Les Roberts on Health Care

Les Roberts, Democratic candidate for Congress in New York's 24th congressional district, recently made the following statement on solving the crisis in health benefits:

""I believe the most expedient way to ensure that uninsured Americans get coverage is to expand the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program. This program already provides coverage to all federal government employees by providing a wide range of health plans to buy into. The risk pool created by opening these plans to a great number of people may eventually reduce costs to everyone in the plans.

This is, of course, not the end to our health care problems. There are gross inefficiencies in our health care system. We must strive to get our reimbursement and paper trail systems to be more compatible. We must push for a revisiting of our entire health care strategy. We are currently one of only three industrialized countries among the 30 largest economies in the world that does not guarantee health care to all of our citizens (Turkey and Mexico are the other two and both are working on plans to expand coverage to all citizens). Since 2000, the number of uninsured, non-seniors, in the United States has increased by 6 million people. We must reverse this trend."