America’s healthcare system is critically ill, according to three presenters who spoke Monday at the Corvallis City Club, and Oregonians are suffering for it.

“Diagnosis Health Care: Three Perspectives” addressed what’s wrong with the current state of health care and some suggestions on how to fix it.

Community health activist Betty Johnson said the state of health care is so bad, it’s driving people to financial ruin.

“The cost of health care is a major cause of bankruptcy,” Johnson said. She said roughly half of today’s bankruptcies list a medical issue as the main cause.

More than 600,000 Oregonians are without health insurance, and 100,000 of those are children. In rural Oregon, nearly 25 percent of residents are without health insurance, and statewide 30 percent of Latinos are uninsured.

Even when employers offer a health insurance plan, employers are often not able to pay into it, Johnson said.

“Health insurance premiums have increased 60 to 65 percent in the past several years,” Johnson said. Meanwhile, those with health insurance are often afraid to leave their current place of employment in case they lose their insurance, while others are putting off retirement until they’re old enough to take advantage of Medicare.

And once on Medicare, “new patients are finding it impossible to find physicians” who will accept Medicare clients, Johnson said.

Dr. Mike Huntington, a retired radiation oncologist, got involved with former Gov. John Kitzhaber’s “Archimedes” project, which focuses on improving the state of health care in Oregon. Huntington said he was tired of seeing patients come into his practice with aggressive forms of cancer that could have been treated more successfully if the patients had access to health care much earlier in the process.

The United States spends twice per capita what other industrialized nations spend, and yet is ranked last in patient safety, efficiency and other quality measures. Huntington said that more expensive tests and treatments have ratcheted up prices. Too often, he said, the success rate of new technology is incremental, while the price is extremely high.

“We’re doubling and tripling our costs to gain a 1 to 2 percent increase in success rate or side effects,” he said.

He said there’s been an explosion in the number of specialists to treat various conditions. Today, there are three specialists for every primary care doctor in this country, when those numbers should be reversed, he said.

“We deserve much better than we’re getting,” he said. “Universal access to health care is a smart investment in our future. It is wrong for people to die because of lack of health care when there is enough money for health care now.”

Ardis Belknap, who works for the City of Springfield human resources department, is a member of the Oregon Coalition of Health Care Purchasers, which helps evaluate what insurance companies are providing to their customers, gives those customers an idea of what treatments are costing at a variety of facilities, and in general works to educate and advocate on behalf of health care customers and for health care reform.

“We want the best value for our money,” Belknap said, “and the highest quality for the cost.”