By By JONATHAN CLAYBORNE
Staff Writer
Locals offered their perspectives on health-care reform as the U.S. Senate prepared to vote on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Congress has yet to reconcile conflicting passages in the House and Senate bills, but the Senate’s Christmas Eve passage of PPACA brought the overall initiative closer to becoming law.
None of the people with whom the Daily News spoke said the vote ended debate over how to extend health coverage to most Americans.
“I think it’ll be a big Band-Aid, and that’s about it,” said the Rev. David Moore, chief executive officer of Metropolitan Community Health Services in Washington.
“In the meantime, the poorest of the poor are still in the stable because there’s no room for them at the hospital,” Moore said.
Agape Community Health Clinic, a service of Metropolitan, offers health care on a sliding fee scale, Moore has explained. The clinic reaches out to low-income populations.
Moore, a Democratic, former Beaufort County commissioner, indicated his disappointment that the compromise legislation won’t lead to a public option for health insurance, instead pointing the way to nonprofit insurance exchanges through which people can purchase private coverage.
“They said we were going to have a sweeping change,” Moore stated. “I don’t see anything sweeping about that.”
The average, middle-class person has access to health care, he said.
“It seems to me a tragedy when there is this almost civil revolt just because poor people don’t have health insurance,” Moore added.
The passage of the bill could lead to coverage of around 94 percent of U.S. residents under the age of 65 (those not covered by Medicare), according to The Associated Press.
At present, 83 percent of Americans have coverage, AP said.
“The government needs to stay out of health care coverage,” said Al Klemm, a Republican Beaufort County commissioner.
“I believe the Senate health care bill is just incremental to the socialists who are in charge taking over and making health care totally a government program, eventually,” Klemm said.
Klemm objected to a portion of the Senate bill that requires employers with more than 50 workers to pay fees if they don’t provide health insurance.
“I would prefer that everybody buy their own health insurance,” Klemm said, “and that it not be provided by the companies, and that it go with them their whole life unless they choose to change their policy.”
According to The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation’s Web site, “Most Americans — 162 million — get health insurance through their employers.”
The Web site continues, “Generally, employers subsidize the cost of the insurance, but workers share the expense through a variety of payments, including premiums, co-payments and deductibles.”
According to AP, citing Kaiser foundation research, “Worker contributions to cover health insurance have increased 128 percent over 10 years,” and, “Premiums rose by 131 percent” between 1999 and 2009.
“The legislation (on the table) preserves the private insurance market, so medicine will not be socialized,” reads the American Academy of Family Physicians’ Web site.
“But what it is intended to do,” the site continues, “is to provide some competition for insurance companies, especially in areas where one company is dominant or a monopoly, which are often rural and where many of our members have no leverage in negotiating with the major plans.”
Dr. Hank Stephenson, a retired Washington physician, said he wasn’t certain the reform package would do enough to address the issues about which he is most concerned.
“I’m not sure they’re addressing some of the more serious needs in health care, such as putting a cap on liability insurance and doing something about primary care, which I think has been destroyed in recent decades,” Stephenson said.
Stephenson, who has been active in medicine for more than 50 years, said there should be more emphasis on, and financial incentive for, communities’ general practitioners.
“That ought to be the basis of the medical system is primary care, and it’s not,” he said. “It’s gotten in the hands of the specialists and the super-specialists.”
Local practices are being bought up by hospitals, and part of the problem is that Medicare and insurance companies “don’t reward people doing primary care,” Stephenson said.
North Carolina’s two senators were divided on the bill.
“Despite being marked as a health care reform bill, the legislation we voted on today is nothing more than a massive expansion of the federal government,” U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said in a Christmas Eve news release.
“The bill reduces the waste, fraud and abuse that currently exists in the delivery of care, and it will save our country money by decreasing the mounting federal deficit,” U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., said in another news release.