Column: What’s to Fear in Healthcare Reform?
Editor’s note: The author will be part of a group of residents who’ll be rallying at 9:30 a.m. Saturday morning near the Ann Arbor Farmers Market to show support for President Obama’s proposed healthcare reform plan, including its public insurance option.
As a primary care physician, I believe strongly that we need meaningful healthcare reform. In practicing for over 25 years, I have witnessed how impossible it is to get healthcare without insurance. And in the last 10 years I have seen an increasing number of my patients lose their insurance.
It saddens me that I can’t provide adequate care for them. It also has been alarming to me to see how easy it is to lose healthcare coverage, especially in these difficult economic times. It will only get worse without substantial reform. If nothing is done to reform healthcare, the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund predicts that over one-fifth of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) will be spent on healthcare by the year 2020. And it won’t mean that more Americans are covered: that year, the number of uninsured is expected to rise to 61 million. [Full Story]