Marcos Santiago MD: While politicians slept, American health care became a monster

To The Daily Sun,

"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" – Francisco Goya, 1797

The misfortune that both US political parties has brought to our country's table is the "Sleep Of Reason," creating fragmented healthcare delivery monsters. Among them are private for-profit health insurance, an avaricious pharmaceutical industry, inefficient hospital conglomerates, costly private laboratories, private dialysis clinics, the fake healthcare reform ACA (Affordable Care Act). These monsters promise erroneous assurance that competition will drive healthcare cost down. But for decades our country has experienced drastic escalation of prices from insurance premiums, medication and services.

For the last ten years, the employer sponsored and individual insurance market has increased the amount of cost sharing of offered plans by deductibles. These deductibles are so expensive that access to care depends on finances, leaving tens of millions either without adequate care, or postponing care, often resulting in more serious conditions or untimely death. Most personal bankruptcies in the US are due to medical bills, another grave consequence.

It is plain to see that the half measures of our current multi-payer system have not resulted in solving matters of life and death from diseases, especially with the unexpected arrival of COVID-19 pandemic.

Thus, the willful intent to preserve this unbalanced state of affair by our bipartisan politicians, resulted in having their pants caught down figuratively and literally. The health system in the U.S. was absolutely unprepared to handle this terrifying health crisis.

There was obvious absence of planning for a pandemic. Unequal delivery of healthcare funds became more evident, lack of personal protective equipment for front line healthcare workers, price gouging for medicines and mitigation essentials is rampant. Spread of this virus among under-served poor and ethnic communities may not even protect those citizens with money and influence who flee urban areas - because COVID-19 is an equal opportunity killer, everyone is vulnerable.

There never has been a time before now when a pandemic laid bare US health care inequities and inefficiencies.

Our country could ill-afford the political bipartisan Sleep Of Reason on matters of life and death. Ignored for decades is the clamor of the majority of US citizens for a just, equal, equitable, and more efficient healthcare system - Improved Medicare For All, already before Congress in two bills: the House version HR-1384 and the Senate version S-1129. Contact your Senator and Representative and tell them to support these bills.

To this date, the two main political party platforms, their presidential candidates, and most local and national candidates do not offer proposals to solve these grave healthcare inadequacies and inequities. Many are asleep and unable to see that decades of tweaks and band-aid proposals had proven insufficient.

Let's wake up local and national politicians from their Sleep Of Reason by voting out those that are hypnotized by lobbyist dollars to disregard this problem. Vote in those who truly represent their constituents by embracing and supporting Improved Medicare For All.

Marcosa Santaigo MD

Rumney