The New Health Dialogue

At this point, there is just one thing left on which all Democrats and Republicans agree: we’re ready to be done with health care reform.

In an ironic twist, it is the Republicans who are insisting that health care stay at the top of the agenda for the coming year.  They may not realize it, but this would be the inevitable result of their strategy to start over with "a blank sheet of paper."

We'd have to get right to writing on that sheet because doing nothing is not an option. This was driven home again, and forcefully, by a study released by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research that shows that nearly two million Californians lost their insurance in 2008 and 2009. That brings the total number of uninsured in this state alone to 8.2 million people, or nearly 1 in 4 Californians under age 65.

For the most part, these newly-uninsured are not people who dropped their individual market coverage because they decided it had become unaffordable. Rather, they are people who lost their jobs during the recession.  An article in the Los Angeles Times relates one such story:

Bruce Kuhlmann of Santa Rosa was laid off in December 2008 from his job as a technology sales executive in Northern California. He has depleted much of his retirement savings to pay for care since he was diagnosed with cancer last month.  The father of three, including two college-age children, has found it difficult to buy insurance on the individual market.  Kuhlmann, 58, worries about affording an operation that he believes will cost about $30,000.  "I've spent a fortune of my own money," Kuhlmann said in a phone interview as he prepared to undergo a medical procedure at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. "I have a house mortgage. It's hard to get a job because I don't feel so good. Everything is negative."

The problem of uninsured people and unaffordable care is real, and it is not going away for all of our earnest wishing or opportunistic political rhetoric.  To paraphrase Mitch McConnell's assessment, the only thing that would be bipartisan about a new health care effort would be the opposition to it.  

We are all ready to be done with the passage of health care reform. Hopefully, studies like this one will provide the final momentum needed to finish the job so that we can move on to something relatively easy in comparison ... like regulating the financial industry.