Should legislators approve 'Healthy Wisconsin' plan?

Healthy Wisconsin could be a model for national program
In Paris several summers ago, I became so ill and dehydrated that I needed an ambulance ride to the emergency room on a Sunday morning. No questions asked, I was treated in two hours and back on my feet.

The two drugs the doctor prescribed cost me $6 each. I received a bill one month after returning home. The hospital and ambulance charge — 50 bucks.

I didn’t even submit my charges to my health insurance coverage. Would anyone go through the headache of our American private insurance bureaucracy for $50?

In this regard, as Michael Moore depicts in his recent documentary, “Sicko,” America has become a medical insurance nightmare. In stark contrast, the World Health Organization ranks the French nationalized and socialized medical delivery system No. 1 in the world.

WHO ranks our system 37th, because we ration health care by excluding one-sixth of our population from the health delivery system. I always wonder why Americans brag about people coming here for medical procedures. Don’t they realize our excess capacity exists by excluding one-sixth of our own population?

Throughout the rest of western civilization, health care is a basic human right. Michael Moore is right, and most Americans know it. Our system is not only broken and needs to be fixed — it is unjust and shameful.

At the national level, Republicans are blocking expanded insurance coverage to needy children. As the syndicated columnist Mark Shields recently remarked, in opposing this expansion, he observed that Republicans seem too busy hunting down deadbeat 5- and 6-year-olds to have the wherewithal to fix our health-care woes.

Fortunately we are now in the death throes of compassionate conservatism. A new presidential administration will have to fix health care for the nation as a whole.

But within our constitutional structure of federalism — that is divided policy responsibility between the national and state levels of government — when the central government fails to address policy concerns, the individual states may take the initiative. The Democrats in control of the Wisconsin Senate have indeed seized the initiative through their Healthy Wisconsin proposal.

These Democrats are operating in the tradition of our state’s greatest political figure, Fighting Bob La Follette. His Progressive state retirement plan started in 1911, and became the model for our national Social Security System, implemented during the New Deal. This is the most successful public program in the history of the United States.

So I hope Steve Gores is right: Healthy Wisconsin could very well become a model for national health care reform. We in Wisconsin have a proud tradition of leading the nation in constructing a quality of life through public policies that enhance our collective well-being.

However, I believe Steve is mistaken in joining with the Republicans controlling our state Assembly and trotting out their same old tired, worn-out and failed solutions. A variety of independent research institutes have now informed us that health savings accounts actually drive up the cost of traditional insurance. Assembly Republican posturing on this issue makes me sick — until I stop to think how costly it is to get cured in our society.

Healthy Wisconsin will pool all of us into a single purchasing unit. This provides all of us the purchasing power to control our health care costs collectively. But it also provides health care coverage without rationing by discriminating against the weakest, poorest and least influential among us.

Healthy Wisconsin will cost us as much as we spend on health insurance today. The Senate Democrats’ plan has co-pays and deductibles lower than most private insurance policies available anywhere in our state.

I hope Republicans are ready to stop dividing us. We need their contribution in constructing a health coverage system that will encourage personal responsibility, economic efficiency and quality medical delivery within a system that no longer discriminates against too many of our own citizens. The Democrats in the state Senate have devised the plan — Healthy Wisconsin.

Keith Knutson teaches history at Viterbo University.

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