Kathleen O’Connor, health care industry analyst and journalist, founded
CodeBlueNow! upon the belief that the public has a right to be involved
in creating its own health care policy. Involved in healthcare for 30 years, she
shares her unique ability to communicate current health care topics in
a language everyone can understand.Document Actions
Solutions for Quality Health Care
By Robert D. Ray, R, former Governor of Iowa and Paul G. Rogers, D, former Congressman from Florida
This is the last of the rerun of the CodeBlueNow! Papers. This piece ran in December 2005. The points of affordable, quality, safety and administrative simplification still hold, but starting next week, we will start to introduce some elements CodeBlueNow! has been working on and refining over the past five years.
Over the past several weeks, prominent individuals have been writing about the problems in our health care system and the need for comprehensive health care reform to fix those problems. It’s good news that there are solutions that can provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans. And those solutions are not only doable, they are affordable. In fact, the cost of inaction – of not doing what is necessary to fix the system – is greater than the cost of needed action. It is not more money we need; it’s a better system for delivering and paying for health care, and we need it now.
A recent international survey released by the Commonwealth Fund reported an astonishing finding: of six Western nations examined, the U.S. leads all of them in the number of medical errors, out-of-pocket health care expenses, and people going without health care services due to costs. And this is in spite of the fact that the U.S. spends twice as much per capita on health care as any other industrialized nation in the world.
The fact is, we can change the system, and we can afford to pay for it, as well.
Like CodeBlueNow!, the National Coalition on Health Care is rigorously non-partisan. Our Honorary Chairmen are former Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald R. Ford. Our members are major businesses, unions, patient advocacy and consumer groups, associations of health care providers, health and pension funds, insurers, and religious denominations. We believe that an effective response to our health care crisis is more than urgently needed. But it requires leadership. Now.
