Former Massachusetts Gov. and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis lectured on the status of America’s uninsured Wednesday night as part of a Core Current Affairs Association event on the issue.
“We have 46 million Americans without a dime of health insurance,” Dukakis said. “And we’re the only advanced industrialized country in the world that does not provide some form of universal health care.”
Since leaving the governorship in 1991, Dukakis has been a professor at Northeastern University as well as the University of California at Los Angeles. His lecture covered the basics of the Medicare and Medicaid systems and also discussed the complexities and political history of universal health care proposals.
He noted that Presidents Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton all ran into roadblocks in Congress when attempting to pass universal health care plans.
“It’s an absolute national embarrassment that this country has not come to terms with this issue,” he said.
Dukakis spoke of the various solutions to the problem of covering America’s uninsured.
“There are a number of ways you can do this,” he said. “You can decide you’re going to provide universal Medicare, but that means you’ll have to increase payroll taxes.”
Another plan he discussed and said he preferred was one first proposed by Nixon, which would have required businesses to insure employees, similar to the requirement that businesses must provide insurance compensation to workers injured on the job.
Dukakis discussed the rising costs of health care, which he attributed to overhead costs and bureaucratic insurance billing procedures, as well as problems employers have in providing health care for employees.
Despite Americans’ high health care costs, Dukakis said they do not get results comparable to those of other industrialized countries with lower health care costs. He noted that in terms of infant mortality or life expectancy, the United States ranks roughly 20th internationally.
After his 45-minute lecture, Dukakis took questions from the audience on a wide range of subjects, including health care.
“It’s a terrible piece of legislation,” he said of the President George Bush’s prescription drug benefit plan which Congress passed last year.
“Under the new bill, Medicare and the United States government will become the biggest purchaser of drugs in the country,” Dukakis said. “The new law explicitly prohibits the government from negotiating for lower prices.”
Following the lecture and discussion, Dukakis posed for photographs with students and fielded questions from the crowd.
CAS senior Fergus Hodgson said that he did not agree with the speech, but enjoyed it.
“His convictions are positive,” he said. “He only wants to do well, but he’s sort of simplifying the issue.”
CAS freshman Stephen Henrick said although he didn’t know much about insurance issues, he still found the speech informative.
“I never realized the issue was so complicated,” he said. “But I definitely agreed with a lot of what he said.”
The informal lecture was sponsored by the CCAA, a group of former and current Core curriculum students who discuss current issues.
CCAA president Jon Goren said he was pleased with the turnout of about 60 students.
“We offer events in different settings, some are panel discussions, others are informal lectures like this one,” the CAS senior said. “One of the topics coming up is a discussion of the situation in Haiti.”
For his part, Dukakis said despite a bitter election defeat in 1988 and subsequent Democratic disappointments in 2000 and 2004, he still retains a sense of optimism.
“As governor, I saw what good people could do,” he said. “We can accomplish a lot.”
