Montrose County Health and Human Services

Citizens' Health Care Hearings

Let me start with a startling observation. By the year 2025, at the present rate, the average household health care premium will equal the average household family income. Or putting that another way, in only nineteen years the average family will spend every dollar they make on health care. Obviously, the situation is completely untenable. In 2025 we will still want to eat. We will still want a roof over our heads and clothes on our backs. Something has to give. We can't let our health care system implode, nor can we afford the unaffordable.

Public Health is all about prevention, so those of us who are in Public Health are eager to jump on this problem before it gets even further out of hand. Of course we recognize there are gamblers in the crowd who will place good money on the bet that even without intervention our health care system will somehow muddle through, but we have to ask, at what price? Already each year nearly a million Americans join the ranks of the uninsured. Already major manufacturers are sending jobs overseas because the American healthcare system is too expensive. Already 18,000 Americans die prematurely each year because they couldn't afford American health care.

It may be too late to use the term prevention when discussing health care reform. In one sense, we cannot prevent what has already been done to hurt our health care. But it is not too late to reform the whole delivery system to make it be a system that is open to all, that is cost effective and that will put us where we should be with the best medical training in the world—at the top of the statistical heap when it comes to issues like life expectancy (20 th for women in the world and 21 st for men), or like childhood immunizations (67 th overall, right behind Botswana), or like infant mortality (41 st overall in the world behind such luminaries as Slovenia, South Korea and Cuba).

Colorado is one of the states determined to see that necessary change in health care delivery happen. The last legislature voted for and the governor signed legislation setting up a commission to study the various alternatives to the present system. Now it's your turn! On September 23 there will be a “Citizens Health Care Hearing” here in Montrose. That hearing is your chance to tell us and your legislatures your story about problems with the present system. That hearing will also be your chance to learn about the alternatives. If you have a story to tell about your encounters with our present system, you can call Montrose County Health and Human Services at 252-5000 and sign up to speak, or you can write out your story for someone else to read and send it to Montrose County Health and Human Services at 1845 South Townsend, Montrose.

Health care reform has to happen before the whole system collapses. You can let someone else reform it for you and take your chances with the end product, or you can help us create the kind of health care product we all want. These hearings will be a chance for all of us to be certain that the Western Slope will not be left out of the process. I hope to see every one of you there!