The health care crisis is a federal problem

I have to hand it to Rep. Mark Green. He has a lot of chutzpah to make this statement in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about Governor Doyle's proposal to create a tax deduction for health care premiums:

"I don't think it shows a lot of leadership to suddenly, right before the election, do something he had failed to do for 3 1/2 years," Green said. "What's he been doing?"

As a member of the Do Nothing Congress, it takes a lot of nerve to ask what other politicians have been doing for the last couple of years.

The quick answer as to what he has been doing is cleaning up the budget deficit that Green helped create when he was a state assemblyman. It's pretty hard to tackle major new initiatives when you have to dig out of hole first.

But the better question is what has Congress been doing to tackle the health care crisis in this country. Governors across the country have been doing their best to plug as many gaps in the system as they can, but true health care reform has to come from Congress and they haven't even tried to do it.

Green and his Republican colleagues like to talk about health care cost transparency as a means to help get the health care crisis under control. This amounts to not a whole lot more than people being able to see the cost of the procedures they can't afford to have and can't get their insurance company to cover.

And it's going to take a whole lot more to fix this problem. Our health care system is completely broken and Green and the Republicans running Congress have stood by and let it happen. In fact, they took over Congress by stopping an attempt at major reform. The plan the Clinton's put together had a lot of problems, but the Republicans didn't try to put together a better plan. They just scared everyone into thinking we didn't need health care reform.

The country now knows better.

About 46 million people in this country lack health insurance coverage. Which is like everyone in the states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Indiana not having health insurance. If our nation decided that those five states should not have health insurance simply because of where they lived, people would be outraged. So why is acceptable to deny people coverage simply because of the job they have because they are spread out all over the country?

The number of people without insurance has been climbing steadily for the last couple of years and it is not a result of people that refuse to work. About 21 million of those people work full-time and still have no coverage. A good deal of the rest work close to full-time hours but are not allowed to have the rest of the hours to make them full-time and qualify them for benefits. Many businesses do this to save money and more and more companies are not providing health care at all due to the costs.

The fact is, the health care crisis is so large that only the federal government can solve it now. It does not require a government run health care. But it will require federal government funds and the system should no longer be job based. It will be expensive at first, but in the long run it will save us money to have everyone covered by insurance instead of doing quick health care fixes in emergency rooms across the country.

The answer to our health care problems probably lies closer to having more people be able to buy into the health care system the federal government provides to its employees and having the federal government subsidize those that can't afford it instead of having the government running the hospitals and clinics.

But will Congress let other people into the good health care coverage they get? Or will they continue to try to pawn the problem off onto the states?