Are You, Or Is Someone You Know, Uninsured?
In Texas, 1 in 4 people is uninsured 1. Only 35% of small businesses in Texas offer health insurance, and only 43% of their full time employees are enrolled. Fewer than half of all Texans get their health insurance through an employer 2.
The Problem
We spend twice as much on health care per person compared to all other developed countries 3. Yet, our life expectancy is lower, our infant mortality higher, and our overall health poorer 4. More than 18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance 5. Illness and unpaid medical bills account for half of all bankruptcies 6. Insurance companies act as costly middlemen and unlicensed providers, adding little value to the system but profiting from it immensely 7.
What We Want
Pursuit of corporate profit and personal fortune in health care is immoral. Instead, the system should be affordable, accountable, accessible, comprehensive and just. It is evident that competition-based or piecemeal reforms will not fix the problem. The only way to achieve universal health care without increasing overall health care costs or compromising our rights is through single payer.
What is Single Payer?
Single payer, universal health care is “Expanded and Improved Medicare for All.” It is publicly funded and privately delivered health care. Just like Medicare, everyone pays according to income. Everyone is free to choose a private or public health care practitioner, hospital or clinic. In single payer, there is no place for the for-profit insurance industry.
A Real Solution
Health Care for All Texas supports single payer universal health care. This can best be accomplished by:
1) state implementation of TIP: The Texas Health Insurance Plan , or
2) national passage of U.S. H.R. 676, The United States National Health Insurance Act (or the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act - Use Search Bill Text by typing in Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act in the search box, leave Word/Phrase checked and then select Search).
How Can I Help?
To become a member of Health Care for All Texas, simply Vote Your Support and go to our Action Page.
Resolution In Support Of Single Payer Universal Health Care For The
Primary Precinct Conventions
www.burntorangereport.com/show
Comment.do?commentId=30893
Health
Care for All Texas and its fiduciary agent, Greenlights for NonProfit
Success promote single payer universal health care by raising awareness,
grassroots education and helping set nonpartisan policy and do not
endorse political parties or candidates.
"Understanding Health Care, Making Reform!
A Community Workshop"
Do you want to learn how:
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The health care sytems works? (Or doesn't?)
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To give a 5-minute presentation on health care reform?
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To answer hard questions about health care reform?
Then...
Join the Health Care for All Texas - Houston chapter for "Understanding Health Care, Making Reform! A Community Workshop" on July 31 from 5:30pm to 9pm at Covenant Baptist Church, 4990 Caroline Street, Houston 77004. The workshop is free of charge. Dinner will be served at 5:30pm. Please RSVP at info@hcfat.org. flyer - Objectives flyer - Understanding Health Care
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An Open Letter To The Candidates
On Single Payer Health Reform
Physicians for a National Health Program, an organization of 15,000 physicians supporting single payer since 1989, has drafted an open letter to the presidential candidates on single payer health reform.
Read and sign the letter, and circulate it among as many people in Texas (especially but not exclusively health professionals).
You can read and sign the open letter at https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/307/t/5720/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=3304 or go to www.pnhp.org and scroll to Open Letter to the Candidates.
An Open Letter To The Candidates
On Single Payer Health Reform
America's health care system is failing. It denies care to many in need and is expensive, error-prone, and increasingly bureaucratic. The misfortune of illness is often amplified by financial ruin. Despite abundant medical resources, care is often inadequate because of the irrationality of our insurance system. Yet our political leaders seem intent on reprising failed schemes from the past, rejecting the single payer national health insurance model that is the sole hope for affordable, comprehensive coverage.
Leading Republicans propose tax incentives to encourage the uninsured to buy coverage, but these subsidies fall far short of the cost of adequate insurance. For cost control, they suggest high co-payments and deductibles. Yet these selectively burden the sick and poor, discourage preventive and primary care, and have little effect on costs, since seriously ill patients - who account for most health spending - quickly exceed their deductibles and are in no position to forego expensive care.
The incremental changes suggested by most Democrats cannot solve our problems; further pursuit of market-based strategies, as advocated by Republicans, will exacerbate them. What needs to be changed is the system itself.
Most leading Democrats offer a mandate model for reform. Under this model, the government would require people (or their employers) to buy private coverage, while offering an expanded Medicaid-like program for the poor and near-poor.
Variants of the mandate model, first proposed by Richard Nixon, were passed with great fanfare in Massachusetts (1988), Oregon (1989) and Washington State (1993). All died quiet deaths. As costs soared, legislators backed off from enforcing the mandates or funding new coverage for the poor. Massachusetts' recent reform, which largely excuses employers from the mandate but imposes steep fines on the uninsured, appears poised to follow a similar path. Of the middle-income uninsured who are required to pay the full premium for coverage, few have signed up. Meanwhile, the state has already announced a $147 million shortfall in funding for subsidies for the poor.
Mandates and tax incentives can add coverage only by increasing costs. They augment the role (and profits) of private insurers, whose overhead is four times Medicare's, and whose efforts to avoid payment impose a costly paperwork burden on doctors and hospitals. The cost cutting measures often appended to such reforms - computerization, care management and medical prevention - have repeatedly failed to yield savings.
...single payer reform could realize administrative savings of more than $300 billion annually - enough to cover the uninsured, and to eliminate co-payments and deductibles for all Americans.
In contrast, single payer reform could realize administrative savings of more than $300 billion annually - enough to cover the uninsured, and to eliminate co-payments and deductibles for all Americans. It would also slow cost increases by fostering coordination and planning.
Political calculus favors mandates or tax incentives, which accommodate insurers, drug firms and other medical entrepreneurs. But such reforms are economically wasteful and medically dangerous. The incremental changes suggested by most Democrats cannot solve our problems; further pursuit of market-based strategies, as advocated by Republicans, will exacerbate them. What needs to be changed is the system itself.
We urge our political leaders to stand up for the health of the American people and implement a non-profit, single payer national health insurance system. |
“Sick Around The World”
PBS Frontline program examination of health care systems of five capitalist countries around the world. This extraordinary program shows us how these countries provide medical care for their populations and depicts what the U.S. can learn about running a health care system from their experiences. Watch it here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/
In addition, watch the video Forum Preview to Sick Around the World, an excellent discussion by 3 experts on health care systems. http://www.kaisernetwork.org/health_cast/hcast_index.cfm?display=detail&hc=2576
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