HR EYE ON THE ELECTION - HEALTH CARE LEGISLATION

HR EYE ON THE ELECTION - SINGLE PAYER UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

This piece of legislation is sitting in sub-committee. It is one idea on how to handle health care. The information below is reproduced from http://www.hr676.org/. No opinions are expressed here by me, and everything that follows is from the web site, and presented as information about possible future legislative changes to come out of the November election.

There is now a bill in Congress, H.R. 676 that offers a new and exciting way for you and your fellow citizens to work together and help make the dream of affordable health insurance for every American a reality. According to the World Health Organization, the US is ranked 37th in the world in providing adequate health care services to its citizens. Most Americans would agree that this is simply not acceptable and has to change.

House Resolution (H.R.) 676, the “New Expanded Medicare” bill now in sub-committee in the House of Representatives simply creates a new and far more functional “single payer” method of paying for medical services while leaving the medical system itself completely alone and intact.

This will eliminate the hundreds of complicated and redundant payment plans currently imposed on the system by private “for profit” health insurance companies and save literally BILLIONS of dollars every year by eliminating such wasteful duplication. This will allow your doctors offices and hospitals to function much more efficiently and serve your needs much more effectively as well. Just imagine what a huge benefit this will be!

Taxes: We all know that nothing of any real value is ever free, but if you think of the taxes that will be required to support national health insurance as simply a lower cost alternative to the staggering private health insurance premiums that most of us already have to pay but which will be totally eliminated under the new system, then it becomes immediately clear that this could be a really good deal after all!

"Health care is a defining right in a democratic society."
Congressman Dennis Kucinich

Check out some of the tremendous benefits that NHI will bring and see what you think:

• Every resident of the US will be covered from birth to death.
• No more pre-existing conditions to be excluded from coverage.
• No more expensive deductibles or co-pays.
• All prescription medications will be covered.
• All dental and eye care will be included.
• Mental health and substance abuse care will be fully covered.(1)
• Long term and nursing home services will be included.
• You will always choose your own doctors and hospitals.
• Costs of coverage will be assessed on a sliding scale basis.
• Tremendously simplified system of medical administration.
• Total portability – your coverage not tied to any job or location.
• Existing Medicare benefits for those over 65 will remain the same or be vastly improved in many cases.

(1)The United States has the unhappy distinction of having the largest inmate to total population ratio of any modern country in the world. It is estimated that a full 53% of that inmate population is being confined due to non-violent drug and addiction related issues. The combined costs to society of maintaining such a huge prison population is staggering in so many ways and accordingly, the cost savings to society of this one enormous benefit of national health insurance alone, that all drug and addiction treatment will be covered, is simply beyond calculation.

The real irony is that this new system will be a lot less expensive and provide much better services than the largely dysfunctional system currently in place and still leave us with the best health care system in the entire world, only with the New Medicare… it will be even better!

Don’t be put off by all of the misleading and often inaccurate rhetoric that you so often hear about changing our system. For example uninformed critics will ask “Do you really want your medical decisions made by some government bureaucrat in Washington DC ?” Well, the truth is that with NHI, just about every medical decision will be made privately by you and your doctor. But ironically, under the current system, many medical decisions about what’s best for you are now being made by some corporate bureaucrat working for a private insurance company whose main concern is making larger profits by denying your claims. How exactly does that work out to be better for you??

"Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.