Senator Tom Daschle on How Health Reform Will Help Americans with Insurance

How will health reform help those with insurance?

When I served in the Senate, one of the saddest things was to go to public meetings all over South Dakota and to have people come after the meeting come up and give us their horror stories. And they were horrific. Many, many stories involving painful, painful chapters in the lives of these many people. Donna and Larry Smith are good examples. Donna was a reporter in South Dakota for a long time, and I write about the Smiths in my book Critical. Donna and Larry were both insured; they both worked in the black hills of South Dakota, both had acute illnesses of great severity, and as a result of the fact that they were underinsured, had to declare medical bankruptcy as a result of their experience. Bankruptcy today is generated in large measure because of medical causes. About two-thirds of all bankruptcies are medically derived and about three-fourths of those are involving people who are underinsured. And Larry and Donna are examples of that.

So what we have to do is we have to listen to the Larry and Donna Smiths of the world. We have to recognize that unless we solve this problem, reducing the tremendous amount of cost involved, recognizing that we've got to improve quality, and making sure that everyone has access to good insurance coverage, we won't solve the problems facing most Americans today.

How will health reform help those with health problems?

Well, health care reform could be of extraordinary help to people like Donna and Larry Smith. First of all, we would pass legislation that would say, regardless of your circumstance, you will no longer be denied coverage by any insurance company. Because it will be against the law. Guaranteed issue. We will also try to help people who would otherwise struggle to buy insurance themselves--offering subsidies to for who can't afford it, and giving them eligibility to Medicaid in other cases where they don't have to buy private insurance. We'd try to do as much as possible to keep make confidence level higher about the care they get, and put emphasis on good prevention and wellness so that rather than waiting until they get sick, we try to keep them healthy. And then finally, we try as much as possible to bring down the cost of health care using as many tools as we have available to us to ensure that we bring down these exploding costs in health for them, for their employer, and for the governments around them every year, doing as much as possible to ensure that our goals can be met.