Care costs outpace ability to pay

The column “Reform will leave us worse off” (The Daily Progress, Sept. 19) strikes me as a tale based on the subtext: “If you are not wealthy enough to afford health care like I am, it’s your own fault; don’t expect me to pay for it.”

While it is reasonable to conserve — if you have something of value through privilege, hard work or both — it is unreasonable to assume that those who do not have what you have must necessarily be trying to take it away from you simply because you have it and they don’t. Unlike a dog that forfeits food simply because another appears to have it, I was born at the height of the Great Depression, and therefore know equally well whereof I speak.

I have family health insurance through Medicare and what I consider to be a very good supplementary plan. I have been paying for this ever since I acquired my Social Security number in my teens, then later through long participation in a group plan associated with a major hospital system.

There are at least three undisputable reasons for comprehensive reform:

l The days are long gone when patients could arrange personal, installment payment agreements with physicians and health care institutions, as the columnist once did. Health care costs in the U.S. are increasing at a rate greater than in any other advanced country, and will eventually bankrupt the country at the same time health science and health care degrade. The costs for health care plans have continued to grow at a rate that exceeds not only annual increases in income, but the ability of ordinary citizens to independently pay for care, which sometimes costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

l Pharmaceutical companies and private insurance companies are poorly regulated, primarily profit-

oriented entities rather than health-care-oriented institutions.

l We are all already indirectly paying an exorbitant price for those who do not have health care coverage, and our premiums will continue to increase until we are no longer able to afford them — if indeed we are able to afford them now.

This is an uncivil, inhumane and antiquated system that should have been reformed long ago.