TOWN HALL JOURNAL - SPRING 2007
American Health Care System
Facing Collapse By 2013?
Tommy G. Thompson, Chairman of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, warned a Town Hall audience that, “Our health care system will collapse around the year 2013,” unless the system is fixed to make it more affordable and accessible. “I can say that because 2013 is the first year that Medicare starts going broke,” he explained at the Town Hall event on December 06, 2006. Thompson is the former Health and Human Services Department Secretary and a past Governor of Wisconsin.
Suggesting paths Congress could take to confront Medicare insolvency, Thompson said, “We’re either going to have to go to complete price controls and put a price on everything we get, or ration health care; or number two, we’re going to have to go to a government controlled program; or three, we’re going to have to raise taxes.
“I don’t like any one of the three, so…I’m talking about transforming health care,” Thompson stated. He described three major issues impacting the health care system: rising costs, chronic illnesses, and a growing number of uninsured Americans.
“Number one, it costs too much,” he observed. “Today it costs $2 trillion…but what scares me and should scare every American, and especially people like you who are good thinkers, who come to Town Hall to be informed, is that in seven years, 2013, it’s going to go from $2 trillion to $4 trillion, a hundred percent increase, and from 16 percent of GDP to 21 percent of GDP.”
The issue of cost will be compounded by declining access to employer-based insurance programs, Thompson asserted, reporting the portion of Americans receiving health insurance from their employer went from 80 percent in the 1950s to about 60 percent today.
In his Town Hall address, Thompson detailed the disproportionate impact that chronic illnesses have on the US health care system, accounting for 75 percent of all US health care expenditures. “The biggest chronic illness is still tobacco,” Thompson declared. He also addressed the health care costs of other chronic illnesses such as diabetes and obesity.
The increasing numbers of uninsured Americans represent a disastrous strain on the American health care system, Thompson contended. “Forty-six million Americans don’t have coverage,” he said. “Why don’t we be smart in America and cover everybody with health insurance?”
Town Hall thanks Carl Dickerson, Vice Chairman of the
Board of Directors, and Dickerson Employee Benefits
for their support of this event.
