Opinion
4A
Saturday, April 17, 2021
Other Views
Reduce costs and
provide health
care for all
ne month ago, I wrote about three areas in
which the U.S. needed to catch up with the
rest of the world’s wealthy nations: health
care, education and child care for workers. Of these,
the most urgent and obvious area requiring imme-
diate attention is health care. Why? Because we spend
twice as much
money as a
percent of
GDP than the
RICH BELZER
other countries
BEND
in the Organi-
zation for Eco-
nomic Cooperation and Development and get worse
results. In addition, they all cover every citizen while,
as of 2019, 28.9 million Americans were uninsured.
Our results? The U.S. ranks 40th in the world in
life expectancy at birth, 78.5, while Japan ranks fi rst
at 84.3.
The U.S. ranks 37th in the world in life expectancy
at age 60, 83.1, while Japan ranks fi rst at 86.3.
The U.S. ranks 47th in the world in infant mortality
— 6.5 per 1,000 live births — behind all of Western
Europe and Japan. Even Russia is better at 5.8 per
1,000 live births.
I could go on, but you probably get the message
at this point. This country spends extravagantly
on health care as a percent of our GDP, produces
poor results and does not insure everyone. In fact,
according to a 2019 study by the American Journal
of Public Health, 66.5% of personal bankruptcies in
the U.S. are due to medical issues. Spending more
and producing low-quality results is not a winning
formula. The U.S. health care system can only be
described as the worst of all worlds. Can anyone look
at these facts and disagree?
There are two questions we should probably be
asking ourselves: 1) How did we let it get this hor-
rible? and 2) Why aren’t our representatives and sen-
ators falling all over themselves to fi x it? If I can get
the above information, we know that they can as well.
First of all, fundamental Republican ideology
assumes that the free market will always work better
than the government. In many cases this is true and
is the foundation for our capitalist system. The free
market works well when competition restrains prices.
For example, if Chevy priced their Silverado $20,000
higher than a comparable Ford F-150, they would
have a hard time selling their trucks. In health care,
however, competition is minimal and prices are not
readily available, so cost-control is virtually nonex-
istent. Imagine that you are at home in Portland and
are hit with an incredibly painful appendicitis attack.
Your wife helpfully calls the EMTs but, in the mean-
time, might you be out on the web trying to fi nd the
hospital with the lowest prices? Is this information
even decipherable?
From a Republican perspective, our health care
system is working exactly as intended in that it is cre-
ating wealth; we have the highest paid doctors in the
world and our health care companies, up and down
the food chain, are highly profi table. To Republicans,
the fact that we spend more than other countries, pro-
duce miserable results and leave 30 million Amer-
icans uninsured is irrelevant compared to industry
profi tability.
There has been an attempt at a fi x. The Aff ordable
Care Act was passed and signed into law by former
President Barack Obama in March 2010. The ACA
fell signifi cantly short of being a total solution, but
it did solve the problem of those who, through a job
change, could not obtain aff ordable insurance due to a
preexisting condition. Through its additional funding
of Medicaid and availability of insurance through
health insurance exchanges, coverage was expanded
by roughly 20 million people. Unfortunately, it did
very little to address the cost of either services or
pharmaceuticals.
The U.S. health care system is obviously broken;
the statistics don’t lie. What should voters say to any
congressman or senator who isn’t working toward a
solution that reduces costs and provides health care
for all? “You’re fi red!”
———
Rich Belzer served as director of federal marketing
for a NYSE-listed computer company and was subse-
quently a senior executive with two NASDAQ-listed
high-tech companies. He moved to Bend to join
Columbia Aircraft where he became vice president of
worldwide sales.
O
Editor’s Note
Do you have a point you’d like to make or an issue
you feel strongly about? Submit a letter to the editor
or a guest column.
Other Views
Poetry can lift us up in troubled times
BETTE HUSTED
PENDLETON
t’s here again — National Poetry
Month. If you were taught, as poet
Billy Collins joked, that you had
to “tie a poem to a chair and beat a
confession out of it ... to fi nd out what
it really means,” you might fl inch at
the very idea.
But in this pandemic year, more
and more people have found them-
selves turning to poetry not only
to help face their pain, but also to
remember moments of light. Thanks
to people who shared some of their
own favorites this month, I found
Ashland poet Angela Howe Deck-
er’s poem about waking to watch her
young boys who have crept into their
parents’ bed “like cats or friendly
spirits” and before dawn are “great
wizards in small bodies, / arms
outstretched above their heads, /
drawing deep swells of breath and /
pulling the morning toward us.”
And January Gill O’Neil’s poem
“In the Company of Women”: “Make
me laugh over coff ee, / make it a
double, make it frothy / so it seethes
in our delight. / ... Let the bitterness
sink to the bottom of our lives. / Let
us take this joy to go.”
