Medicare for All: Fair, Frugal, and Inclusive
By Johnathon Ross, M.D.
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2011/july/medicare-for-all-fair-frugal-and-inclusive"...The Medicare program has many virtues. It has created incentives for hospitals and doctors to improve the quality of care. It has produced better cost control than the private sector, despite giving patients freedom to see any doctor and go to any hospital.
The cost of administering the program is in the 1.3 percent to 3 percent range, much less than the 12-14 percent range typical of big employer-based private plans, and the 25-30 percent overhead associated with individual plans.
Given these strengths, Medicare should have been the model for health reform. Instead, in passing the Affordable Care Act, Congress added a third floor to house with a crumbling foundation. That crumbling foundation is our inefficient, wasteful private-insurance-based system of financing health care.
Private insurers make money by screening out the sick, denying claims and raising premiums. They cause us to waste enormous amounts of money on excess paperwork and bureaucracy — their own paperwork and the paperwork they inflict on hospitals, patients and doctors like me. An estimated 31 cents of every health care dollar goes toward administration in U.S. health care, at least half of it unnecessary..."Save lives and money by expanding Medicare to allhttp://www.pnhp.org/news/2011/july/save-lives-and-money-by-expanding-medicare-to-allBy Dr. Quentin Young
"With media attention focused on the debt-ceiling drama in Washington, and with so many Americans rightly preoccupied with the frightening level of joblessness and bleak state of the economy, it might seem strange to urge a national celebration of Medicare’s 46th anniversary this Saturday, July 30.
After all, if we’re to believe top lawmakers, Medicare is part of the problem, right? Aren’t we supposed to be talking about raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67, reducing benefits, increasing seniors’ co-pays and deductibles or, even more dire, abolishing the program altogether and handing seniors vouchers to buy private insurance?...But thanks to Medicare, the health and economic security of millions of seniors, the severely disabled, and our nation’s families have dramatically improved. It should not be weakened or destroyed. Those who advocate doing so will reap a whirlwind of popular rage, as GOP Rep. Paul Ryan, an exponent of ending Medicare, has found out.
In such an environment, the obvious approach of President Obama and Congress should be to join the American people in embracing Medicare, not to cut it. But right-wing ideologues, with personal assists from the president himself, have forced a debate on the wrong issue: the debt ceiling, as opposed to enhancing the health status of the American people..."
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