Senator Ted Kennedy - Healthcare's Great Advocate

We would like to take the opportunity to formally pay our respects to Senator Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy. Senator Kennedy did so much to improve healthcare during his time in politics. He worked tirelessly as an advocate to better patient care. Sen. Kennedy was responsible for pushing the War on Cancer in 1971, the Ryan White AIDS Care Act in 1990, the Mental Health Parity Act in 1996 and 2008, Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in 1997, the Medicare prescription drug law in 2003, and the Massachusetts health reform act in 2006 all through Congress. Sitting on the forefront of crumbling healthcare reform, it is hard to imagine that one person could have done so much to better policy.

Sen. Kennedy is an inspiration to anyone who has devoted his or her life to healthcare. In 1994, Sen. Kennedy said with great passion, "What we have in the United States is not so much a health-care system as a disease-care system." His words were not meant to point fingers or accuse but to bring light to the fact that though we enjoy so many luxuries in our healthcare that so many other countries do not, we still focus on treating disease instead of preventing it.

Though Sen. Kennedy may no longer be with us, he will remain an inspiration to anyone who may not be directly involved with patient care but can make a difference in the care of patients. He was a great speaker, a great American and a great advocate for those who needed him most – the sick.

The fact SCHIP passed at all during the turbulent Clinton years—in Newt Gingrich’s Congress, no less—was a testament to Kennedy’s negotiating skills. Millions of uninsured kids suddenly could get health care—check-ups, vaccinations, hearing tests, and antibiotics for strep throat. Millions more children need the same care, but the law (and its extension passed earlier this year) still leaves medically needy children uninsured—an issue that has been lost in the political thicket. Kids’ health is still at the mercy of state budget shortfalls—as we have seen in California, where thousands of children have been cut from the SCHIP rolls during the state’s latest fiscal crisis.

Senior citizens who complain about Medicare in the town hall meetings would do well to remember that Kennedy was instrumental in passing the law giving them the prescription drug benefit that now helps pay for their medicines. Before the law passed, they were the only large group of Americans who had no assistance paying for their drugs. (Employed people usually had drug benefits from their employers that kept their costs relatively low.) Though the law is far from perfect—it prohibits the government from negotiating cheaper prices from drug companies, and people with large drug expenses must shoulder those costs when they reach the limits in the so-called donut hole—no senior would want to be without it.

And then there’s Massachusetts, where Kennedy helped engineer the compromise that brought health insurance coverage to most of the state’s residents. As we have pointed out in our series Health Reform Lessons from Massachusetts, not everyone in the state is pleased. Mistakes have hurt the safety net hospitals, tax penalties have hurt uninsured residents, and, most important, the lack of serious cost control coupled with run-away medical costs threaten the law’s long-term viability. In the end, Massachusetts may not be a model for the rest of the country. But there’s no denying that, in the meantime, thousands of people who needed medical care have received it over the past few years. –Trudy Lieberman, Columbia Journalism Review

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