Universal Coverage Would Help Keep America’s Health System Stable

Think about the plight of our safety net health systems, the ones that take care of the poor, and that often provide critical services like trauma care and neonatal intensive care units. They're drowning, and the rapid growth in uninsurance and underinsurance - we now believe that only half of employees and families have employer sponsored coverage - is exacerbating that problem.    

This isn’t an isolated problem. Last year, Martin Luther King in Los Angeles closed under the weight of too few patients with a funding source. Grady Hospital in Atlanta and Jackson Health System in Miami are on the ropes. A couple years ago Women’s Hospital in Philadelphia closed. And some 1/3 of all American acute care hospitals are operating in the red. That number is undoubtedly rising in these difficult economic times. 

Universal coverage - some mechanism, public and/or private that ensures that we ALL can have access to at least the “basic care we need” - basic would have to be defined - without bankruptcy. It would stabilize the safety net, which serves us all. And it would dramatically simplify the currently arcane system of cross-subsidies that hospitals use to apply paying patients’ dollars to cover those who can’t pay. In the end, many health care experts believe that, when the administrative complexity and the costs of exacerbated care (the more complex care that’s required when people didn’t get basic care) is considered, the cost of a universal coverage system would be less than we currently pay.