Only a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable. Who would have thought that the American Medical Association, Lee Iacocca and the Heritage Foundation -- not a radical tendency among them -- would be joining unions and assorted leftists in calling for an overhaul of America's health-care system?
Hardly anyone agrees on the exact prescription. But across industry, academia, organized labor and politics, a rising chorus is warning of calamity if serious medicine isn't found for the growing ranks of Americans who are walking around without health insurance, justifiably afraid that they are just an ambulance ride away from financial ruin.
Commit this statistic to memory: In America, between 31 million and 38 million people have no health insurance. Many of them do without such basics as prenatal care, immunizations and cancer screenings. Often, they stay home until they are desperately ill. And then, the hospital emergency room becomes their family doctor.
A 1987 survey by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that two-thirds of the uninsured with serious symptoms -- loss of consciousness, bleeding and chest pains, to name a few -- didn't go to the doctor at all.
The problem is likely to get worse. Dr. George D. Lundberg, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, says it is reasonable to think that 75 million people -- more than twice the current number -- will be uninsured in five years if the nation doesn't find an effective way to stem health-care costs and insure everyone.
Twenty years ago, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass, proposed national health insurance. But it remained a fringe issue, perceived as too esoteric or too distant a problem to concern a broad spectrum of the electorate. It was a problem of the poor. Now, the issue has emerged into what Alex Gage, a Republican political pollster, calls ''a very dominant second-tier issue'' -- dwarfed only by foreign policy and recession as the 1992 elections loom.
''It's not too esoteric,'' says Mr. Gage. ''People are so confused. They go [to the doctor] and get 15 bills, and there's a sense that everybody is raping everybody.''
Proposals for national health insurance abound in Congress. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., may make his a launching pad for a presidential run. In May, JAMA and nine specialty journals published by the staid AMA devoted all their pages to proposals for insurance reform. The proposals ran the spectrum, from tinkering with the insurance industry to dismantling private insurance and establishing a Canadian-style system that covers everyone with tax dollars. But they all agree: The current system is failing.
