On 29 September 2006, the Citizens' Health Care Working Group, targeting 2012 for ensuring a core set of benefits and services for all Americans, sent its final recommendations to Congress and the President:
- establish public policy that all American have affordable health care
- guarantee financial protection against very high health care costs
- foster innovative integrated community health networks
- define core benefits and services for all Americans
- promote efforts to improve quality of care and efficiency
- fundamentally restructure the way end-of-life services are financed and provided
Seven months later, and 4 days after the similarly-goaled union-based Partnership for Quality Care (PQC) announced its own launch, yet another group has formed to champion healthcare reform.
A new coalition of 36 major companies has launched a political campaign lobbying Sacramento and Washington, D.C. to expand medical insurance coverage to everyone.
The Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform (CAHR), founded by Steve Burd, CEO of the Safeway grocery chain, includes some of the nation's largest companies: PepsiCo, General Mills, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Wm. Wrigley Jr Co., The Kroger Co., a number of Safeway vendors and grocery item manufacturers such as Bumble Bee Seafoods LLC. It also includes insurers and drug firms Aetna, Blue Shield of California, CIGNA Healthcare, Eli Lilly and Co., and PacifiCare.
Coalition members employ over 1.7 million workers and 18 of its members are among the Fortune 500's biggest companies.
Changes proposed by the Coaliation include:
- health insurance required for everyone
- subsidized insurance for those with low incomes
- pre-existing conditions covered
- incentives for healthy behavior and prevention
- tax deductions for individuals who buy insurance
- costs of care revealed to consumers
Inexplicably, the changes proposed by Burd's coalition are inconsistent with the practices of his own company. Safeway rquires hourly employees to wait a year or more for health benefits; families wait 30 months.
CAHR has targeted 2009 for the policy reforms to solve the nation's healthcare crisis.
Requiring everyone to be insured and providing financial assistance to the poor to help them purchase coverage is also the basis for a proposal in Congress by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), that has some bipartisan support. Wyden's Healthy Americans Act would guarantee every American universal, affordable, comprehensive, portable, high-quality, private health coverage that is good or better than Members of Congress have today.
It appears we are past the point of recreating the wheel on healthcare reform. The similarities of the goals between the various (and many) coalitions, groups, associations, and partnerships far outweigh their differences, but, unfortunately, each of the interested parties has chosen to forget the truism found in "divided we fall."
Americans want healthcare reform. We are not best served if we allow ourselves to be fragmented in our approach to achieving that goal. Healthcare reform is not a partisan issue. Neither is it an issue to be shouldered or solved by any one group.
Federal government, state government, healthcare providers, insurers, big business, small business, unions, working citizens, indigent citizens, and retired citizens must come together, united as a whole, if we are to have any hope of effecting real, meaningful, and lasting healthcare reform.
Healthcare reform is an American issue. If we continue to allow ourselves to be sub-divided and disparate in our goals and actions to achieve healthcare reform, we will fail -- and, as Amercians, such failure is unacceptable.■
Recent Comments