I have long wanted to have the chance to ask an elected official a simple question – Why do we need private health insurance companies? If we start by assuming that all Americans should have access to basic health care (I know that assumption is under fire by the right), then we have to ask, what service could private health insurance companies provide that justifies their high cost.
Typically, conservatives claim that privatization is always cheaper, but given the cost of health care in the U.S., that is a ridiculous assertion. The U.S. spends more than twice as much as most other countries on health care and there are still 50 million people uninsured. So what do private insurers do? They mainly compete with each other to insure healthy people and then try to find loopholes to avoid paying for people that do get sick. This is both incredibly expensive and cruel.
With this in mind a new petition at We the People asks the White House to answer this simple question.
The Petition is titled 'Justify Excess Cost of Maintaining Private Health Insurance System Versus Medicare-for-All' and says-
The U.S. spends two and a half times the OECD average on health care costs per capita (http://www.oecd.org/...) but we do not get better health care results and leave millions of Americans uninsured.
A large portion of U.S. health care spending goes to salaries and profits for private health insurance companies and to administrative costs of hospitals and clinics associated with completing paperwork in this overly complex system. In addition, this fractured system limits bargaining power on prices.
We therefore request that you quantify the costs of maintaining a system of private health insurance companies instead of a Medicare-for-all system and specifically enumerate the benefits resulting from the current system that justifies these costs.
Unlike other petitions that ask for too much and are then completely ignored,
this petition just requires a simple response, but one that the media has all but completely ignored. Is Medicare-for-All cheaper? And if so, why are we sticking with our current expensive, unpopular, and ineffective private system in this time of austerity? If we get 100,000 signatures, then a response is required.
The media, the GOP, and possibly the White House are all now trying to convince us that we need to raise the age for Medicare. This is entirely the wrong approach. It will cause tremendous hardship while actually increasing health care spending for the country as whole. The unspoken truth is that Medicare is not the problem, health care costs are the problem, and more Medicare can be part of the solution.
So sign this petition, and take a small step towards changing the Washington narrative.