Waiting for Better Health Care
Public Policy Ailments Create Public Ills
Mary Kay and Travis Ansley are living the health care crisis many others are talking about.
This month, the Ansleys nearly dropped the health insurance on their five-person family because the monthly premium on their self-insured policy jumped to more than $750 a month.
That’s an enormous chunk of money to this Charleston couple. Travis works in a two-man cabinet shop and Mary Kay runs a two-person home cleaning operation.
Scrambling for better coverage for the family, Mary Kay found a carrier that would cover them for a little more than $500 each month, or some $6,000 a year. But Mary Kay said the new insurance didn’t really compare to her old policy.
“The new one riders-out my asthma and [my son’s] ADD,” said Mary Kay.
“We’re going to have pay for all that out of pocket,” said the former social worker who nearly became a member of a growing demographic: the working uninsured.
A lot of the family’s concerns could have been answered had Gov. Mark Sanford not vetoed a bill this summer that would have increased the state’s lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax, according to Dr. Casey Fitts.
In 2001, Fitts, a Harvard-educated physician who graduated from the Medical University of South Carolina before becoming a general-practice surgeon, took a year off from his bustling practice to create Tri-County Project Care, a novel way to deliver health care at affordable and profitable rates.
Since 2002, the Mount Pleasant-based Project Care has knitted together an alternative health-care plan with money and services from doctors, hospitals, employers, employees and public sources. Fitts said the project is designed to lessen the strain on emergency rooms and the overall health-care system while increasing the health of those enrolled in it.
Fitts said his pilot program was on the cusp of a major influx of state money from the cigarette tax increase that would have allowed it to at least double its client list of 75.
Knowing that a single-payer insurance structure is politically unpalatable in America at this time, Fitts has been trying to convince anyone who will listen that the biggest problem in the cost of medical care is the industry’s focus on the last days of life.
Instead, Fitts said, the emphasis should be about maintaining health early on before medical problems get out of hand: “It’s like the old Fram oil filter ads said, ‘You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.’”
Fitts said it’s wrong that the nation’s health-care system charges so much when people are at their most vulnerable, when “they’ll pay anything.”
State Sen. Harvey Peeler, R-Cherokee and chairman of the Senate Medical Affairs Committee, said he didn’t think the total answer was to blame the industry, as he would like to see the topic of “personal responsibility” re-enter the discussion. “Back before when we decided we needed our health insurance paid for by our employers, human nature would make employees take better care of themselves,” said dairyman Peeler. “But there’s no way to un-ring that bell.”
State Rep. Leon Howard, D-Richland and chairman of the House Medical, Military, Public and Municipal Affairs Committee, was aghast when told Peeler’s comments.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Howard, who owns an auto repair shop. “I completely disagree with Peeler that the reason people don’t take as good care of themselves as they could is because they don’t have to pay for it. Ludicrous.”
Howard, who said he employs mostly retirees on Medicare, added that health care isn’t about “material things.”
But for the Ansley family, with active kids looking forward to expensive fall sports and school (read: books, paper, uniforms), the choice might soon become one between health care and material things.
BY BILL DAVIS
Free Times
August 13, 2008