As a society these failures like you see with Kaiser in Western Mass. bring up some fundamental questions about our health care system and what we want from it. After years of calm, the questions are again swirling, stirred up by disturbing new statistics on the uninsured, the underinsured, HMO profiteering, access to necessary care, rising health care premiums and crippling drug costs. After a few sweet years of stability, health care premiums are rising, too. The U.S. House of Representatives spent last week engaged in a bitter, impassioned debate over the state of the nation's health care, then passed a sweeping new bill aimed at controlling the managed care industry and protecting patients' rights. Out on the stump, presidential candidates are peddling policy papers on health care access and cost.
Next year is an election year.
It's the time to get promises out of powerful people. The groundwork for dealing with health care is laid out there in Technicolor. It's not brain surgery. We just need some political leadership and a couple of states to take it on to give the rest of the nation some hope. Dunham is national program director for the Health Access Project, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program at Brandeis University that assists community coalitions in improving access to health care.