5 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT OBAMA'S PUBLIC HEALTH INSURANCE OPTION
and five more things you should know about the only real option: Single-Payer

The choice of a public health insurance plan is crucial to real health care reform.
(And the conflation of health insurance with healhcare does not clarify the issue.)
But right now, it's being smeared by conservatives and insurance-industry front groups. Here's what you really need to know:

1. Choice, choice, choice. If the public health insurance option passes, Americans will be able to choose between their current insurance and a high-quality, government-run plan similar to Medicare. If you like your current care, you can keep it. If you don't—or don't have any—you can get the public insurance plan.
1. And under this plan, health insurance companies will continue to define, deliver, and set costs for the available plans.  And the costs associated with health insurance companies denial of benefits, large co-pays, and increasing costs will continue to waste resources which could be better used for public health. And there will remain millions who are not covered by this plan.

2. It will be high-quality coverage with a choice of doctors. Government-run plans have a track record of innovating to improve quality, because they're not just focused on short-term profits. And if you choose the public plan, you'll still get to choose your doctor and hospital.
2. Unfortunately, this plan is not economically feasible.  In order to cover everyone in America, we cannot afford to continue to allow private firms to siphon off record profits for denying benefits.  These inflated administrative costs will make it impossible to cover everyone.
3. We'll all save a bunch of money. The public health insurance option won't have to spend money on things like CEO bonuses, shareholder dividends, or excessive advertising, so it'll cost a lot less. Plus, the private plans will have to lower their rates and provide better value to compete, so people who keep their current insurance will save, too.
3.  Some of us will save some money, but all of the private plans will continue to pay CEO bonuses, shareholder dividents, advertising costs, and inflated administrative costs.  When private firms continue with these practices, they will deny benefits to their clients, raise co-payments, and raise rates.  They will treat healhcare as a commodity instead of as a service, and we will pay the costs.

4. It will always be there for you and your family. A for-profit insurer can close, move out of the area, or just kick you off their insurance rolls. The public health insurance option will always be available to provide you with the health security you need.
4.  But as long as private insurance companies define the delivery system and set the costs, the costs will be inflated and there wil not be funding to sustain a public system.
This pie-in-the-sky scenario will not work. It has been tried in other western industrialized nations, but they have all moved to some form of single payer, nationalization in order to get costs in line and provide access and service for everyone.

5. And it's a key part of universal health care. No longer will sick people or folks in rural communities, or low-income Americans be forced to go without coverage. The public health insurance plan will be available and accessible to everyone. And for those struggling to make ends meet, the premiums will be subsidized by the government.
5.  Actually a system defined and created by private insurance firms is not part of any universal healthcare system.  In fact, it will only continue the suffering and inflate our costs. It is easy to say "the premiums will be subsidized by the government," but what this means is "the government," that woud be you and I, will be subsidizing the costs of allowing private firms to continue to deny benefits, inflate costs, and waste resources.

We all need to speak out to make sure we get real health reform. Please pass this email on, then call your senators and ask them to support universal single-payer coverage as the only fiscally viable option.  And encourage them to avoid the false choice between nationalization of healthcare and a mandatory and an unsustainable public health insurance plan. These public plan schemes wil provide coverage for more Americans, but they will still leave millions of our people without adequate heathcare and the rest of us will pay the costs associated with their suffering.

Here's the info for your state:

Senator Ron Wyden
Phone: 202-224-5244

Senator Jeff Merkley
Phone: 202-224-3753

Contact your legislators

       Single-payer advocates oppose the creation of
       a so-called " public" plan for specific reasons.

1. It continues to divide, devalue, and define people by their health status.
2. It can’t address the endemic racial and gender disparities in the system, including the 12 million undocumented.
3. It leaves the employer-based system of health care provision intact. That link has to be broken so workers are free to change jobs, go on strike and not fear loss of coverage, and so that small businesses will no longer have to try to compete while carrying these burdens.
4. The system would continue to have multiple payers and therefore would
   retain the complexity and gaps in coverage which are inevitable when there are numerous bureaucracies to navigate.
5. Where will the money come from to finance the plan, especially in a time of economic recession, like right now? A public plan is not fiscally sustainable because it’s rooted in a multiple payer system that foregoes at least 84% of administrative savings.

Single-payer on the other hand, would immediately inject 400 billion into the system by eliminating bureaucracy, billing apparatus, administrative waste, advertising, corporate profits, and CEO compensation. That’s enough money to bring everyone into the system with no co-pays or deductibles.

We don’t need any more feasibility studies or examinations of  single-payer in other countries. It’s a proven fact that a single-payer system can cover everyone and control costs. Period, end of discussion.

So the question becomes why don’t the Democrats and HCAN ( Health Care for America Now) fight to get rid of the parasitic private health insurance industry (the source of the crisis) once and for all instead of constantly, unsuccessfully, decade after decade, trying to rein in, regulate, and do an end-run around them?  

Doctors Himmelstein and Woolhandler from Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) explain:

“A quarter century of experience with public/private competition in the Medicare program demonstrates that the private plans will not allow a level playing field. Despite strict regulation, private insurers have successfully cherry picked healthier seniors, and have exploited regional health spending differences to their advantage. They have progressively undermined the public plan – which started as single-payer for seniors and now has become a funding mechanism for HMOs – and a place to dump the unprofitably ill. A public plan option doesn’t lead toward single-payer, but toward the segregation of patients, with profitable ones in private plans and unprofitable ones in the public one.”

Private Medicare Advantage plans cost the government 13 percent more per beneficiary on average in 2008, and overhead for private plans is also much higher, at 13 percent, compared to 2-3 percent in traditional Medicare. Of the 45 million Medicare recipients, 23 percent are in private plans. Most Americans aren’t aware of the extent of privatization of Medicare.

... Experience shows the government has given an unfair advantage to private insurers when it comes to the Medicare program, ...this is proof the government won’t lower reimbursement rates or impose cost controls on private insurers.

Try the animated version of "What Is Single-Payer" first.
What is Single-Payer?
If you'd like to learn the basics about what all this "single-payer" talk
is all about, we've got the answers.
How Would It Work?
This section describes what a single-payer system might look like in the United States.
Compare
Compare a single-payer system to the current health care non-system.
Financing
How would we pay for all this?
Other Questions?
Heard something about single-payer? Want an answer? We've got it,
or we'll get it for you.

Single-Payer News Posted by WritingResource at
4:28 PM comments

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Single-Payer Means Everybody In, Nobody Out

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