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HealthcareDiscuss this topic in our discussion forums
About 46 million of the nations citizens have no healthcare coverage. Why? Because of the prohibitive cost of insurance, companies are charging their employees more and more to make the equation work for their workforce. Unfortunately, this problem can be explained in one word, GREED. Rising insurance costs are due to several things. The most expensive component is administrative costs. With many insurance carriers it has become necessary for physicians and clinics to hire many staff members to complete the paperwork for billing and reimbursement from the insurance companies. This leads to the physician charging more, to cover the costs of the staff to fulfill this need. Marketing and lobbying costs are high. For all of these insurance companies to keep their competitive edge, they need to spend millions on skillful and slick marketing ventures to sell the public and lobby your state legislator to vote to give the insurance industry the ability to continue to run the show they way they want to. More and more upper middle class families are paying up to $1000.00 a month for family coverage, and that is with their employer still footing part of the bill. The CEO's of these insurance companies command multi-million dollar salary and incentive packages, while the middle class gets squeezed out of the market due to rising monthly costs, rising co-payments for office visits, rising prescription costs and the list goes on and on. I believe that we need to end the GREED cycle and try something else. I believe in a single payer health care system. This simply means that instead of paying multiple entities for medical services, and feeding into the already high cost of insurance administration, the insurance carriers get paid by one entity. In our country, a good example of the single payer system would be Medicare. As you know, in the United States, Medicare is only available for retired senior citizens. But it works much like the system most countries have in operation internationally. With the Medicare system, Medicare will only pay the Medicare "allowable" fee on medical services and physician services. Many times physicians choose to accept the Medicare allowable as payment in full, and waive the additional bill, in an effort to decrease the costs of subsequent patient billings. One way to enact a single payer system in our country would be to lower the eligible age for Medicare to "0", and allow the Medicare system to pay "allowable" fees for all people on medical bills. This would streamline the billing process and would decrease the cost of delivering medical services to the citizen drastically. Although this is one scenario there are other ways to accomplish a more affordable healthcare system with access for all. You may say, well, how could we afford this? What would you say if I were to tell you that if we could make this happen nationwide, we would actually save an estimated three trillion dollars a year covering everyone, rather than our current system where 15% of our citizens remain uncovered. Remember, when someone does not have insurance and needs emergency services and cannot pay, who does? You guessed it, you and I. Government picks up the tab, and we all know that the only way Government generates money at all, is from you and I through our taxes. Although the single payer healthcare system could be set up in a myriad of ways, I think it is safe to say that we need to try something new. The current system isn't working, and is excluding more people every day. I believe that although it may cause our taxes to go up to provide these services for everyone, in the long run society will benefit immensely. Think about how much economic growth would occur if we all of a sudden were able to provide healthcare coverage for everyone in the state without attaching that coverage to our employer. More people would start new small businesses. Large businesses would be able to invest more money in retirement incentives for their employees, thereby augmenting the Social Security system benefits that are so desperately needed later in life. When people are laid off due to company cutbacks, they would not lose their personal health insurance, and their families would remain covered in spite of job loss. This is my biggest dream to accomplish in office. I hope that you will join me in this quest.. With your support we can get the job done. To find out more check out the video on this next page called The Missing Link. |