Virtual town hall offers public chance to effect health-care change
By Steven Witz
|
Health-care spending is escalating and, by 2015, could account for $1 of every $5 spent by consumers annually. One of every six Americans lives without health-care insurance.
Corporations are increasingly concerned about being able to affordably offer health-care benefits to their employees and still compete in a global economy. Health-care providers say they are struggling to recover the costs they incur to deliver services and question their ability to continue under current financing policies.
Is the U.S. health-care system sustainable given its growing costs and unmet public demand for care?
Industry officials, policy-makers, researchers and academics want to hear from the general public about what answers you might have for the many questions about how our health-care system works — and doesn't work.
That's why Hoosier participation is encouraged in the Wednesday, March 22, virtual town hall meeting, "What is Your Health Worth? A National Conversation on Health Care." Purdue University is joining its Big Ten colleagues, along with Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and 10 other U.S. schools of public health in this important discussion.
The University of Michigan is coordinating the meeting nationally in conjunction with the Citizens' Health Care Working Group.
The 15-member panel, formed by Congress last year, hopes to find out what the public thinks about the accessibility, cost and quality of health care. The ultimate goal is to turn that input into policy recommendations for the federal government.
The Citizens' Health Care Working Group, established as part of the vast Medicare Modernization Act passed by Congress in 2003, went to work in February 2005, committed to find out whether the health-care system is working for all Americans.
Following hearings in five U.S. cities last year, the working group released its "Health Report to the American People" last October, summarizing the current state of the U.S. health-care systems.
Since mid-January, the panel has been holding meetings across the country. Wednesday's virtual town hall meeting at university towns across much of the Midwest will draw answers from the public to four primary questions:
• What health-care benefits and services should be provided?
• How does the American public want health care delivered?
• How should health-care coverage be financed?
• What tradeoffs are the American public willing to make in either benefits or financing to ensure access to affordable, high-quality health-care coverage and services?
During the meeting, participants also will be asked to vote on a variety of health-care issues — information that will be vital for what's finally presented to the president and congressional leaders.
The legislation requires President Bush to propose his fixes for the complicated health-care crisis. And Congress has been tasked to hold formal hearings on what's finally presented to federal lawmakers by the Citizens' Health Care Working Group.
A key factor about this particular effort is that it draws the views of the thousands — and hopefully the millions — of people who rely on this nation's health-care system.
These are the people who use our local hospitals and clinics and worry as the calendar turns about how their annual pay increases continue to fall short of the increase they see every year in their health-care premiums coming out of their weekly or monthly paychecks.
Answers also will help Purdue's Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering in its unique mission to apply systems-engineering principles to address this country's health-care issues.
Join us from 6:30-9:30 p.m. Wednesday in Stewart Center, Room 218, or for IUPUI's forum in Room 132 at the University Place Hotel and Conference Center in downtown Indianapolis.
This is a chance for your voice to be heard from Indiana all the way to Washington. This discussion is critical, and your opinions are essential if we are going to come up with a solution to an issue that affects every single person in this country.
— Steven Witz is the director of the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering at Purdue University's Discovery Park and has nearly three decades of experience as a hospital and health-care administrator.
To the News Service home page