McHenry County College board member Scott Summers has written about how he would deal with health care. His press release follows:
The Scott Summers Prescription: “Medicare for All”
Let’s try out some synonyms — all “u” words — for health care today in the USA.
Unaffordable. Unfair. Unsustainable.
And — for nearly 46 million uninsured people — unavailable. (1)
As far as I’m concerned, adequate health care is a basic human right. And it’s a fundamental part of our social compact — like police and fire protection, infrastructure, elementary education, and a common defense.
Every major industrialized country in the world has some form of universal health care. Except the United States.
I say: it’s high time that we implement “Medicare for All”. Period.
“So what!” quoth you, my erstwhile and gentle readers. “It doesn’t matter much what YOU think, Scott Summers!”
Right you are.
So. Let’s be calculating and steely and ruthlessly objective.
Let’s count dollars. Let’s count beans.
Friends, we’re not getting our money’s worth. We’re not getting good value for our health care dollars.
Per person, we put more money into health care — twice as much money per person, in fact — than any other country in the world. (2)
Yet we get so-so medical outcomes. And still we have the aforementioned 46 million uninsured. Plus stark disparities in care linked to race, gender, geography, education, economic standing, and age.
Billions of our health care dollars don’t even get spent on health care. They go right off the top for insurance company marketing, and for bloated overhead. All to service thousands upon thousands of convoluted and bewildering health care plans.
That’s bad enough. But systemwide, our priorities are way out of whack.
In this country, we give lip service to preventative care, and instead pay copiously for exotic procedures and protocols associated with advanced disease.
That’s not smart. As the old adage goes — “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Associated services and products are way out of whack, too.
Pharmaceuticals. Medical equipment. All at preposterous prices that dwarf those for the same products in other parts of the world.
Consider this: government already pays for over half of all health care spending in the United States. (3) This is in the form of direct insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, other programs) and indirect insurance (governmental entities such as schools purchasing private insurance for their employees).
Note well that with the exception of the military and the Veterans Administration and a few other programs, this is government-provided insurance. It is NOT government-provided medicine, i.e., “socialized medicine”.
Does anybody — anybody — really have a problem with the concept of Medicare?
For over forty years, we’ve watched — largely with approval — as our parents, and grandparents, and great-grandparents, have benefited from the Medicare program.
Look. There’s nothing magical about the age of 65.
Medicare works for America.
Let’s now let ALL of America buy into Medicare.
In addition to finally, finally providing universal coverage, a new national health plan based on the Medicare model will provide a consistent and cost-effective single payer system that will keep administrative costs low.
And people will be able to choose their own physicians. Preventative care will be emphasized. Rather than being marginalized, public health will play an integral role. Leverage in purchasing power will drive costs down. Quality and care standards will be raised.
To be certain, Medicare needs retooling. Lots of it. Cost pressures have become enormous, and the program as presently constituted is in greater fiscal peril than Social Security.
Universal health care will be hugely expensive. And I say plainly that the massive new debt being taken on by the federal government now has me despairing — greatly — about the feasibility of all of this.
But I press on. My advocacy will not be stilled.
How shall we pay for “Medicare for All”? I say: (a) A modest increase in the existing Medicare payroll tax. (b) A slight (one or two percent) bump in federal income taxes, scaled mostly toward higher incomes. (c) Punishing new taxes on alcohol and tobacco and junk food. (d) Handsome savings as health marketing costs are largely eliminated and administrative overhead is reduced. (e) Fund transfers from a slimmed-down military. Plus a major intangible: a new social compact in the form of peer pressure. If we’re to have national health care, then each of us — as (and if) we are able — MUST eat right, keep fit, refrain from tobacco, and drink but little.
Note well the significant savings that will serve as tax offsets. Some health costs as we now know them will largely disappear. Health insurance premiums. Co-pays. Deductibles. And we also can build in some new financial incentives in the form of restructured IRA-style health savings accounts: people can accrue modest sums of tax-free cash by engaging in wellness activities.
“But Scott, why the big fix? Sure, health care needs work. But an entire makeover?”
I believe that the incremental health care tweaks now being proposed by Democrats and Republicans alike simply will not solve the basic problems — the stunningly high cost of health care, and the shameful lack of accessibility to it.
You know, it’s kind of like owning an old beater of a car. It keeps breaking down, and you fix it, and fix it, and fix it, and defer, and delay, and the car just keeps breaking down no matter what you do. At some sorrowful point, you realize that you’re merely throwing good money after bad. And in your sadness and disgust and denial and despair, you finally come to the realization that you simply can’t go on trying to fix it.
I really think we’re at that stage now with health care.
We simply can’t afford a fancy new car, figuratively speaking. So let’s junk our pathetic beater of a health care system, and go instead with a decent and serviceable and reliable vehicle that all of us have come to know: Medicare.
Medicare for every American. “Medicare for All”.
I am not alone in my thinking. Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org) has endorsed “Medicare for All”. Senator Ted Kennedy and Representatives John Dingle and John Conyers are among its eloquent
advocates on Capitol Hill.
And if the voters of the 16th Congressional District of Illinois see fit to elect me, I, too, shall work tirelessly for universal health care.
“Medicare for All”. The nation’s health — quite literally — depends on it.
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Footnotes:
(1) www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2008/09/15/gvl10915.htm
(2) www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/publications_show.htm?doc_id=673038
(3) www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7630/1126
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