It’s Broke--Fix It : Either patch up Medicare or address comprehensive health care issue

Another siren has joined the howling chorus that warns America that it is heading for both medical and financial disaster unless it reforms its health care system soon.

It is a chorus so compelling that not even the fact that this is an election year can stand up as an excuse for Congress and the White House to ignore health care any longer.

The new siren is a frank and gloomy assessment that the national trust fund that pays hospital bills for 34 million Americans on Medicare will be broke in 10 years.

The report by five trustees of the fund blames sharply rising costs and falling revenues--the same symptoms that afflict all American health care.

Signed by three members of President Bush’s Cabinet, the report says Congress can patch up Medicare or deal with the broader lack of comprehensive health care for all Americans, but it must do one or the other promptly.

The Medicare hospital fund is being drained by a combination of higher admissions than forecast and costs that continue--year after year--to climb faster than inflation generally.

Hospital bills account for about 40% of per capita costs of health care in the United States, while physician fees account for another 20%. The other 40% is taken up by the costs of drugs, insurance overhead and other services. These costs of health care have doubled in the last nine years. This year alone, medical services will cost $750 billion. In just four years, it will total $1.3 trillion.

According to the National Leadership Coalition for Health Care Reform, only eight countries in the world spend even half as much as Americans on medical services. Yet 22 nations have lower infant mortality rates and 15 have higher average life expectancies.

It is not as though Congress must start from scratch on a health reform package. The coalition has a plan that is a good place to start, one that 46 senators have endorsed.

As so often happens these days, Washington is in gridlock, yanked this way and that by differing ideologies and differing pocketbooks. But in this case, Washington ignores the warnings not only at its own peril but at the peril of 300 million Americans.