Posts filed under ‘Single Payer’
Mr. President: Listen to Your Doctor!
The (President’s) doctor orders Medicare for all. He’s right. If conventional wisdom is correct, and a single payer system is not “on the table,” surely the President and reform leaders must at least insist on a public health insurance option.
If the goal of health care reform is to provide coverage for all as cost-effectively as possible, a public health insurance plan MUST be included in any health care reform package. We can’t afford to be scared again by dire warnings about Big Government. Big Insurance costs a lot more than a public program and it helps people get health coverage a lot less. Ask anyone who really knows about the public Medicare program and private Medicare plans.
Support a true public health insurance option! It’s best for people who need health care and most cost-effective for taxpayers. Isn’t that what the President and his doctor ordered?
Medicare for All?
This morning I showed my brand spanking new Medicare card to my 27-year old uninsured son, Patrick.
He looked the card over carefully and said “I wish I had one of these.”
“Venting” About Single Payer Health Care
Dr. Walter Tsou, a former Commissioner of Health in Philadelphia and a public health physician, eloquently testified before Congress on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 about why a single payer health plan is necessary. Although the Washington Post saw fit to characterize his and other speakers’ thoughtful and reasonable opinions as “venting”, in fact Dr. Tsou made many excellent points. Among them were:
- The only affordable means to achieve quality health care for every American is through a “properly financed, single payer national health insurance program”;
- Attempts to reconcile universal coverage with cost control are futile without a single payer plan;
- Cost controls will mean that either taxpayers , physicians, hospitals or the private health insurance industry will have to ‘pay the piper’
- The private health insurance industry, which has dominated health care for the past 50 years in a supposedly competitive marketplace, has proven unable to control costs, even while the quality of health care in the U.S. is “suboptimal” (the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s term, not Dr. Tsou’s) and nearly 50 million people are uninsured
- A single payer plan cuts costs by cutting insurance firms’ profits, streamlining the massive administrative apparatus that adds to the costs of hospitals and doctor’s offices, using bulk purchasing, negotiating fee schedules with physicians, and putting hospitals on predictable, global budgets
- By entrusting health care to private health insurers, we have saddled the U.S. with an inefficient and exorbitantly expensive health care system that drives jobs overseas where health benefit costs are low, and discourages entrepreneurs from striking out on their own for fear of losing their health insurance coverage
- The $19 billion dedicated to health information technology is doomed to failure because our health care system will remain too fragmented under any system but a single payer plan.
Medicare is a single payer system. It’s time that an “Improved and Enhanced Medicare for All” be seriously considered and adopted by Congress and President Obama. It is the best solution to our current health care mess.
The complete text of Dr. Tsou’s remarks can be found here.
CMA Health Policy Blog 