Health Care for All, Just a (Big) Step Away

There’s an even simpler way to provide health insurance for all Americans than the one mentioned in the article below, and that is to pay for it through taxes, as does every civilized nation. People who tout privatization of all services forget that private companies have to make a profit. THAT’s why our health care in this country costs twice what it does in Canada or Britain. That and the fact that much of the spending by insurance companies is figuring out how to deny coverage.

The first step could be an easy one: allow those who choose to, to buy into Medicare. When just about everyone has done that, because Medicare is so much cheaper than any private insurance, it will make sense to just start paying for Medicare for all through our taxes.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

From The New York Times:

Health Care for All, Just a (Big) Step Away

… (I)f the objective is to expand health care coverage … the bulk of the money on the bottom end of the income distribution.

Added to what is already spent on Medicaid, this financing would be roughly enough to make health insurance free for people earning up to three times the poverty level, and perhaps somewhat more, said Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the efficiency of alternative methods for financing health insurance.

To make insurance universal, two other things would be needed, Mr. Gruber said. As soon as the tax break was eliminated, company-provided health insurance would be likely to disappear, too. So some mechanism would be needed to pool groups of people and to avoid leaving higher-risk people to face enormous insurance costs. Such a mechanism would probably make health insurance affordable for all. And to make it universal, a mandate would be needed to make people buy it.

This isn't communism. The changes could happen under a public health care system or one that is privately run.

The new universal insurance could be provided by government. One simple way would be to extend Medicaid coverage up to the desired income level and to require people above that point to buy into the system according to a price scale that rose proportionately to income…

People like Medicare. It has proven itself and its popular. The way to go about a national health care system is not to sell it as a new government program, but rather, the expansion of an existing, well-established program that people like and trust.

Hillarycare was a bad idea because it was mystifyingly complex and allowed the private insurance companies to continue to spread their filth around the country.

Keep it simple!

We really need to just expand Medicare to provide medical coverage for all US citizens. Period. That's for everybody, and no means testing. Put all those blood sucking insurance companies out of business. Forget about employer-provided coverage; corporations are unacceptable providers. Just look at the latest episode of Verizon's endless pillaging of employees' coverage.

Costs would come down because lots of overhead would be eliminated, and hospitals would no longer have to absorb expenses for treating the uninsured. Termination of associated corporate tax breaks would increase federal revenue.