Hawkins Says Economic Crisis Increases Need for a Single-Payer Universal Health Care System
Howie Hawkins for Congress
25th District, New York
www.howiehawkins.org
Media Release
For Immediate Release: Saturday, October 25, 2008
For More Information: Howie Hawkins, 315-425-1019, hhawkins@igc.org
Howie Hawkins, the Green Populist candidate for Congress in the 25th District, said today that the nation's economic woes made it even more important for enact a single-payer universal health care system to save money.
"A single-payer national health insurance system, by eliminating the wasteful system of private for-profit health insurance, would free up much needed money to help out the rest of the economy. A single-payer system would save as much as $350 billion a year, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003. We don't need more money to have quality health care for all. All we need are political leaders who are willing to stand up to the insurance and drug companies and do what is best for America. Rather than running away from single payer, as Sen. Obama did in the recent debate, the next Congress should adopt a single-payer health plan and demand the next president sign it into law," said Hawkins.
Hawkins supports a single-payer bill now before Congress, HR 676, United State National Health Insurance Act (Expanded and Improved Medicare for All), which has 92 co-sponsors. Hawkins opponents, Democrat Dan Maffei and Republican Dale Sweetland, do not support HR 676.
HR 676 provides comprehensive medical insurance for every US resident, covering all medically necessary procedures, including drugs and long-term care. It creates a system of public insurance, which pays private providers of health care on a fee for service basis, with full freedom of consumers to choose their doctors, clinics, and hospitals. The national health insurance will be funded through progressive taxation of citizens and businesses. 95 percent of US residents will pay less in taxes for this system than they now pay in payroll taxes for Medicare and premiums of private insurance.
The US spends more than twice as much on health care as the average of other developed nations, all of which boast universal coverage provided by the government. US spending on health care is now over 2.1 trillion dollars nearly $7,000 per person. This is more the double the world average of $2,571. This amounts to a whopping 15.5% of our GNP on health care far more than any other country which puts our businesses at a competitive disadvantage in the international marketplace.
Unfortunately, the US is the lone country that treats treat health care as a commodity distributed according to the ability to pay, rather than as a social service to be distributed according to medical need. Despite spending twice what other countries spend per capita, the World Health Organization ranks the US only 37th in terms of overall health care outcomes despite having some of the best doctors, nurses, and hospitals in the world. Several dozen countries now have longer life expectancy than the US. The US actually has more of a sick care system; it is much more expensive and less effective to treat illness than it is to keep people healthy.
Over 45 million Americans are currently without health insurance, more than 75 million went without insurance for some length of time within the past two years, and tens of millions more have inadequate coverage. More than 18,000 Americans die annually due to a lack of insurance, according the National Institute of Medicine, which is funded by Congress to advise it on health care policy. Tens of thousands more die due to problems of trying to deal with their insurance companies. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted that "of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.
Support for universal health care remains strong in public opinion polls. Much more so than politicians, voters understand that we need radical reform, not more incremental bandaids that fail to fix system while driving up costs. 59 percent of physicians, fed up with dealing with insurance companies and their conflicting rules and forms, now support a single-payer system, according to a survey published by the Annals of Internal Medicine last April. The NYS Nurses Association and the NYS Academy of Family Physicians also favor single payer. A March 2007 poll by CBS/ NY Times found that 64 percent of the respondents said the government should guarantee health insurance for all; 27 percent said it should not. An August 2009 poll by commissioned the Drum Major Institute found that 79 percent of the public favor "national health insurance."
"The overwhelming majority of the people and the doctors want a single-payer national health insurance plan. The only thing standing in the way is a Congress that has been bought by the insurance and drug company lobbies with campaign contributions," Hawkins said.
Hawkins criticized liberal groups such as the Health Care for All Now (HCAN) coalition of labor and community organizations who recognize private for profit health insurance as a major problem but then fail to call for their elimination and promote marginal reforms that keep inefficient, for-profit health insurance companies as major players in the system. In their drive to enroll healthy (and profitable) patients and screen out the sick, private insurance waste vast sums on billing, marketing, underwriting, utilization review, and other activities that enhance profits but divert resources from care and hassle patients and physicians. 31 percent of every health care dollar going through private health insurance goes to pay for their overhead, profits, marketing costs, and excessive executive salaries. Doctors on average have to hire two and a half staff people just to deal with the conflicting paperwork, rules, and bureaucracy of some 1500 private health insurance companies.
"We need leaders, both elected and in the community, who have the backbone to do what they know is right. There's only one way to stop the insurance and drug industry abuses. It's to actually stop them. The pay or die system of for-profit health insurance is fundamentally immoral. The HCAN plan will continue to split the risk pool, contrary to the principles of a cost-effective universal health care system. Competition between public and private health care systems does not work. It leaves the insurance and drug company power structure of lobbyists and campaign contributions in place to do what it always does, which is to make sure public policies and regulations channel profits to the private insurers and drug companies and shift costs to the public insurance programs," Hawkins noted.
Several states have tried to implement HCAN's strategy of extending coverage while leaving private insurers in place: Oregon in 1989, in Tennessee, Minnesota and Vermont in 1992, and Massachusetts in 2006. These efforts have all failed. In Massachusetts, the uninsured are legally mandated to purchase costly and substandard insurance policies, or lose their income tax deductions. Two years after the program began, 7 percent of the state's population remained uninsured, and 86,000 people gave up their $219 personal tax exemption. The plan was also much more expensive than anticipated, with the budget for this year increased by an additional $150 million, to $869 million. Massachusetts also announced they had adopted universal health care more than 2 decades ago along similar lines, shortly before Gov. Dukakis announced his presidential campaign, as Romney did last year. The Dukakis plan failed in 2 years.
"It is time for the US should join the rest of the industrial world and treat health care is a human right, not a commodity to be rationed in the market according to who can pay and who can't. I want to 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. 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, better health care outcomes. Their businesses are more competitive because they don't have provide expensive private health insurance plans for employees. We have an immoral system where profits come before the well-being of the patients and an inefficient system where costs are needlessly inflated by corporate red-tape, overhead, and profits," said Hawkins.
"A single payer national health insurance plan is a long overdue reform. With the economic crisis we now face, we cannot afford to wait any longer to do it," Hawkins added.
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