EDITORIAL: Amid a cacophony of political distractions, Colorado’s health care crisis grows

Amid the recent frenzy of tough talk, flailing hands and dire warnings across the country during and after the president’s annual state of the union speech, the nation’s health care crisis garnered little attention.

With immigration, Donald Trump’s bombastic diversion from his growing criminal problems and President Joe Biden’s near-manic defense of his advanced age, the nation’s actual pressing problems are being set aside.

A looming health-care crisis nearly tops the list. 

The United States now spends a startling average of $13,493 per person, per year on health care, twice what other wealthy, western nations spend.

At the same time, the health-care industry continues to deteriorate into a behemoth of shortages, long waits and shocking prices.

Hospitals, insurance companies, drug companies and providers all blame one another for a system that increasingly provides less and less, for exorbitantly more money.

It didn’t have to be this way, and it doesn’t have to.

In 2009, Congress took a route to creating the Affordable Care Act so tortuous that there was no way the United States would create a better way to provide affordable health care. Rather than do the logical thing, Congress tried to preserve the demands of the most vocal lobbyists, and the needs of a sensible system and package of reform went to the wayside.

Americans demanded health care reform because people who were ill couldn’t get care because they simply couldn’t afford it. Insurance companies were permitted to “cancel” coverage for people who’d paid premiums for sometimes decades and became ill, needing to draw against their policy. The country was trapped in a spiral down of quality and affordability.

Here we are again.

Almost 20 years later, health insurance rates are higher than they ever have been, in part, because policies actually cover so little. Many Coloradans are getting less coverage because they’re trading off high deductibles for more affordable rates.

The country is spending more on health care than ever and there is not only no end in sight, insurance companies are predicting big increases for future rounds of hikes.

The Affordable Care Act as written, does not work. It can’t work. It can’t work because Congress kowtowed to a massive health care machine composed of endless factions and lobbies, many of whom provide only bureaucracy and not health care.

It was doomed to fail because Democrats caved to Republicans and refused to regulate prices and rates, which are now out of control.

It can’t work because Democrats caved to Republicans and failed to create a “public option,” which was the country’s only hope for driving down market, for-profit insurance prices. Colorado’s own “public option” is still delayed.

This newspaper and hundreds of other critics of the Congress that created the Affordable Care Act warned Americans then and all along the way that compromises made by Democrats in creating Obamacare would undermine its laudable goal: increasing Americans’ access to affordable health care.

It was conservatives who insisted that the health-insurance industry be preserved in a new health-care system, turning aside single-payer ideas that would have done away with billions of dollars in insurance company profits and payrolls, which feed from the U.S. health care trough without providing health care services.

We are where we began because health care is too expensive for too many once again. In fact, it’s easy to argue that it’s unaffordable for more people now than ever before. In a system that’s a gift to providers and hospitals, which no longer have to dish out mountains of free care, no one is doing anything but raising rates.

The Sentinel has published two recent, local investigations showing the insidious ways medical debt crushes those with and without health insurance. It’s a cruel reality of America’s health care failure, trapping the working poor into a life-long quagmire.

This newspaper and so many others have backed experts in the field vying for consumers and not industries in begging for a universal health care system like those in Canada and Europe. Because Democrats were too weak to do the right thing when they could, this is the ailing prognosis Americans now must suffer.

Democrats and Republicans need to set their spiteful partisan politics aside and add regulations and market competition to the ACA before the cost of health care destroys the economy and the lives of millions of Americans.

The ACA fails only because our elected leaders in Congress and the state legislature fail us, putting industry interests ahead of the nation’s residents. Colorado, and the nation, deserve better.