Fix the prescriptions.

• Position: Comment

In this Presidential election year, universal health care ought to be a popular demand. Actually, it already is. According to an ABC-Washington Post poll last October, 62 percent of Americans favor a government program providing universal coverage, while only 32 percent oppose it. Unfortunately, the proposals of the two major candidates do not come close to universal care. Meanwhile, the reliance on the private health care system grows more and more malignant.

At present, forty-four million Americans are without health care, and more than one-third of these are from families below the poverty level. The uninsured have much poorer health, as a result. "Compared to persons who have health insurance, the uninsured receive less preventive care, are diagnosed at more advanced disease stares, and once diagnosed, tend to receive less therapeutic care and have higher mortality rates," according to the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. This results in 18,000 deaths a year among uninsured adults between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four, according to a 2002 study by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine.

For those who are insured, the cost of health care keeps rising. Employees are having to pay more money for premiums and co-pays and deductibles. For instance, in 2003, the average monthly employee premium contribution was $201, up from $178 in 2002, according to a 2004 Kaiser report entitled "Trends and Indicators in the Changing Health Care Marketplace" (www.kff.org). And retirees are getting hit, as well: Some 71 percent of employers have increased the amount that retirees have to pay to get coverage.

Even though Americans are shelling out more, they are not happy with what they are getting in return. Discontent with our current system runs high, with 54 percent of Americans dissatisfied with the overall quality of health care, the ABC-Washington Post poll found. And 79 percent of Americans expressed concern that they may be unable to afford health care when a family member gem sick, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The total cost of our health care system is going off the charts. "Expenditures in the United States on health care have nearly doubled (+88 percent) since 1992 ... and are more than six times the $246 billion spent in 1980," the Kaiser report notes.

States, which use about 21 percent of their budgets on Medicaid, are trying to cut costs by scrimping on coverage for the poor. Tennessee is...