The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights lists affordable health care as a basic human right. I’m going to spare the graphic and saddening images of people dying from easily preventable or curable diseases — President Barack Obama had a few in his recent speech. According to Families USA, a nonprofit health care advocacy group, an average of 44,230 people lose their health coverage every week. Over 50 million people are without health insurance, and an additional 25 million are under-insured. Medical bills are estimated to contribute to half of all personal bankruptcies, and 75 percent of those people had health insurance at the time they got sick. The U.S. infant mortality rate, vaccination rate and life expectancy rank near the bottom among developed countries. However, the U.S. spends the greatest percentage of total per-capita gross domestic product in the world on health care.
Under a single-payer health insurance policy, all Americans would be guaranteed taxpayer-subsidized health care with no direct out of pocket expenses. H.R. 676, the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, introduced by Representative John Conyers Jr., would establish a national health care system in which all care, including preventative and primary care, hospital visits, vision care, mental health, dental care, pharmaceuticals and rehabilitation deemed medically necessary by doctor and patient (not the government) would be provided for with no direct out-of-pocket expense. Patients would still have the freedom to choose their own doctors.
The corporate waste currently in the system would be streamlined into more care for all people. A Harvard University study estimated that 30.1 percent of U.S. health care expenses go toward administration, as opposed to 16.7 percent in Canada, which has a government run health plan. The system will also drastically reduce, if not eliminate, costs on the system due to predatory pharmaceutical monopolies. The overall cost to the average taxpayer would be much lower than with the current system.
One may ask, why is the current plan favored by Obama and many Democrats inadequate, and why is single-payer necessary? This plan would create health care cooperatives; mandate that all people purchase health insurance; ban insurance companies from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions, or weight; prevent insurance companies from dropping coverage when the holder gets sick; and penalize large (50 or more employee) businesses who do not offer their employees health insurance.
Businesses would be punished for not offering health insurance to their employees, but there is no protection against the coverage offered being inadequate or unaffordable to the employee. In other words, people would be penalized for not purchasing health insurance they could not afford. Insurance companies would not necessarily have to reduce prices, as any loss in customers due to increased competition would be offset by the influx of new customers being forced into the market. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2019, 25 million people would still be uninsured. A single-payer system ensures that people receive the care they need without suffering significant financial burden.
I now pose the question: who is the current system favoring? This goes beyond political ideologies, partisan politics or beliefs in market theory. How many people are directly benefiting from such a system in a way that they would not if a single payer system was intact, and how many are suffering? Health care, a basic human right, should not be denied based on one’s ability to pay. Many state that a single-payer system is extreme, but a crisis extreme enough to affect over 20 percent of the population demands a progressive solution.
