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Health Care
Health Care for All |
Howie Hawkins supports providing universal health care through a Medicare Care for All type program (HR 646), which is promoted by the Physicians for a National Health Program. We need a democratic universal health care program, funded by a single public payer out of progressive taxes and democratically controlled by elected local health boards that in turn elect state and federal boards to govern the system.
Freedom of Choice
Patients and doctors, not insurance clerks, should be free to act when it comes to diagnosis and treatment.
Reduce Administrative Costs and Paperwork Through Single Payer / Medicare for All
A single payer system (one entity pays all bills, like Medicare) eliminates the paperwork, bureaucracy and profit margins of private health care insurance. A national single payer health care system – which most of the industrial world already has - would save hundreds of billions of dollars annually, allowing the country to spend less money while provide quality affordable health care to all. With private health insurance, as much as thirty cents on the dollars goes to pay for the insurance company existence, while forcing each doctor to hire on average 2.5 staff people to deal with the paperwork. Medicare by contrast expends only 3% on administration.
Spend less money, not more, on health care.
Our country cannot afford to continue to spend one out of six dollars in the economy for a health system, especially one that is ranked only 37th in the world by the World Health Organization. The rest of the industrial world spends far less on health care than we do but they have longer life expectancies, lower infant mortality rates, more doctor visits per capita and better health care outcomes. The US may have the best medical professionals and equipment in the world, but we have a fatally flawed system where profits are all too often come before the well being of the patients.
Health Care for Service Not for Profit
We need to stop allowing health care to be just another commodity that corporations can use to maximize their profits. We have a sick care rather than health care system in this country. It is much more expensive and far less effective, to cure people once they are sick rather than keeping them healthy. We need to focus more on preventive health care and public health measures that focus on keeping people healthy.
Support Comprehensive Benefits, Including Dental, Mental Health and Alternative Treatment
Lower Drug Prices
We should not have to travel to Canada to get reasonably price drugs. A government-sponsored bulk purchasing program could reduce prices by more than half. And drug companies should not be allowed to grab huge profits from research that is often financed with our tax dollars.
Hawkins Opposes Clinton's Support for "Compulsory Private Health Insurance"
Hillary Clinton supports initiatives such as the recent Massachusetts legislation that mandates that consumers buy inadequate private health insurance rather than provide all residents with health care services through a publicly-funded health care system. Clinton is beholden to special interests like insurance companies. It was Hillary Clinton's unwillingness to oppose the private health insurance industry that caused a 30-year movement for national health insurance to be derailed in 1993. She refused to even allow her health care advisors to consider a single payer system that is commonplace in the rest of the industrial world. Instead, she promoted so-called managed competition, which channeled even more money to the health insurance companies. Her legacy is the rise of Health Maintenance Organizations in our country, where insurance clerks, not doctors and patients, determine medical care.
As Sam Smith of the Progressive Review noted, what Hillary Clinton proposed was "a massive transfer of the American health industry to a small number of the largest insurance companies and other major corporations. These were companies that had the assets to play the game being offered -- a medical oligopoly that would dispense health-care under the rules of the Fortune 500 rather than according to those of Hipprocrates."
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 *Website by David Doonan, Labor Donated to Hawkins for Senate Campaign* |
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