Medicare for All

QUALITY, AFFORDABLE, HEALTH CARE FOR ALL AMERICANS

America faces a health care crisis. Too many Americans are uninsured, and the number of the uninsured is increasing at an accelerating rate. No American family is more than one pink slip or one employer decision to drop coverage away from being uninsured. Health care costs are too high and are rising at double-digit rates. Our dysfunctional health care financing system makes it harder for American businesses to compete in the global economy, creates incentives to outsource jobs abroad, has slowed job growth even as the economy recovers, and has been an especially heavy burden on manufacturing.

America’s failure to assure the basic human right to health care to all its citizens was one of the great public policy failures of the 20th century. Recent data emphasizes the urgency of redressing this failure. Forty-six million Americans are uninsured, and the most recent Census Bureau figures show that the number of uninsured increased by nearly one million Americans in 2005 alone.

After a brief period of stability in the mid-90s, health care costs are rising at unacceptable rates far in excess of inflation. Health insurance premiums have risen at double-digit rates since 2000, and have increased a whopping 73% in the last five years.

Health care spending reached 16% of GDP, the highest level in our nation’s history.

The high level of American health care costs combined with a financing system that places the burden of paying for coverage on employers who voluntarily choose to offer health insurance puts American firms at a competitive disadvantage. As a proportion of GDP spent on health care, America is first in the world by a large margin. By that standard, we spend 49% more than the Swiss, the next highest spending country, 88% more than the Germans, 150% more than the British, and 160% more than the Japanese, according to the latest data from the OECD.

Our extraordinary level of health spending, however, is not reflected in better health outcomes. Among the world’s leading industrialized countries, the United States ranks 22nd in average life expectancy and 25th in infant mortality.

Not only are our health care costs much higher than our trading competitors, but our system forces employers to finance a much higher proportion of costs than firms abroad, because foreign systems rely much more on broad-based public financing.

Medicare Part D Fix Amendment

VA Prices Amendment

–Crystal Patterson