Posted on: Friday, January 16, 2004

EDITORIAL
Healthcare gap is a national shame

It's a good bet that political opportunism, institutional resistance and a "can't do" attitude on the part of too many in leadership will quickly doom the latest report on universal healthcare from the Institute on Medicine.

And that's a shame, because the institute's findings are compelling on a variety of social, medical and even economic fronts.

The Institute on Medicine is a nonpartisan group that advises the federal government on health issues. In its latest report, it called on the government to provide universal health insurance coverage to all Americans by 2010.

Pie in the sky? Hardly. Many enlightened industrialized nations already have universal healthcare of some kind.

It's true that no program is 100 percent successful. The perfect solution has yet to be discovered.

But an imperfect system would surely be better than the one we have now, in which some 15 percent of Americans are uninsured and untold others are inadequately covered for their healthcare needs.

This is not simply a matter of social justice. It makes plain economic sense to see to it that everyone who needs medical care can get it when they first need it.

The institute contends that the cost of the uninsured is represented by 18,000 premature deaths a year, developmental problems in children, family bankruptcies and deferred access to medical help. The loss of economic productivity alone is between $65 billion and $130 billion a year.

As this year's presidential campaign unfolds, it is critical that every candidate with a serious claim on America's vote have his specific, concrete and sincere plan to deal with our nation's shameful healthcare gap.