PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A former acting CDC director is warning that the coronavirus pandemic has revealed a lot of problems in American health care, and the longer COVID-19 spreads, the worse those problems will get.
"We are clearly still in the early days of this pandemic," cautioned Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "When you look at the number of people, the percentage of the population who's been infected, we have a long way to go."
Besser says the pandemic has hit every community across America, but it hasn't hit every population the same way.
"Black Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans are being hospitalized and are dying at rates that far surpass their percentage of the population. And one of the things that's becoming more and more clear is that this pandemic is revealing a health care system that is in tatters," he said.
Besser said there are 12 states that haven't expanded Medicaid coverage.
"If you look at what's happening in those states, those are a lot of the states in which people of color are being hit the hardest," he said. "Lower-income Americans are the most likely to not have employer-based health insurance and to be unemployed. When you lack health insurance during this crisis, you can't even begin to follow the recommendations of the CDC."
As an illustration, he points to Americans who don't have a primary care physician because they lack health insurance or don't have health care access nearby.
"What they said early on in this pandemic was if you thought you had a COVID infection, don't go to the hospital, call your doctor because you may be able to manage this over the phone. But what does that say to the tens of millions of people who don't have a doctor to call? What it says is, you're on your own or go to the emergency room, where if you didn't have COVID, you were likely to pick it up. And that's just wrong."
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, 28 million Americans didn't have health insurance, but it's a lot more than that now.
"Given how many people in America have their health insurance related to their job, with the devastation of the economy, millions more are going to be losing their health insurance because of this," says Besser. "I'm hoping that this will be a wakeup call for the nation to say, this is unacceptable. It's unacceptable that as the wealthiest nation in the world, we allow for a situation in which there are so many people who don't have access to high-quality, comprehensive health care. It should be a right."
Step one to fixing the problem, Besser says, is acknowledging the system America has right now just isn't working.
"Even for people who have health insurance, whether it's employer-based or others, they're finding that what they have to pay has been going up. Their copays, their deductibles have been rising. So for the average working American, health care is becoming a luxury and not something everyone can afford."
Besser thinks there's agreement across the political spectrum that people with means shouldn't be the only ones who have access to affordable health care.
"We pay more for health care than any country in the world, and we don't get the return on that. It's not going to quality of health care, it's going to increasing costs and profits."
If there's a silver lining to come out of the pandemic, Besser thinks it's innovation in the medical field.
"We're seeing telemedicine being used far more than it ever had been, and the quality of telemedicine improving."
But he cautions that those innovations aren't reaching everyone in the same way — internet access in rural America isn't available to everyone.
America has been hit harder and has responded less effectively to the pandemic than many other developed nations, something that Besser says is in part because the U.S. has failed to pinpoint successful strategies and apply them on a macro level.
"We're not seeing a uniform approach toward the things that have worked in many states in America and in countries around the world," he said. "Wearing masks. Keeping 6 feet apart. Handwashing. Limiting indoor exposure. These kinds of control measures that have been so effective around the world have fallen here along political divides. And that is the worst thing that can happen during a public health crisis. You never want things to become this politicized."
But, Besser says, it's not too late to come together as a nation to fight the pandemic.
"I think we can, with a sense of shared responsibility that what I do matters not just for my own health, but it matters for your health. I wear a mask because I care about you and I know I am responsible for your health. If I happen to have this infection and not know it, by wearing a mask I am reducing the chances that I am going to spread it to you. And you wear a mask for the same reason. If we can come together as a nation just around that simple idea and that simple concept, we'll go far to getting this under control."
