Word: healthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...often this pile of medical money has not bought better care or increased access. Instead, it has fueled a profoundly wasteful and inefficient system. "Thirty percent of what we do in health care is of no apparent benefit," says Marion Ein Lewin, of the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine. A Rand Corp. review of carotid endarterectomies, operations aimed at clearing blocked neck arteries, found nearly a third of the procedures "inappropriate." Similar questions have been raised about heart bypass operations and pacemakers. The next Administration must put a premium on value and coordinate a nationwide re-examination...
Cost containment alone won't cure the medical system. New sources of revenue must be found. Begin by doubling the federal excise tax on cigarettes. In recent years smoking has been recognized for what it is: an addiction and a health threat, often even to bystanders. This Administration championed "zero tolerance" and urged Americans to "Just say no" to other drugs. Let the next Administration commit itself to leading the U.S. away from its single most deadly habit. Cigarettes kill an estimated 300,000 Americans annually. That is 15% of the deaths in the country, far more than are caused...
Federal excise taxes on cigarettes are about 16 cents a pack. For every additional penny levied on the 29 billion packs smoked yearly, the Government would raise $290 million. Doubling the tax -- call it a user fee -- would yield an additional $4.6 billion that could be earmarked for health care. That revenue would be only half the benefit. Kenneth E. Warner, a professor at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, estimates that doubling the cigarette tax would cut the population of teenage smokers by 17%, protecting more than 800,000 young Americans from cigarettes. Governments...
Catastrophic health care was only the first problem addressed in assisting the chronically ill who desperately need help in paying for nursing-home and home health care. As the population grays, those demands will grow. But paying for programs projected to cost $30 billion to $50 billion a year will take sizable increases in taxes on payrolls, gifts and estates. Moreover, ; Washington will need both compassion and political gumption to achieve so- called generational equity. The sometimes stentorian American Association of Retired Persons ably represents America's elderly, but it should not be allowed to drown out the softer voices...
Children also make up about one-third of the 37 million Americans who have no health insurance. Today the uninsured are sometimes dumped by hospital after hospital, forced to "crawl around like health-care beggars asking for some kindly doctor's or hospital's noblesse oblige," says Uwe Reinhardt, professor of political economy at Princeton University. Of the industrialized nations, only South Africa and the U.S have not made an effort to extend coverage to all their citizens. If compassion were not an argument for remedying that dreadful situation, economics might be. At present the costs of the uninsured...