How Eliminating Insurance and Pharmaceutical Industry Waste.........
................Could Fund Health Care for All
This is an interesting report written by Jobs with Justice in collaboration with others to "send a message to politicians and employers demanding health care reforms that would expand and improve Medicare -type coverage for all rather than undermine or privatize existing programs." As I've written on numerous occassions, I am a socialist/capitalist at heart. I believe in free market economy where appropriate, but without corporate abuse of workers. But, I am also a strong advocate of some things being socialized, like education and health care, which should be a individual's right, rather than the privelege it now is for only those who can afford it. Below, I have exerpted a portion of the Executive Summary. Go to Link which is a .pdf file, to read the full report.
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Executive Summary
The United States is the only industrialized country in the world that does not guarantee health
insurance for its population. The U.S. spends far more per person on health care than any other
country in the world – in fact more than twice as much as the average for other rich countries.
Yet people in the United States do not have good health. The United States ranks near the
bottom of the industrialized world in life expectancy, infant mortality, and other standard
measures of health.
As bad as the health care situation is in the United States, it is getting rapidly worse. Doubledigit
increases in health care costs are leading more employers to drop health insurance
coverage for workers or their family members, and to raise costs for those who keep coverage.
The number of people without insurance or with inadequate insurance is rising rapidly, leading
more people to become insecure about their access to adequate medical care.
While everyone agrees that Medicare has been an enormously successful program, many people
believe that covering everyone would be too expensive – that the country simply can't afford to
insure its entire population. This report sets out to prove the opposite. We already spend more
than enough to insure the entire population. The reason that we pay more and get less for our
money is that our health care system is enormously wasteful.
This report looks at some of the waste in the U.S. health care system. It calculates how much
waste could be eliminated at the national level and at the state level, and how many people
could be insured with the savings. Specifically, it looks at the waste that results from our
fragmented system of private insurers, rather than using a "Medicare for All" approach that
efficiently covers everyone. It also looks at the waste associated with government granted
patent monopolies for prescription drugs that protect drug companies from selling in a more
competitive market. Finally, the report analyses the waste from the additional subsidies for the
insurance industry that were part of the recently passed Medicare prescription drug benefit.