Health Care
Working for Improved and Expanded Medicare for All, H.R. 676, single payer national health insurance |
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Take Action!1. Help fund publicity and outreach. As the nation’s healthcare crisis continues to worsen, the single payer movement is growing stronger. Single payer bills are in both the House and the Senate. We need your help to get the word out. Use the Donate button in the right column to support advertising, actions and other outreach. |
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| 2. Get involved with Jobs with Justice Healthcare Committee! Please join us for a meeting or an action. There’s lots to be done and we can help you plug in a way that works for you. We have meetings twice a month and always have an upcoming action or event. To have your email added to our invite list, please contact margaret@jwjpdx.org |
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3. It is an exciting time and there is a lot to do to push the single payer agenda forward in the Fall of 2009, while our movement is growing as never before. Two important items are coming up in Congress. We need to mobilize lots of support for them.
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What is Single Payer?
Portland Jobs With Justice Health Care Committee works to promote universal, single payer health care for everyone in America. Single payer health care is often called improved and expanded Medicare for all. Just as Medicare works now, doctors would remain private and their bills would be paid for out of tax dollars. Unlike current Medicare, there would be no additional premiums. With single payer, you could see any doctor you wanted for any care you needed with no copays, no deductible and no lifetime caps. If you changed jobs, were laid off or became too sick to work, you’d keep the same healthcare. It’s only the health insurance companies that are out of the picture, along with their exorbitant executive salaries and 30% profit and overhead. (1)
Currently there is a federal single payer bill in both the House (HR 676) and in the Senate (SB 703). Portland Jobs with Justice Health Care Committee works with labor unions and other community organizations, lobbies Congress and holds actions to support these bills and the rapidly growing single payer movement.
Why We Support Single Payer
Our health care system is not working. According to the World Health Organization, we spend more than any other country, yet our health care system is ranked 37th in the world. (2) Fifty million people in the U.S. have no insurance at all. (3) And for those who are insured, there still is a crisis. Health insurance premiums are increasing at least twice as fast as inflation (4), making health insurance less and less affordable each year. Of all U.S. bankruptcies, 62% are due to medical expenses, and of medical bankruptcies more than 75% happen to people who have health insurance. (5) For those people, even with insurance, expenses from deductibles, copays, caps and uncovered treatment mounted too high when a family member suffered serious illness or injury. Private insurance companies often refuse or fail to protect us when we need them the most.
Health care is a labor issue. With health care costs rising so fast, many employers don’t offer insurance, and some are dropping it. Others expect employees to contribute more and more for insurance, often increasing the workers’ share on top of premium increases, or offer plans covering less and less each year. Many of the bitterest union struggles of recent years have involved demands for givebacks on health benefits. In other cases, management uses negotiation over heath insurance coverage as leverage to prevent raises and other benefits from going to workers. Some employers, including major auto manufacturers, are moving US jobs to Canada to avoid the high costs of providing healthcare to workers. (6)
With the amount of money currently paid to insurance companies, we can cover everyone in the U.S. for all their health care needs. A national single payer system, improved and expanded Medicare for all, would convert medical benefits into wages. It would collect the money to pay for care through equitable, progressive, predictable taxation, and give the same broad, high quality benefits to all, guaranteed.
Single Payer would redirect money to patient care that is currently going to health insurance CEO salaries, shareholder dividends, ads, and bureaucratic paper shuffling. We would save money by negotiating lower prices with drug companies, as the Veterans Administration does. The program would also save money by giving everyone access to care before health problems become so serious they must be cared for in the emergency room or the hospital, and by reducing expensive treatments that don’t improve health results.
Most insured Americans – 95 percent – would pay less for health care than they do now. (7) People with private insurance would end up paying less in taxes than they do in premiums and out of pocket expenses, while seniors on Medicare would no longer have to pay basic or expensive supplementary premiums, or huge medication costs in the so-called doughnut hole.
There is so much wasteful, non-medical and non-beneficial expense in the current non-system that we can cover everyone, improve benefits and care, and cut costs. But we can’t do that by expanding the current wasteful methods to more people. Only a different system, eliminating private insurance in favor national health insurance, improved and expanded Medicare for all, can be universal, effective and less costly.
(1) D.U. Himmelstein et al., “Our Health Care System at the Crossroads: Single Payer or Market Reform?” Annals of Thoracic Surgery, 84, 5 (2007): 1437; http://ats.ctsnetjournals.org/cgi/content/full/84/5/1435
(2) W.H.O., World Health Report 2000, p. 155; http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf
(3) Congressional Budget Office, Preliminary Analysis of the Insurance Coverage Specifications Provided by the House Tri-Committee Group, July 14, 2009, p. 1.
(4) Sean Keehan et al., “Health Spending Projections Through 2017: The Baby-Boom Generation Is Coming To Medicare,” Health Affairs, 2008 Supplement, 27, 1/2: w145.
(5) David U. Himmelstein et al., “Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study,” American Journal of Medicine, 122, 8 (2009) p. 743.
(6) Paul Webster, “US big businesses struggle to cope with health-care costs,” The Lancet, 367, 9505, (Jan 2006), pp. 101-102; Eric Mayne, “Ford: Health costs could drive investment overseas Firm's vice chairman says rising fees hurt competitiveness,” The Detroit News, July 20, 2004; http://www.pnhp.org/news/2004/july/ford_health_costs_c.php
(7) Physicians for a National Health Program, “Financing National Health Insurance,” Feb 4, 2003; http://www.pnhp.org/publications/financing_national_health_insurance.php
Links to More Information on Health Care:
MEDICARE FOR ALL; Single-Payer for the USA.
Organizing citizen communication to U.S. Representatives, Senators and other officials to get single-payer health insurance passed into law.
Seeking to implement a single payer health insurance system in the United States.
Employees of Providence hospital working for fair election grounds rules in order to form a union.
HealthCare-Now! Advocates for Expanded and Improved Medicare for All (current Federal bill H.R.676, aka the U.S National Health Care Act)
United Nurses of Legacy Campaign to improve staffing ratios and hospital working conditions for the benefit of employees and patients.
