Paying docs with chickens?

Ron Pollack

Thursday, May 6, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

You’ve got to hand it to Sue Lowden, a Republican primary campaign candidate for the upcoming Senate race. Her recent health care policy proposal sure set tongues a-clucking with her statement, “You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor.” One wag quickly labeled her proposal, “Chickens for Checkups.”

Lowden was pandering to that trick of hazy memory, when everything in the past is recalled as appearing to have been simpler, homier, more personal. Whatever her memories, however, for almost all Americans “olden days” were not “golden days” of health care.

We have made almost unbelievable strides in a couple of generations to eliminate childhood diseases, control life-threatening conditions, and foster good preventive, healthy lifestyles. At the same time, health care costs have continued to climb, putting important interventions and even routine checkups out of reach for an increasing number of Americans.

Medicare has given senior Americans peace of mind; Medicaid has made health care accessible to many of the lowest-income Americans; and active-duty military personal and veterans have access to their own health coverage programs. For the rest of the population — students, families, the self-employed and employers large and small — the stark reality has been that health care has become increasingly unaffordable.

Our system of health care delivery has forced people to stay in jobs to preserve their coverage, denied coverage to many because of pre-existing conditions, or blocked the startup of new businesses because health coverage was unaffordable. Headlines have often focused on breakthroughs in medical research and technology, but they have missed the almost invisible premature deaths of millions of Americans who did not have health coverage.

Candidate Lowden later defended her comments by stating, “When you don’t have government in between you and your health care, you can negotiate — it was in that context,” but it’s clear from decades of trying that her throwback “Clucks for Bucks” couldn’t fix this broken system. However, the health reform legislation signed into law by President Barack Obama begins the essential repairs.

Pioneering programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid sought to address great inequities in our economic system. The new health care law will make our nation healthier and stronger, and is a great accomplishment by members of Congress who supported it.

Ron Pollack is the executive director of Families USA, a Washington-based nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy group seeking high-quality, affordable health care for all Americans.