The 2007 Ohio Family Health Survey found that 30% of Ohioans 18-64 years old reported being uninsured for some period during the 12 months before the survey was conducted. On average 17.7% of Ohioans age 18-64 were uninsured during 2007. This is an increase of approximately 209,000 new uninsured since 2004 when the rate was 15%.
Presidential candidates and state and federal lawmakers are all trying to find a fix to the patchwork of health insurance coverage that leaves an estimated 47 million people in the U.S. without coverage.
Many other countries have national plans, including Britain, France and Canada, and while the US spends more per person on health care, we are not getting better care. However, none of the major party presidential candidates are calling for a national health plan.
A recent survey of over 2,000 doctors shows that 59 percent of U.S. doctors now favor switching to a national health care plan and 32 percent oppose the idea.
This is a significant shift from the 2002 survey found that 49 percent of physicians supported national health insurance and 40 percent opposed it.
As Senator Bill Frist put it in a Jan. 20, 2005 New England Journal of Medicine article: “All Americans deserve the security of lifelong, affordable access to high quality health care.”
There are a lot of special interest groups who are trying to make sure that they hang on to their profits, and a lot of people who are afraid of change. Unfortunately these people usually have more influence on lawmakers than the unemployed, low wage earners, independent contractors, and others that cannot afford health insurance under the current system.
Most Americans would not spend a bunch of money trying to fix a broken computer; they know that they would just end up with an expensive, outdated, system anyway, so they would just go out and buy a new one. I say it’s time to take the same approach to our health insurance system. Nobody should be happy with a system that doesn’t work 17% of the time.
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