Rockville Centre Letters to the Editor

Fix it now

To the Editor:

The 2,000-pound gorilla in the room is our health care system. Without a comprehensive, honest and effective fix, any short-term help for Main Street and jobs will not last because that gorilla will pound such programs into the dirt. It is amazing to me that just about every economic think tank, conservative or progressive, agrees, yet there are citizens and elected leaders who, for their own narrow and even selfish reasons, want no change and are willing to mislead other Americans into believing this change is the wrong thing to do. All indications say otherwise.

Fixing our terrible economy, which nearly collapsed a year ago, is Job One, and it must be fixed on different fronts at the same time. President Obama did not make this mess, President Bush did. There, I just said what everyone is tiptoeing around. Obama stopped the free-fall and because of the lack of time, not perfectly, but it worked.

The different fronts that are being worked on are health care and then reforms and controls on banks, Wall Street and investment houses. This is a tall order, and only a single year has passed in what will take more years to fix. Health care is a good thing to do first, because it will remove the main stumbling block to overall economic reform and will help just about all of us. It will also make us more able to compete in the world economy.

Those who stand in the way of this without any better ideas, while making all sorts of wild claims to scare people and make sure it will fail, are working to the detriment of our country. Those who are proud of themselves for their destructive efforts are the ones who are truly unpatriotic.

The health system as it currently stands can't work much longer. It will cause large economic problems and a great deal of Americans will lose health coverage. Here is what the changes in health care will do for us:

We have the most expensive health system of any industrialized country; 18 percent of this country's total output goes toward health care, and that's going up every year. Yet 45 million Americans don't have health coverage, and the rest of us pay more and more for what we get every year. We pay more for drugs as well, and what coverage we do get is less comprehensive every year. That is a type of tax that is forced on us.

By adopting comprehensive national reform, we can lower that 18 percent to at least 12 percent, which, by itself, could pay for the cost of these reforms. Insurance companies will no longer have the power to reject you when you're ill or because of pre-existing conditions. There won't be rationing of care, as the insurance companies now do. The drug "doughnut hole" for Medicare recipients will be gone. Medicare will work better, guaranteeing that it will always be there for us without any cuts in benefits.

A public option is key. All that means is that our government will have its own plan that is on par with those of other insurance companies that you would pay for. It would pay for itself. Because it won't be for-profit and answerable to shareholders but rather answerable to all of us, it will cost less and be another choice for all of us. That kind of competition will force the insurance companies to become more cost-effective to compete with it.

Don't be fooled by those whose only interest is to keep things as they are. As Americans living in the richest country in the world, we deserve a system that is the best, and we don't have that. So we must fix this thing now. Insist on change, and don't let anyone tell you everything is OK, because it's not! The system as it stands will create an economic disaster.

Arnold Kirschner

Oceanside