Americans spend $23,000 a second, $2 billion a day and $73.3 billion a year on medical care. A coronary bypass for a fifty year old man costs $49,000. The cost of a single Bufferin tablet for a patient in a psychiatric hospital is over $3 dollars. These outrageous prices are a signal of the surging costs of health care in the United States. For corporate America, health care prices have become a ravenous expense. In 1991 alone, General Motors paid out $3.2 billion to provide coverage for 1.9 million employees. It is obvious that in order to fight the growing health care crisis in the United States, we must battle growing prices. There are some definite steps that can be taken to lower health care costs.

First, we must form a universal health care program that covers basic, preventive treatment for all Americans who cannot pay for their own insurance. Medicaid is supposed to insure those who cannot pay for coverage. However, Medicaid cut-offs are left for each individual state to decide upon. This has left many working Americans in a void. For example, in Alabama a family of four cannot qualify for Medicaid if it earns more than $16,584 a year. Therefore, many American families make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but too little to afford medical care. We must delete Medicaid and insert the above-stated plan. To support this plan the United States could remove the salary cap that provides additional monies for Social Security. Then, the budget previously held by Medicaid could be diverted to provide support for the plan. These funds would give the plan a strong financial base on which to build its operations.

Secondly, we must take steps to eliminate unnecessary care and medical waste. A fear of huge malpractice suits has driven practice costs up. Costs have soared because doctors must take extra precautions during procedures to protect themselves from malpractice suits. Doctors are forced to up their prices in order to pay for these extra steps.

However, many doctors and hospitals overtreat their patients simply because they have a blank check to do so under many insurance programs. Dr. Robert Brook contends that 20 percent of all medical procedures are completely unnecessary. Dr. Brook says that this waste costs us about $132 billion a year. These extra costs could be cut by placing award caps on suits dealing with questionable claims such as pain and suffering. If these awards were lessened, the number of "ambulance-chasing" lawyers would be lessened as well.

Also, insurance companies need to further enforce their recently installed maximum claims plan. These plans limit the need of unnecessary care by governing just what procedures can be paid for.

Finally, we need more doctors to practice primary preventive care. We have more than 570,000 physicians in the United States today. However, there are large areas in which medical care is dangerously distant. A government estimate in 1990 found that communities need about 35,000 more general practitioners. In today's highly specialized society, doctors prefer more lucrative practices such as surgeon and specialists. These positions can earn up to $300,000 a year whereas a general practitioner earns $96,000 on the average year. This lack of general health care has forced many Americans to seek the costly help of a specialist when the services of a general physician would more than suffice.

We can take several steps in order to correct the problem of a lack of general practitioners. Federal money pays for half of all graduate medical education. We could provide additional federal money to those students who plan to practice primary care. We could also expand the three year plan proposed by Congress that would help communities finance medical education for physicians. This plan provides up to $50,000 in matching funds to such communities. As an extra incentive we could provide a tax break on the physician's first year income once he began to practice primary care.

The health care crisis in the United States cannot be solved by simply attacking one of the problems it has caused. The problems that this issue poses must be solved by cooperation between Congress, the President, and the people of the United States. As long as there is more emphasis put on the power struggle within Congress than the issue, problems will only get worse. Health care figures to be a huge issue in the upcoming Presidential elections. All of the candidates seem to have proposed new policies on health care. However, no plan will work effectively without cooperation between the President and Congress. If there is a genuine concern over the issues in government, then our officials must put aside their differences and help one another help us.

While no plan to help us out of our current situation should focus purely on price control, it is important to limit costs. We have discovered where the problems lie. Now, to do something to correct those problems is our obligation to ourselves and our children. While we are not purposely depriving our countrymen of health care, they are being deprived. It is time for our leaders to forget political positioning and focus on this human issue.

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