
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, August 7, 1994                   TAG: 9408090007
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: D1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By LAURA WILLIAMSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FROM OUR READERS HEALTH CARE STORIES

Health care reform. It's in the news these days almost as much as O.J. Simpson.

Ever since the Clintons announced plans last year to completely overhaul the nation's health care system, debate has been raging over how to do it - and whether it even needs to be done.

Five congressional committees - three in the House and two in the Senate - took up the problem and produced four different solutions, which have now been hammered out into two widely disparate bills put forward by the leadership in each house. The Roanoke and New River valleys played an unusually active role in that debate with two local congressmen - Rep. L.F. Payne, D-Nelson County, and Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon - serving on key committees.

Members of the full House and Senate will continue to argue the merits of the leadership bills -along with two Republican proposals, a bipartisan House proposal and one that would create a Canadian-like plan. They hope to pass one of them - or some version of one of them - into law this year. Whether they will succeed in doing so is anyone's guess at this stage.

Is all this really necessary? Opinions in this region - as in the rest of the country - are all over the lot.

In May, the Roanoke Times & World-News asked readers to tell us about their experiences with the health care system and the insurance industry. More than 175 phone calls and letters arrived, many from people who were satisfied with their health care and their health insurance.

What's all the fuss about? they asked. Keep government out of it, they demanded. Interestingly enough, many who worried about government intervention were people who were covered by Medicare, a government-run health care program for people over the age of 65.

Many couldn't understand the call for universal coverage. Aren't the poor already covered by Medicaid? they asked.

In fact, Medicaid covers only 42 percent of the nation's poor, according to Hans Palmer, a national health care expert and economics professor at Pomona College. Medicaid does not, for example, cover unmarried, childless adults - unless they are disabled. Women are often covered during pregnancy, but not after the child is born.

Others who called detailed stories of horror. Of unpaid bills mounting into the tens of thousands, of untreated illnesses, of children with birth defects who were shunned by health insurers. Of policies that doubled and tripled in cost until people could no longer afford them. It was often the sickest people - those most in need of insurance coverage - who couldn't get it.

In short, those who were healthy, well-off or well-insured were happy with the current system. Those who were not wanted change.

Is there a crisis?

Perhaps not until it happens to you.

(This for a box)

Consider the following:

The United States spends 14 percent of its gross domestic product - that's $903 billion, or $3,380 per person - on health care each year. That's more than Canada, Germany, Sweden, Japan and the United Kingdom spend.

Yet more babies die in the United States for every 1,000 born than in any of the above-listed countries. In 1990, nine of every 1,000 American infants died - more than twice the number of Japanese babies that died.

At least 37 million Americans lack health insurance. Most of the uninsured hold jobs.

Health

care

stories

FROM OUR READERS

Many wonder why health care is such an issue. Others know why, from hard experience.

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