Sununu fails to find health care solution yet again

Portsmouth Herald
Letter to the Editor
July 24, 2008

http://www.seacoastonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080730/OPINION/807300352&sfad=1

We’re disappointed in “the latest” health care proposals from Sen. John Sununu, which seems to amount to little more than election-year rhetoric. They do not solve the health care problems faced by most of the citizens of New Hampshire who do not already have health insurance or even for many of those who do.

For example, when then presidential candidate George W. Bush spoke to the Portsmouth Rotary Club in the fall of 2000, he responded to a business owner’s question on health insurance costs that he had the answer: to allow businesses to pool their resources as a large group.

This is identical to Sen. Sununu’s answer to rising health insurance costs, yet in the first six years that President Bush and first four years that Sen. Sununu held office, their party held majorities in both houses of Congress as well as the White House and yet no such legislation was ever implemented.

Apparently Sen. Sununu believes he has a better chance of implementing such legislation when the Democrats control Congress and the cost of health insurance premiums are nearly double what they were when he assumed office six years ago.

Sen. Sununu states that he can lower health insurance premiums by opening up the New Hampshire health insurance market to insurers nationwide. Yet, when N.H. Senate Bill 110 was passed and “competition and reduced prices for businesses was coming our way,” the New Hampshire Medical Society got one bid for group insurance that year and it wasn’t any cheaper. This bill failed and was repealed. Does Sen. Sununu think some insurance company from Ohio is going to compete for your business coverage if you have even one employee with a preexisting condition?

When the senator voted twice in the past month for a 10.6 percent cut to physicians, he failed to see that by undermining payments to physicians, he is decreasing access to medical care, whether or not they participate in Medicare, Tricare or Medicare Advantage. The senator was more concerned in diverting public funds to the few private health insurers who participate in Medicare Advantage than in the plight of thousands of doctors and their patients who would be forced to lose or deny access to care as a result of his vote. In the six years he has held office, the cost of medical insurance premiums rose 71 percent while primary care physicians’ income has remained about the same.

When one factors in inflation, it’s not hard to see why there is a severe shortage of primary care doctors and medical students are choosing other specialties.

Medicare, with all its detractors, currently operates at a low overhead. Medicare Advantage, with its additional 19 percent overhead, will do nothing to control health care costs.

We feel Sen. Sununu has again turned to the failed solutions of the past with his latest health care proposals. We are disappointed and feel we deserve better.

Thomas Clairmont, MD
James Fieseher, MD
Portsmouth Primary Care Associates
Portsmouth