Universal health care coverage would cost less

The numbers are truly astounding. According to a report by the Commonwealth fund, a nonpartisan organization that studies health care, more than 40 percent of non-elderly Americans with incomes that range from $20,000 to $40,000 were without health insurance for all or a significant part of 2005. That's nearly a 30 percent increase from the same tracking study done just a few years ago. Furthermore, many of these people, who had spent their entire life life savings, were giving up their basic necessities in order to feed their health care habit and were making desparate decisions between eating and filling prescriptions on a regular basis. This is unaccepable in America. At the same time, the ever rising cost of health care has made some employers, the mid-range employers who have traditionally provided health insurance coverage to their employees, wary of providing that coverage and eliminating the benefit. This drives more and more working men and women in America into the group of the 47 million uninsured. And it will get no better unless we do something about it. There is some good news. A study also found that the cost of not covering the 47 million uninsured actually was higher than the projected cost of covering all Americans with some sort of a basic health care policy. The dollars that would be saved by eliminating marketing and profit costs and the unnecessary paperwork, which is currently choking many parts of the system, could be rechanneled into universal health care. A universal health care program would eliminate the problem of those without health care coverage who today regularly seek primary physician care at emergency rooms and who seek health care when they are sicker and closer to acute illnesses than they might otherwise be. Chip Gerrity, President NJ IBEW Published in the Daily Journal, August 5, 2006