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).
Watch this excellent video created by Health Care for All Texas on single payer:
“The Health Insurance Game”
AUSTIN, Texas – Affirming that “every person deserves access to
affordable, quality health care” and noting that area residents are not getting it, the Austin City Council called today for the enactment of a nonprofit, single-payer national health insurance program.
At its regular Thursday meeting, the Council voted to endorse the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, H.R. 676, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and 91 other members of Congress. The vote was six in favor and one abstention.
In taking the action, Austin joined at least 24 other municipalities, including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco and Louisville, Ky., that have called for the bill’s passage.
Also known as the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, Conyers’ bill would guarantee everyone access to all medically necessary care, including prescription drugs, with no co-pays or deductibles. It would contain costs by eliminating the administrative waste and bureaucracy associated with the private insurance industry, and it would assure patients their personal choice of doctor and hospital.
Speaking to a local reporter shortly before the vote, Council Member Lee Leffingwell, a co-sponsor of the resolution, said, “This is not socialized medicine. It is basically the same system we have now in the form of Medicare, just more broadly applied.”
Leffingwell told KLBJ-AM radio he was reluctant to get involved in
national issues, “but … about 20 percent of our residents don’t have health insurance, and that puts a heavy burden on our area hospitals and our network of social service providers.” Council Members Mike Martinez and Randi Shade joined him in co-sponsoring the measure.
The Council’s action follows on the heels of a similar endorsement by the U.S. Conference of Mayors at its June meeting in Miami. Several religious denominations, most recently the Presbyterians and Unitarian Universalists, have also endorsed the single-payer approach, as have over 400 labor organizations, according to the resolution’s backers.
Gaye Kopas, member of Health Care for All Texas--Austin chapter, who was among the first Austin activists to contact City Council, said "If there is any advice I can give health care activists, it is to be persistent. Persitence paid off in our efforts to get the City Council to become interested initially, and to pass the resolution in the end. When the Council members heard the statistics, the number of uninsured in Austin, and how much the city was already paying for health care, they quickly became convinced that a single payer system would cover everyone and save the city money."
Bill Holloway, an activist with Health Care for All Texas who helped promote the Austin resolution, said: “This vote is a major victory for those who want to see a more just, rational and compassionate health care system in our state and nation. The resolution makes it clear that managed care and other private insurance company schemes have been miserable failures when it comes to providing care or containing costs.”
“We need to convince our lawmakers in Washington that a more equitable and sustainable system of publicly financed care is possible not tomorrow – but today,” he said. “The people of Austin have spoken: we want single-payer health care.”
Dr. Ana Malinow, a Houston-based pediatrician who serves as chairperson of HCFAT and president of Physicians for a National Health Program, said: “As a physician, I see the toll our broken health care system takes on people’s lives every day – too often leading to their financial ruin, unnecessary suffering, early disability or death. We can and must do better. The Austin City Council, by its vote today, has pointed the way forward.”
Testimony of Joe Bak, Ph.D. before the House Judiciary Committee
Presented before the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers, Jr. (MI-14) and Senior Member of the House Judiciary Committee Sheila Jackson Lee (TX-18) In Houston, Texas on July 18, 2008
My name is Dr. Joseph Bak. I am a clinical psychologist in private practice for 25 years and therefore, also the owner of a small business. In addition, I have been actively involved in advocating for universal healthcare since the early 1990s. Most importantly, I am a consumer of healthcare services. It is from five different perspectives, that of psychologist, small business owner, taxpayer, healthcare reform advocate and patient that I strongly support the enactment of H.R. 676. I believe it is the only solution that can comprehensively and cost-effectively address what is wrong with our fatally flawed healthcare system; a system that long ago became too sick to cure.
In my role as clinical psychologist I provide mental healthcare services within a system that routinely discriminates against my patients. Health insurance policy benefits for mental healthcare are seldom comparable to physical healthcare benefits. They are typically severely and differentially capped by placing limits on the number of outpatient sessions, inpatient treatment days, annual and lifetime dollar amount, etc. H.R. 676 explicitly eliminates such discriminatory practices by providing coverage for all medically necessary mental healthcare on the same basis as coverage for other conditions.
In my role as healthcare reform advocate and collector of healthcare horror stories, it is imperative that H.R. 676 be enacted for Melissa, and for unnamed tens of thousands of Americans with equally tragic stories that are unfolding as we speak. Melissa, a vibrant young woman working at a city library in Austin, decided two years ago to sign a one year contract to work in the Japanese school system to teach English. While there she was diagnosed with Stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the same cancer her brother has contracted, for which she is now being treated with chemotherapy in Japan. She was able to extend her work contract for another year but has no idea how or when she might be able to return to the U.S. She would have no health insurance, be uninsurable in the individual health insurance market, and likely be treated as a leper by most small and midsize employers because of the impact she would have on their company’s health insurance premiums. So she stays in Japan with a potentially life threatening medical condition, visited only occasionally by family and friends. Universal healthcare afforded by H.R. 676 would allow Melissa to return to the U.S. to be reunited with her family and friends, and to be treated for her lymphoma without question.
As a small business owner, I want to know that I will be able to obtain health insurance and drug benefit coverage at affordable rates even though I am not a member of a large employer’s risk pool. As a taxpayer, I want to know that my tax dollars are paying for the most cost-efficient system of healthcare delivery possible. As a patient, I do not want to be subjected to double jeopardy. I do not want to discover after the fact of sustaining a catastrophic illness, that I was unknowingly one of the underinsured and now have to file for bankruptcy. I do not want to find out that I am responsible for overwhelming medical bills once my insurance company determines that they are not required to pay for services that I thought my policy was supposed to cover.
For decades now it has proven to be a dismal failure to blindly insist that merely allowing health insurance companies to compete without restrictions in the marketplace will fix the problems in our healthcare system. It has become obvious that private market forces are severely limited in their ability to achieve valued social objectives. However we continue to try to rely upon free market strategies in the healthcare sector to no avail, when measured either by their ability to control costs or to expand services to everyone.
Few people understand that what markets do best is to distribute goods and services according to price. They do a masterfully efficient job of creating winners and losers according to one’s ability to pay. This seems fair and just regarding the distribution of televisions, refrigerators and computers. However, when market forces are relied upon to determine the distribution of healthcare services, the losers stand to lose their wellbeing, or possibly even their lives if they are uninsured or underinsured.
If you believe as I do that healthcare is a right that is central to human dignity, and necessary to preserve equal opportunity in our country, not a privilege or a commodity to be distributed according to one’s ability to pay, then it is essential that H.R. 676 be passed into law as it is designed to embody these beliefs. It eliminates wasteful, cost-inefficient competition between health insurance companies and replaces them with a system based upon single source payment. As has been demonstrated repeatedly in other countries, single source payment represents the “gold standard” in administrative efficiency. Single source payment is the proven method to achieve effective cost containment and rational healthcare resource distribution, which then makes it possible to provide comprehensive and affordable healthcare services for everyone.
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).
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/
