Harkin says health care should focus on wellness, not curing the sick

After this week’s release of President Bush’s budget strategy, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin is proposing an alternative health care plan which he says would help Americans become healthier while helping the government save money. Harkin, a democrat, says the system we have now is failing. “Currently, we do not have a health care system. We have a sick care system. We wait until people get sick, obese or disabled and then we spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to pick up the pieces. This is unwise, it’s uneconomic and we know it’s totally unsustainable.” Harkin says his health care proposal would be radically different. Harkin says his Help America Act is to create a health care system that focuses on wellness and disease prevention, and that keeps people out of the hospital in the first place. He says it’ll be good for the physical health of our nation’s citizens and for the fiscal health of the nation’s Medicare and Medicaid programs. Harkin, the chief sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act, says the Bush plan to privatize Social Security would hurt the nearly six-million people who are now getting disability payments. Harkin says it’s the sole source of income for many of those people and they’d face their benefits being cut by up to 30-percent. “This just can’t happen,” he says.