Healthcare seems to be the topic of the day.
In the news, in Internet chat rooms and local coffee shops, it seems everybody is talking about it, worrying about it, or fighting over it. Well, not so much fighting over it. Fighting about fighting about it is more like it.
Until an actual plan reaches the table, the discussion has been little more than one of inflammatory talking points.
Healthcare is a real problem, or more accurately maybe, paying for healthcare is the real problem. Health access is less of a problem in that if you can crawl into an emergency room, especially in the state of Maine, you will be treated, probably at a staggering expense truly, but they will give you something to stop the bleeding, anyway.
For those who can afford it, the United States offers the best medical treatment in the world.
For everybody else, with insurance rates going up double digit percentages almost every year, businesses are forced to offer insurance to attract and retain employees, private citizens struggle to afford or are worried about losing what coverage they do have, or alternatively, throw themselves on the mercy of Medicare. It’s the cost that counts.
Like so many difficult problems, this one is a many-headed serpent.
We need to lower costs and we tend to believe, based on the free market model, that maybe Newcastle Republican Jon McKane is on to something.
McKane has been arguing for years about the need to open the State of Maine to all insurance providers, the concept being the competition for business will naturally lower rates. We have already seen what a closed system can do.
We are also alarmed when national sources cite Maine’s Dirigo Choice program as the model of the kind of access the President’s people may be dreaming about. By any measure, Dirigo has been a colossal failure and the failure to admit that has allowed the state to continue to throw our good money after bad.
Then too, we citizens have a responsibility to get off the couch, put down the remote, park the car, push away from the table, take the stairs, lose some pounds, quit smoking, moderate drinking, eat more vegetables, and do all the other stuff mother told us to do. She really did know best.
A national effort to embrace fresh foods in schools and reemphasize physical education wouldn’t hurt, either.
We think solving this problem is going to require some rational thinking about difficult issues, followed by some hard decisions.
Ultimately, the solution will likely come down to a little from here and little from there but whatever the solution, a real solution (if it is to be a solution at all), is going to have to be bold and we are going to have to be brave enough to embrace it.
One thing we know for sure, we have to do something. All this hysteria surrounding the issue is doing nothing, and doing nothing is not going to help.
