America's New Single-Payer Majority (Rep. John Conyers Feb 2015)
Very good read. Rep. John Conyers gets it:
America's New Single-Payer Majority
Rep. John Conyers
Dean of the US House of Representatives | Ranking Member, House Judiciary Committee
02/05/2015 1:07 pm EST
The Republican-led House of Representatives just unsuccessfully attempted to undo the Affordable Care Act for the 56th time.
While it's been well established that repealing Obamacare without a plausible replacement would leave tens of millions of people uninsured and worsen our deficits by accelerating the growth in healthcare costs, it's also important to note that this continued GOP crusade to get government out of health care runs directly counter to the stated will of the majority of Americans.
A
new poll shows that more than half of Americans -- including 80 percent of Democrats and a quarter of Republicans -- support expanding health reform to "Medicare for All." While Obamacare has been a step in the right direction, more and more people across the country understand that a single-payer healthcare system is the only way to guarantee quality care and at the same time reduce medical costs.
The United States spends
almost twice as much per person on health care as any other country, yet our key outcomes -- life expectancy, infant mortality and preventable deaths -- too often lag behind our peers. A recent Commonwealth Fund study ranked the U.S. healthcare system dead last among 11 highly developed countries in terms of quality, efficiency and access to health care.
What are we doing wrong?
One major problem is that billing and insurance-related administrative costs -- in other words, bureaucratic red tape -- cost the American people
$471 billion in 2012. That's enough money to pay for our country's
whole interstate highway system. At least
80 percent of that extraordinary cost was, according to a respected study, due to inefficiencies in our for-profit, multipayer healthcare system....
~Snip~
Half a century ago, addressing the convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Martin Luther King Jr. declared, "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane." It's time to adopt a serious comprehensive plan to address it.
Read more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-conyers/americas-new-single-payer_b_6616396.html
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