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We Need Universal Health Care |
A new report finds that most Americans support a universal health care system with a core of guaranteed benefits. A commission created by Congress as part of legislation signed in 2003 by President George W. Bush—who thinks privatized health care accounts and high-deductible health plans will fix America’s health care crisis—last week issued interim recommendations calling for the nation to develop and implement universal health care by 2012.
In its report, the Citizens’ Health Care Working Group wrote:
Health care costs strain individual, household, employer and public budgets. Often our citizens [forgo] needed treatment because they are priced out of the market. At the same time, public budgets are buckling under the burden of public health care programs. We spend nearly $2 trillion on health care each year, yet geography, race, ethnicity, language and money impede Americans from getting appropriate care when they need it.
The commission, created by the 2003 prescription drug legislation, is charged with gauging the views of everyday Americans and health care professionals on how to improve the nation’s health care system. It will make its final recommendations for developing “Health Care that Works for All Americans” in the fall following a public comment period between now and Aug. 31. You can comment on the recommendations until Aug. 31. Click here to read the full report and here to submit your comments.
The 14-member commission has heard from more than 20,000 people at 75 community meetings around the country and online. Its recommendations include:
- A public policy that all Americans have affordable health care.
- A “core” benefits package for all.
- Guaranteed financial protection against very high health care costs.
- Development of integrated community health networks.
- More intensive efforts to improve quality of care and efficiency.
- New ways to provide and finance palliative care, hospice and other services so people living with advanced incurable conditions have access to them in the environment they choose.
In its report, the group wrote:
Across every venue we explored, we heard a common message, “Americans should have a health care system where everyone participates, regardless of their financial resources or health status, with benefits that are sufficiently comprehensive to provide access to appropriate high quality care with endangering individual or family financial security.
Today, some 46 million Americans have no health insurance at all; employers are dropping health care coverage for workers and the average health care premium for family coverage shot up 67 percent between 2000 and 2005 while working families’ wages have stagnated.
As working families struggle to meet soaring health care costs, the Bush administration is pushing so-called health savings accounts, which force individuals to bear the brunt of health costs, and other schemes that give working families no relief from the health care cost burden. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says Bush’s health care strategy is to:
Take the burden off employers. Keep cutting budgets for Americans’ health care, shrinking government and creating government-sponsored crises like Medicare Part D. Lower health care spending by making health care unaffordable for people who need it—they can’t spend what they don’t have.
We all know this is not an answer—it’s abdication. It’s tossing America’s health to the wolves.
The answer is universal health care. But this administration and its congressional allies refuse to face that fact.
The Citizen’s Health Care Working Group has faced it, though.
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