Issue Page

Why Health Care For All

Chris Rasmussen — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:18:33 -0500

Quality, affordable health care should be a right for everyone in America, not a privilege for the few. But the number of people in this country without health insurance is growing. And the likelihood of losing—or not being able to afford—good health care is striking fear in the hearts of many family breadwinners. Meanwhile, the CEOs of private insurance and drug companies are raking in huge profits.

The number of uninsured people in America has shot up to 47 million, including 9 million kids, as skyrocketing health care costs are pricing care out of reach for more and more families and businesses. Employers are passing more costs onto employees or finding it difficult to offer coverage at all. Many families are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy.

Private insurance companies profit off of this broken system by avoiding insuring those who are sick, and insurance agency clerks tell doctors what treatments they can prescribe. The time is now to fix the system and guarantee that everyone has the choice of quality, affordable health insurance.

The Challenge

Chris Rasmussen — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:20:05 -0500

Unlike every other industrialized country, America does not have a national system of public health insurance. Instead, intense lobbying by insurance companies over decades has left us with a patchwork system. Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Administration are public plans that cover seniors, the poor and veterans. Most other Americans get employer-provided private plans of varying quality, but the number of people covered by employers is shrinking as more and more employers decide they cannot afford to even offer coverage.

As fewer and fewer employers provide quality coverage, more and more middle-class families are vulnerable when catastrophe strikes. Today, more than half of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical bills. Every 30 seconds, someone files for “medical bankruptcy.”

Why are costs skyrocketing and squeezing working families? The administrative costs for private insurers are approximately four times the size as those for Medicare. That’s because instead of providing coverage to all who need it, private insurers have a layer of bureaucracy to “cherry pick” their customers. They take on people who are less likely to get sick and deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. The uninsured often turn to expensive emergency rooms for their medical care, driving up costs for everyone. Furthermore, there’s been no incentive to move towards electronic medical records, which would help prevent wasteful spending on unnecessary medical procedures.

Insurance companies, HMOs and private providers do compete with one another. But without standards for high quality, the competition is over who can avoid insuring the sick and the elderly—and who has a better system to deny health care to people who need it. This kind of competition has led to byzantine paperwork, soaring costs and massive waste, not affordable choices for all Americans.

Letting private insurance companies dictate the terms of our health care system simply hasn’t worked. They haven’t covered everybody. They haven’t kept costs reasonable. They haven’t given us good choices.

The Conservative Failure

Isaiah J. Poole — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:20:04 -0500

Seven years of conservative rule in Washington has made the problem worse. Nine million more Americans, 47 million total, are uninsured. Family health insurance premiums have risen 57%, while fewer businesses offer their employees coverage.

Instead of expanding coverage, conservatives blocked bipartisan legislation extending health care to 4 million uninsured children—twice. They lavished billions in subsidies on insurance companies, despite an astonishing 1,084% rise in insurance company profits during the last five years. And they continually sought to cut billions from Medicare and Medicaid.

Conservatives also have been looking out for the drug companies. Conservative congressman Billy Tauzin designed the law banning Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices, sticking taxpayers with a huge bill. As soon as the law passed, he resigned and took a $2 million job as CEO for the drug lobby. But the fellow conservatives he left behind
in Congress continued to do his bidding. After a new Congress was elected in 2006, the conservative minority stifled efforts to let Medicare negotiate lower drug prices and to allow Americans to import affordable medications from Canada.

With the public demanding health care reform, conservatives can’t completely ignore the issue. But their proposals would make problems worse—encouraging employers to drop health care coverage and offering individuals the illusion that tax breaks would make health insurance affordable for their families.

The insurance companies and their supporters are pushing plans that have deductibles as high as $11,000. They would make us pay taxes on our employer-paid health benefits or offer us tax credits that pay only a fraction of our health insurance. Tax credits don’t guarantee health care.

Conservatives pretend to offer freedom, yet they have left too many Americans stuck with only bad health care choices.

The Progressive Solution

Chris Rasmussen — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:20:01 -0500

It’s time to guarantee health care for all, get costs under control and offer Americans the choice between a good public insurance plan, like Medicare, and private insurance plans that can meet basic standards of benefits and cost. With this guaranteed affordable choice approach, if you have insurance you like, you can keep it. But if you need something better—or if you lose your job—you have other options.

The bold health care proposal authored by Yale University Professor Jacob Hacker, “Health Care For America,” has reshaped the health care debate. Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama modeled their health care plans on Hacker’s plan, published by the Economic Policy Institute.

All Americans would have a choice between private insurance plans and a public insurance plan. Quality standards would ensure that public and private plans compete on a level playing field—no more profits from “cherry picking” the young and healthy while turning away those with pre-existing conditions. We’ll be able to set and enforce the rules to make sure insurance companies put our health before their profits, and we’re not left at the mercy of the same private insurance companies that got us into this mess.

Employers would have to either provide quality coverage or chip in a modest amount to fund the public plan. Low-income families would receive subsidies to ensure everyone could afford coverage. Huge savings would come from slashing administrative costs, emphasizing preventative care, reducing emergency room visits and
moving to electronic medical records.

An independent analysis from the nationally respected, nonpartisan consulting firm The Lewin Group found that “Health Care For America” would not only cover 99.6% of Americans but would also save $1 trillion in health care spending over 10 years. The group concluded that an annual public investment of $49 billion would be needed to
implement “Health Care for America,” and families, businesses and state governments would immediately enjoy an equivalent $49 billion in savings.

Real health care choices guaranteeing quality health care for all at an affordable cost—that’s how we’ll finally achieve an America where quality health care is a right for all, not a privilege for a few.