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StumbleuponISSUES IMPORTANT TO VOTERS: HEALTH CARE
'Our health care system ... is extremely messed up'
> Obama, McCain health care plans | More issues
Sunday, August 24, 2008
KETTERING — Hers is a typical story in America these days: a working mom with no health insurance who makes too much to qualify for government assistance but not enough to afford a health plan.
So when Vicki Willems of Kettering is ailing, she heads to Reach Out of Montgomery County, a crowded free clinic near Miami Valley Hospital where she has to wait for hours to be seen.
Her 17-year-old daughter Andrea isn't so lucky. She has occasional migraines with blurry vision and numbness on one side of her body — symptoms that need more expensive care.
"The doctor sent her to a specialist and wanted her to have (two) MRIs," said Willems, 46. "Well, that costs $5,000 and I don't have the money for it. So here we are. She's probably not going to get it unless we get Medicaid."
Most polls show Americans list health care among their top three concerns, right behind the economy and Iraq.
Eight in 10 Americans believe the U.S. health care system needs to be changed or completely rebuilt, according to survey results released this month by the Commonwealth Fund Commission on High Performance Health System.
What happens to America's health care system may depend on who is elected president in November. Both contenders, Barack Obama and John McCain, are proposing changes aimed at helping people like the Willemses, but their plans are markedly different.
Obama, the presumptive nominee at this week's Democratic Convention in Denver, would create a new national plan for people who can't find affordable private plans. The Illinois senator would pour billions into subsidies, require that all children have health insurance and expand eligibility for federal-state programs such as Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, would offer tax credits — $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families — to offset the cost of insurance. The government would send a check directly to the insurance provider of the consumer's choice.
McCain would fund the proposal, in part, by taxing workers' employer-contributed health premiums, which are currently exempt.
Willems, an assistant to a certified public accountant in downtown Dayton, said she hasn't looked at either plan. She doesn't know what it will take to fix health care in America.
She just knows it needs fixing.
"Our health care system, obviously, is extremely messed up," she said.
