Jerome Adams says he can be other people’s champion (File)
Washington:
Former U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams was left with eye-watering medical bills of nearly $5,000 last January after spending an overnight stay in an Arizona hospital to be treated for simple dehydration.
Now he’s calling for reforms to the country’s market-based health care system, including greater cost transparency and an independent arbitration process, while using his pulpit to speak out on behalf of the 100 million Americans saddled with medical debt.
Although the share of uninsured Americans has been declining in recent years, the Commonwealth Fund estimates that 43 percent of working-age adults are “underinsured,” limiting their access to health care and leaving many in need of just a major Disasters can prevent financial ruin.
“I was attending the Society of Critical Care Medicine meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, and like thousands of tourists who visit the area, I decided to go hiking on Camelback Mountain,” said the 49-year-old, now at Purdue University told AFP.
He brought a bottle of water, which he thought would be enough for a 60-degree Fahrenheit (16 Celsius) day.
But when he went out to dinner, he started feeling dizzy, and his fellow doctors suggested he better get checked out, especially as a middle-aged black man who is at higher risk for cardiovascular complications.
“We called an ambulance because I was out of town. I got IV fluids on the way. When I got there, it was obvious I was dehydrated,” he said in an interview in Indianapolis.
He took his doctor’s advice and stayed overnight, and two months later, despite having insurance, he received a bill for $4,800. Soon there were threats of being sent to a debt collection agency.
Adams said he’s aware that his situation is all too common in a country where nearly 66 percent of bankruptcies are directly related to medical bills.
But as a Black doctor walking the tightrope of advocating for racial justice in health care — both as Donald Trump’s surgeon general and, before that, as head of Indiana’s health department under Mike Pence — Adams said he can be a champion for others.
“My complaint is not personal because I will be fine – but I do have a say,” he insisted. He’s been busy posting other cases to his nearly 90,000 X followers, such as a mother of premature quadruplets who submitted a $4 million bill.
market reform
While progressives like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have suggested eliminating private health insurance altogether, Adams said that’s unrealistic given that too many participants profit from the status quo.
Instead, he advocates for a series of reforms aimed at regulating the free market, much like the Affordable Care Act of the 2010s (better known as Obamacare).
First, more transparency: “There can’t be a market without transparency and accountability — right now, if I go to a car dealer, they have to tell me how much the car costs.”
Second, he said, there needs to be an arbitration process so that the hospital providing care (in his specific case, the Mayo Clinic) is not given sufficient control, creating a situation where patients have no recourse for huge bills. Mayo did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.
Third, Adams said that while Obamacare helped provide coverage to tens of millions of Americans, it did so in part by incentivizing employers to offer lower-cost plans to workers, but at a higher cost. Much less.
People in these plans — including Adams himself — can contribute to tax-free spending accounts to offset some of the risk. But he said they might not have adequate reserves if a health incident occurred earlier in the year, in which case legislation should be passed requiring insurers to cover a larger portion.
Ultimately, he said, all Americans should be able to access preventive and emergency care without financial barriers holding them back.
For Adams, who has suffered from severe asthma since he was a child and had to go to the hospital multiple times as a child because his parents couldn’t afford medication, the policies he has advocated for throughout his career have always been personal.
“We have a lot of trade-offs to make,” he said of U.S. health care. “But we have to ask ourselves, even in a capitalist system, when is enough enough?”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
