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Where is our universal health care?

TT:

Nine hours a day, five days a week, Tommy Smith watches television from a chair inside the tiny office at his father's workplace.

Since graduating LaVoy Exceptional Center in May, the blind and autistic man hasn't had any place else to go - except to work with his dad, a single parent who provides his developmentally disabled son with 24-hour care.

``This is my fault,'' Greg Smith said Wednesday. After Tommy left the public school system, ``I assumed there would be something in place.''

Smith signed up for a Medicaid waiver that put his 23- year-old son on a waiting list for services in June. Eight months later, Tommy is No. 11,783 out of 14,000.

``That's just unacceptable,'' said the 42-year-old lawn mower service manager.

But a day after Smith shared his story with WFLA, News Channel 8, Tommy had a place to go. And other families struggling with a wait that could take up to five years have hope.

An agency that serves developmentally disabled clients offered Tommy a scholarship for a daily program. He starts Friday.

This isn’t Greg Smith’s fault. It’s society’s fault. Why does a hard working parent have to rely on the kindness of strangers to have his kid cared for? Tommy was lucky enough to be featured on TV. Immediately after the TV report aired there was an outpouring of support. Soon, people will forget all about him. There are also more than 14,000 still waiting for services.

We can pay for universal health care in this country without raising taxes. We can provide health care to every single person in this country for less than we pay right now to insure only a small fraction of our population. It works in Canada. It works in Europe. We need it here. Now.

The president and Congress should immediately begin work to achieve health insurance coverage for all Americans by 2010, the National Academy of Sciences said on Wednesday.

"It is time for our nation to extend coverage to everyone," the academy's Institute of Medicine said, in a report intended to put the issue back atop the national agenda.

The report, summarizing three years of work by a panel of 15 experts, concluded, "Universal insurance coverage is an important and achievable goal for the country."

The academy is an independent, nonpartisan body chartered by Congress. It did not endorse a specific legislative proposal or estimate the cost of its recommendations. But Mary Sue Coleman, the president of the University of Michigan, who was co-chairwoman of the panel, said, "The economic cost to the country from the poorer health and premature deaths of uninsured people is in the range of $65 billion to $130 billion a year."

The report pointed out that because uninsured people received much less medical care than those with insurance, they tend to be sicker. About 18,000 people die each year as a result of not having insurance, it said.