into the profit-hungry 'medical-industrial complex,' " based on the reporting of financial journalist Maggie Mahar. I caught only a part of it, so I'm viewing/listening to it right now, even as I type this post.

We're the best in the world when it comes to "rescue care" (expensive, complex surgery for cancer, for instance), one expert says, but we lag far behind in the basics: treating diabetes, controlling pain, providing primary, preventive or community-based care. Why? U.S. health care is skewed by a system that puts profits over patients. As costs rise, access goes down, down, down -- so much so that emergency room care increasingly is going to middle-class rather than low-income people.

Dr. Donald Berwick, a pediatrician, cuts to the core of the moral issue in a quote that closes the program:

"I think health care is more about love than about most other things. If there isn't at the core of this, two human beings who have agreed to be in a relationship where one is trying to relieve the suffering of another -- which is love -- you can't get to the right answers here.

"It begins so much for me in that relationship -- that everything built around it had better make damn sure it's supporting it, not hurting it."

For nearly 24 years, I have been blessed to work for a company that has furnished generous health insurance (plus dental and vision plans), even going so far as to pay every dollar of my monthly insurance premiums. Starting January 1, that will change; along with other employees, I will begin paying 25 percent of the cost of those premiums. I think that's fair and proper, given that one out of five Oregonians have no insurance at all -- and there are now 46 million uninsured Americans.

To go another year with the bloated, horribly inefficient and frighteningly expensive health care system we have in this country is just unconscionable. If Congress fails to deliver a reform package this summer, it will be a failure of the first magnitude -- even more disappointing than the gridlock that killed federal immigration reform during the Bush Administration.

I suspect I'm preaching to the choir on this blog. If so, I hope you'll take every opportunity to challenge those who would defend the abysmally unfair system we have now -- especially when they resort to parroting the lies, half-truths and misrepresentations spewed by the likes of Limbaugh, Palin and O'Reilly.

If not, if you're one of those who believes the U.S. system is fine as is, take some time to read these stories above. Take some time to view the Bill Moyers video. Then, let's talk.

Photo: Brent Wojahn, The Oregonian