Congressman John D. Dingell of Michigan's 15th District proposed a bill for National Healthcare in January. No sponsors as far as I can find so far. Here are the reasons straight from the bill:
Since the tremendous advances in medical science in recent years have necessarily meant great advances in the cost of health services, our archaic system of paying for medical care--based on public and private charity for the poor, on unpredictable and often unbearable costs to the otherwise self-supporting, and on disproportionate charges for the well-to-do--has resulted in the following conditions:
(A) the inability of the vast majority of our people to meet the shattering cost of serious or chronic illness;
(B) the inability of most of our people to benefit from modern preventive medicine; and
(C) wholly inadequate provision for the health needs of our farm families and agricultural workers.
What is the point of having such an advanced healthcare system if so many people in the country cannot afford it?
Our healthcare system is so sick that even people with good insurance are feeling the fever. Premiums for employers and their workers are rising 12 percent, even 18 percent per year. Employers have downsized coverage by super-sizing copayments and deductibles. Insurance often proves illusory when it's most needed--payment denials, visit limits, loopholes and policy cancellations leave millions stuck with huge medical bills despite what they thought was good coverage. Most people's choice of doctors and hospitals is restricted. Seniors can't afford drugs, Medicaid recipients face draconian cuts and everyone's rushed out of the hospital.
A single payer national health insurance (NHI) program could simultaneously cover all of the uninsured, upgrade coverage for most other Americans and save money. Under NHI, everyone would be covered for care at any hospital, doctor's office or clinic without copayments or deductibles. Patients would enjoy a free choice of provider, and doctors and nurses would be freed from the massive bureaucracy that encumbers care and wastes money. For-profit ownership of hospitals and other clinical facilities would be proscribed, and private health insurers and most HMOs would be eliminated--saving billions now squandered on profits and executives' incomes, while upgrading quality.
Surprisingly, universal coverage under NHI would not increase health costs. At $6,200 per capita, Americans already spend nearly twice as much for care as do Canadians, Australians, Germans, Swedes and the Swiss--all of whom enjoy universal coverage and lower death rates than ours. Much of the cost difference is due to our mammoth health bureaucracy, which wastes upward of $300 billion annually. NHI could slash bureaucracy by replacing the current welter of private plans with a single public payer and simplifying payments. Even the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office concede that NHI could save enough on bureaucracy to cover all Americans for what we're now spending.
Dingell's bill is not just good policy, its good politics.
According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, 62 percent of Americans favor "a universal health insurance program, in which everyone is covered under a program like Medicare that's run by the government and financed by taxpayers."
This can be a bipartisan issue if we can get the issue back out into the public consiousness. We need to get people talking about National Helath Insurance as a viable solution to the growing healthcare crisis.