Healthcare reform is needed now more than ever

The following is a recently submitted letter to the editor:


To the Editor:
I am a psychiatrist in private practice in Atlanta who saw every day how broken our for-profit healthcare system is. In fact, calling it a system is inaccurate; Americans are covered by a patchwork quilt of private and public providers, all interested in shifting cost to someone else. As a result, the patient loses. 
I cannot count the number of times I have faced a patient in distress because a for-profit insurance corporation refused to pay for needed care, or found some excuse to defer or deny payment for services rendered. I cannot count the number of bankruptcies I have witnessed, survivors of trauma, cancer, and heart attacks whose insurance companies fought them at every step of the way. Simple human decency is absent in such a system, staffed by layers of faceless bureaucrats who have never met my clients making decisions in an attempt to maximize corporate profits.
Since insurance is a zero-sum game, every dollar that goes to CEO bonuses represents a dollar that could have gone towards a medication, a hospitalization, a pap smear, or vaccination.  A country that allows 45,000 of its citizens to die for want of health insurance, according to a recent Harvard study, does not deserve to call itself civilized. Half of those without insurance are children. 90% of the uninsured families are employed.
The United States remains the only industrialized country that does not insure all of its citizens. Now, thanks to the misinformation of powerful interest groups posing as populists, we may retain that status indefinitely. Thank you, Tea Party organizers. Profits have trumped patients once again.
Insuring our children is no more of a moral option than feeding them. Almost half a million Americans, some of our most vulnerable citizens, have died needlessly since 9-11 but there is no equivalent war on uninsurance. We should all be ashamed.  There is a solution, actually several dozen, but all involve making universal healthcare a reality. We can pick and choose from the best plans worldwide. I do not believe that the bill now threatened with dilution to meaninglessness is a great bill, but it is a move in the right direction. 
Americans deserve access to their own healthcare system. No child should ever have to die simply because their parents worked for Enron or were between jobs when the cancer was diagnosed. History will judge us not by how much a privileged few made in corporate bonuses, but by how well we took care of the least among us. Failure is not an option. We need healthcare reform and we need it now. 
Sincerely, 
Mark Vakkur, MD