Universal healthcare not viable without cost control

Oregon House of Representative member Cyrus Javadi from the 32nd District, (Tillamook area) wrote a guest column in McMinnville’s News-Register, wrapping up a series of essays walking through the slow unraveling of American healthcare with a response to the question: “OKm soi what’s the answer?”

Here’s his response:

”Here’s the answer, but it won’t fit on a bumper sticker:

We have to choose a universal financing system and pair it with real cost control.

That means admitting healthcare is not a normal market. It means standardizing prices where markets don’t function. It means expanding the workforce instead of treating burnout like a personal failing. It means simplifying administration so clinicians spend less than 25% of their time feeding billing portals collectively costing $90 billion a year.

It means confronting drug pricing where 2-3% of prescriptions drive half of all spending. It means acknowledging consolidation raises prices, but also that thin margins force survival mergers. And it means accepting out loud that better medicine costs money, whether we pay through premiums, taxes or time.

Obamacare bought us time.

We spent that time arguing about whether the tourniquet caused the wound. It didn’t.

Now, time is running out. And choosing nothing is still a choice — just one in which the system keeps deciding for us, hospital by hospital, county by county, mile by mile.

Which is fine. Unless you think healthcare matters.”

Read Javadi’s full comment’s at the News-Register website.