The New Health Dialogue

"Hands off my health care," is, as the New York Times' Reed Abelson noted in a Week in the Review piece, a rallying cry of the foes of reform. But what if Congress did keep their "hands off" and let the health care system continue on its current path with just a bit of government tinkering around the edges? What if, as the Times put it in the headline -- we've been known to say more than a few times ourselves -- is the Cost of Doing Nothing?

What happens? Not the status quo -- because health care is not static. The price of doing nothing is soaring costs. Millions more uninsured. A deepening deficit, affecting Medicaid and Medicare and just about everything else. A doubling of insurance premiums in a decade. A health care system strained to the breaking point -- affecting all of us, insured and uninsured alike.

“People think if we do nothing, we will have what we have now,”  Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis told the newspaper. "In fact, what we will have is a substantial deterioration in what we have.”

“It will break all of our banks if we do nothing,” said Peter V. Lee, who oversees national health policy for the Pacific Business Group on Health, which represents employers that offer coverage to workers. “It is a course that is literally bankrupting the federal government and businesses and individuals across the country.”

Those 39 percent premium increases you've been reading about in California? Not a rarity under the do-nothing scenario.

Some conservatives call for a series of incremental fixes. But as we've argued for the past two years, it's hard to do little fixes in a big system where everything (cost, coverage, quality) are so interconnected. And the incremental fixes we've done since the Clinton plan collapsed in 1994 haven't really done all that much -- which is why we are where we are today. As President Obama said as he wrapped up the summit last week, “It turns out that baby steps don’t get you to the place that people need to go.”

Still not convinced? Look at these charts from the Commonwealth Fund. Where we are now in terms of health spending. And where we would have been had we passed the Clinton plan in the 1990s. Or even the Nixon plan in the 70s. Less red ink -- trllions less red ink. And fewer people living with the uncertainty, insecurity and terrible expense of being uninsured.