Dr. Norbert Goldfield, Dr. Mitch Kaminski and Jeffrey C. Lerner: Voting for the common health of Pa.
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The first patient one of us treated as a young internist 45 years ago had been refused care by another physician because his insurance had expired. The man cried. He hasn’t been forgotten.
Scenes like this were more common at one time. Today, millions of patients are spared humiliation and threats to their well-being due to expansions of the Affordable Care Act. Still, not all patients can get the care they need. The greatest health risk to individuals and to their families is to fail to cast ballots in the upcoming election.
Here’s why. Contrast among the candidates is stark and consequential, and swing voters will need to decide what they most want from the health care system.
Democratic candidates are likely to support federal legislation to limit the startling rapid rise in the cost of insulin, to lower rapidly rising prescription drug costs through empowering Medicare to negotiate prices, and to increasing subsidies for private insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
Republican candidates oppose these steps. But they have not yet developed alternative plans for health reform. Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz has stated in the past that the uninsured “don’t have the right to health,” but should be given “a way of crawling back out of the abyss” with “15-minute physicals” provided by hospitals “in a festival like setting.” No Republicans favor Medicare drug price negotiations.
These issues should resonate with Pennsylvania voters. We have an older population that can benefit from affordable drugs and cheaper health insurance, and a significant number of younger but less well-off people need such help too.
Other public health threats are also on the ballot. Patients continue to arrive with long covid — they continued to have fatigue and shortness of breath after having had covid several months ago. The candidates we elect will be enacting, supporting or opposing policies to address the lingering effects of long covid, and to cope with the increasingly engrained opposition to vaccines, not only for covid but also well-established ones for polio, and vaccines for newer threats like monkeypox.
Abortion remains polarized and poses agonizing health dilemmas for families. Even wanted pregnancies may be ectopic, posing acute risks of death, as do incomplete miscarriages and fetal death without miscarriage. Some voters may oppose government involvement in decisions they believe are private, between a patient and his/her health care provider, while others may support bans on religious grounds. Obstetricians and gynecologists have become increasingly politically vocal, and in a recent survey, only three out of every 100 supported abortion bans for any reason at conception.
The biggest threat to our future health care is registered voters sitting home on Election Day, leaving in the hands of others which candidates get elected.
Health care professionals like us have long argued that a sedentary life is risky. If you decide to exercise even one day this year, make that day Election Day and cast your ballot for your health, your family’s health and the common health of Pennsylvanians.
Dr. Norbert Goldfield is a practicing internist and founder of Ask Nurses and Doctors. Dr. Mitch Kaminski is a professor of public health. Jeffrey C. Lerner is president emeritus of ECRI, a nonprofit aimed at improving the safety, quality and cost-effectiveness of health care, and an adjunct senior fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.