If you’re looking for poems that
lift your spirits, you could try Naomi
Shihab Nye’s “Kindness,” Wendell
Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things,”
or almost anything by Ted Kooser,
I
Letter
Compare U.K. health care
model with U.S.
Thank you to Dick Mason for his
article (March 23, 2021) covering the
recent Union County chapter online
meeting of Health Care for All Oregon
when Wayne Hill and his wife, Lynn
Relfe, reported on their experiences
with the National Health Service in
England, which is part of the United
Kingdom. Since Wayne is my brother,
I have more NHS information that I’d
like to add to Mason’s fi ne coverage.
Each NHS eligible person chooses
their own family practice group
and one of the group’s physicians.
When specialists or tests are needed,
a referral is made (immediately for
emergencies). The NHS in the U.K.
who is sharing new poems on Face-
book nearly every day.
Last month, I found myself sit-
ting on the fl oor beside the book-
case where I’d shelved the books
I brought home from my mother’s
bedroom. Here was Carl Sandburg’s
“Harvest Poems,” complete with the
receipt from my hometown’s Owl
Rexall Drug. Forty-seven cents —
the receipt dated March 21, a day
that has since been designated as
World Poetry Day and the same
day, in 2021, that I happened to be
reading.
Was it a coincidence that I could
hear her quoting Sandburg, telling
the wrens nesting just above our
door, “People of the eaves, I wish
you good morning, I wish you a
thousand thanks”?
In “The Pocket Book of Verse”
she had bookmarked “The Lake Isle
of Innisfree,” “To a Skylark,” “Jenny
Kissed Me,” and Robert Frost’s “Two
Look at Two.” Again, I could almost
hear her voice, reading that poem to
me when my teenaged life seemed
too much to bear. She is still off ering
me guidance; the slip of paper she
kept on her kitchen bulletin board
and that is now on mine reminds me
— in lines she copied from Frost’s
poem about a glass of cider — “I’d
catch another bubble if I waited. /
The thing was to get now and then
elated.”
Poetry can help us confront hard
truths, too. I think of “Facing It,”
Yusef Kumenyakaa’s poem about vis-
iting the Vietnam Veterans Memo-
rial wall. Or this from Joy Harjo’s
“A Postcolonial Tale”: “The children
were in school / learning subtraction
with guns.”
Wendy Rose’s poem about the
Wounded Knee Massacre — inspired
by the art auction of shirts and leg-
gings and cradleboards stripped from
those frozen bodies — gives voice
to a mother’s unspeakable grief.
“Would’ve put her in my mouth like a
snake / if I could, would’ve turned her
into a bush / or rock if there’d been
magic enough / to work such changes.
Not enough magic / to stop the bullets,
not enough magic / to stop the scien-
tists, not enough magic / to stop the
money.”
What poetry does at its best, I sup-
pose, is help us address the ques-
tion Mary Oliver asks in “A Summer
Day”: “Doesn’t everything die at last,
and too soon? / Tell me, what is it you
plan to do / with your one wild and
precious life?”
We know this much: Poetry can be
a path toward truth. “Say it plain: that
many have died for this day,” Eliza-
beth Alexander reminded us at Barack
Obama’s inauguration. And we won’t
soon forget Amanda Gorman at the
podium in January inspiring a shaken
nation. “Let the globe, if nothing
else, say this is true, / that even as
we grieved, we grew, that even as we
hurt, we hoped, that even as we tired,
we tried.”
Stay strong. And happy National
Poetry Month.
———
Bette Husted is a writer and a stu-
dent of tai chi and the natural world.
She lives in Pendleton.
fully covers routine care including
vision, dental, prescriptions and cancer
treatments. A few of the additional ser-
vices, at no extra cost, include:
1. Ambulance: Members are regis-
tered with a local ambulance service,
which gives paramedics vital medical
information before an emergency.
2. Phone-in service: People can call
111 in the U.K. and receive care from
a medical care provider through a tele-
phone offi ce visit (this service has been
vital during COVID-19).
3. House calls: NHS doctors make
house calls.
The NHS does have some problems.
There are non-covered medications and
treatments, as with U.S. health insur-
ance companies. Those treatments not
covered by NHS are still available —
paid for out-of-pocket or through pri-
vately purchased insurance.
Purchasing optional private insur-
ance can also speed up elective sur-
gery. However, the patient receives the
same quality of care since the same
private practice surgeons also work for
the NHS.
The National Health Service in the
United Kingdom certainly off ers its
members greater care for less money
than the for-profi t private system does
in the United States.
Organization for Economic Co-op-
eration and Development data pub-
lished in 2019 states the U.K. spent
just $4,653 per person for a life expec-
tancy of 81.3 years while the U.S. spent
$11,072, for a shorter life expectancy of
78.7 years.
To learn more about the information
presented here and join in the move-
ment to improve U.S. health care, send
an email to unioncounty@hcao.org.
Vivian Young
La Grande