Originally published October 7 2005
Panel seeks ways to improve U.S. healthcare system
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The Commonwealth Fund's Commission on a High Performance Health System, a panel formed in June, released its report on the healthcare system, offering both criticisms of its shortcomings, which have left 45.8 million Americans without medical coverage, and hope for innovative reforms.
The U.S. health-care system is fraught with waste and inefficiency, unequal access, and stubborn gaps in quality and coverage, but it also offers opportunities for improvement, according to a new report.
"Essentially the commission is to identify public and private strategies, policies and practices that will lead to improvements in the delivery and financing of care for all Americans," said Anne Gauthier, the panel's senior policy director.
"Many of us have been working at health-care reform for a number of years," Gauthier noted, "and yet we have not made the progress that we might all have hoped we'd have made by now.
Some 45.8 million Americans lack health insurance coverage, and that number is projected to exceed 50 million by the end of the decade.
* Though the U.S. spends more than twice as much on health care per capita as other industrialized nations, Americans don't live as long as people in some industrialized countries.
"Progress in the struggle to finance universal coverage will not come easily and will be bitterly fought at every step," he wrote.
"I believe progress on health insurance will come only when we as a nation answer the question of what happened to social justice as a moral value."
But Devon M. Herrick, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, said part of the problem is that public-health advocates and health economists "can't even agree on what the problem is."
Having studied the latest U.S. Census Bureau data on the uninsured, for example, Herrick found that roughly one-third live in households with more than $50,000 in annual income, many of whom could presumably afford some type of health insurance coverage, he said.
In addition, some 10 million to 12 million people already qualify for Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program but are not enrolled.
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