Health Reform That Works for Every American…. and some information about RAM
by Sen. Sherrod Brown and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse
source HufPost
“This morning, millions of people all over this country woke up hoping today isn’t the day they get sick. Millions of Americans went to work wondering whether today would be the last day they get paid in a while. And millions sat up late last night at the kitchen table, to try to balance the family budget as health care bills piled higher and higher.
Access to secure, affordable health care is one of the brightest lines dividing our country. When the system works, it’s at worst inconvenient. When it doesn’t – and too often, it doesn’t – it can leave families, businesses, whole communities devastated.
There has to be a better way. We have to do better than 47 million uninsured, and millions more teetering on the brink. We have to do better than 100,000 people dying each year from avoidable medical errors. America can do better than this.
That’s why for the past several weeks, Senate Democrats have worked hard to craft a sensible, comprehensive health care reform that will begin to reduce costs for families, businesses, and our government; protect people’s choice of doctors, hospitals and insurance plans; and offer affordable, high-quality health care for every American.
Our reform upholds President Obama’s promise: if you like the health care you have, you can keep it. But for the many Americans who want different choices – or don’t have health insurance at all – we also offer a new, public health insurance option. The Community Health Insurance Option will be a national plan, administered by the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and available in every state and territory. It will offer benefits that are as good as those available through private insurance plans – or better. The Secretary will negotiate provider payment rates to encourage doctors and hospitals to participate, and individuals who need financial help purchasing coverage will receive it. Local advisory councils will assure the plan receives community input.
Overwhelmingly, Americans agree that healthy competition and a broad range of choices will help keep costs down and insurance plans honest. Our Community Health Insurance Option will be a clear, affordable alternative to for-profit insurance companies.
Your health insurer should be your advocate – not your adversary. The Community Health Insurance Option will invest in prevention, so that when you’re healthy you stay that way. It will invest in care management and coordination, when you have a chronic condition. And it will fight for you, not with you, to get you get the best possible care with the least possible hassle.
Some people will try to scare you into thinking that having a public option will drive all private health insurers out of the market. But we all know the truth: the only place the public option will drive private health insurers is back onto the straight and narrow. Your health insurer should never deny you coverage because you’ve had a heart condition. Your insurer should never carve out your diabetes from your coverage. Your insurer should never deny payment for the MRI they didn’t pre-authorize because in the haze of your breast cancer diagnosis, you hadn’t read the fine print.
They’ll also try to scare you into thinking that our plan will put the government between you and your doctor, and ration your care. The truth is just the opposite. Private insurance rations care by ability to pay – and puts insurance company bureaucrats between you and your doctor. Our plan rejects this failed system – because every American deserves the very best care, no matter what.
The HELP Committee’s plan is the right path for our country as we work to reform our health care system – and we look forward to the day when it’s available to millions of Americans desperately in need of comprehensive, low-cost, high-quality coverage. This should have happened long ago.
The writers are Democratic U.S. Senators representing Ohio and Rhode Island, respectively. They are members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee.“
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This reminded me of a documentary I’ve seen a year ago on one of our TV channels about the volunteer organisation “Remote Area Medical” (RAM) that once started it’s roots in the Amazon and was founded in 1985 to provide medical care to some of the poorest and most remote areas of the world.
Stan Brock, the founder of this organization, dedicated his life to providing health care to remote regions on this planet after he spent over fifteen years in the Amazon rain forest witnessing tribes without modern day health care.
Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps is a non-profit, volunteer relief corps that provides free dental, eye and veterinary care to the underserved of the world. Volunteers collect supplies, medicine, facilities, and more. They travel as far as the Amazon jungles to assist those in need.
Right now RAM operates solely on the generosity of the American people and has no corporate sponsors. In fact, last year the organization survived on only $250,000 but treated 70,000 people in rural areas in the United States. Many of these areas have under-insured and impoverished people who were unable to obtain health care otherwise.
Most people (me included) find it a shock to see that conditions we would expect only in the darkest forests on the other side of the planet are in fact occurring every day in the United States. In fact, 60% of their services are provided in the United States.
For more information you can visit their website ….
http://www.ramusa.org/
http://www.ramusa.org/projects/ruralamerica.htm
The majority of those who come to the clinics have jobs, they simply cannot afford health care and although they work hard (sometimes more than 2 jobs) but rising medical costs and limited local dental and eye care force them to look to services such as RAM.
On a typical RAM expedition, health care specialists make a weekend trip to a specified area- usually setting up in a high school or other local venue. Upon arriving, the RAM team sets up dental care stations and eye exam stations, and sometimes provides routine medical tests such as pap smears and mammograms.
(this is not in Africa or South America, this is in the United States)
The clinics open early in the morning, patients get a ticket and are seen on a first-come, first-served basis. Those tickets are the only hope some people have of seeing a health clinician. Some have suffered multiple heart attacks but cannot afford follow-up visits to a doctor. Breast cancer survivors come to RAM clinics for mammograms that they can’t pay for. Some people arrive barely able to see until they receive a new pair of glasses, free thanks to RAM.
Long lines of people are waiting to see the doctors, nurses, and dentists but RAM usually cannot attend to everyone who comes to their mobile clinics…
Here are some videos…
and…. click on the picture below or go to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/interactives/healingfields/
to watch the videos….
IT IS shocking to see that IS the current situation in the United States. In Germany we have universal health care and everyone (nearly everyone) is covered.
We don’t have the best health care system, it is getting more expensive for everyone but it works and the costs are by far not so high (we have nearly the half costs) than the costs in the US right now.
I would never want to miss it.
It saved my life and saved me from bancrupty. My sons had nearly 15 surgeries (broken legs, knee surgeries, sport accidents etc.) during the last 10 years and I could have never paid for it by myself.
Health care for all is a human right and I hope that Obama is able to make it work, so that these people in the videos above (and all the other 5 million Americans who are without health care) don’t have to “sit up late last night at the kitchen table, to try to balance the family budget as health care bills piled higher and higher.” (to quote Brown and Whitehouse) just because Big Pharma wants to make their money.
