Response to Health Care for America Now Campaign
NY Metro Chapter, Physicians for a National Health Program
The American health care system is in deep trouble. Everyone recognizes that it needs substantial reform. For too many Americans, health care is simply unaffordable. As each year passes, millions more are added to the rolls of the uninsured and underinsured. Physicians for a National Health Program believes that only a real structural change, to a publicly-financed single payer program, can effectively address its many problems.
Now a number of progressive public interest organizations and labor unions have announced a health care reform campaign called Health Care for America Now ( www.healthcareforamericanow.org). We welcome the attention they are bringing to the critical problems of the health care system. We applaud their recognition that the reliance on private insurance companies lies at the heart of the problems we face, and that it is the responsibility of government to assure access to affordable health care for everyone. The more that Americans understand that government must play a key role in the necessary reform, and that the private insurance industry is incapable of providing us with the health care we need, the sooner we will get the reforms that must take place.
Unfortunately, although the founders of HCAN correctly identify the problem, the remedy they offer — a choice of private plans and a new public plan with government playing a “watchdog” role — takes us away from actually achieving decent health care for everyone in this country. Past attempts by many states to increase access and improve coverage by regulating the insurance companies have all failed miserably. As long as they are “players” in our health care, these insurers will use their power and influence to see to it that there is no meaningful regulation of their behavior. Time and again in this country’s history, we have seen such regulation founder as the regulators become captives of those they are supposed to regulate.
Under the HCAN plan, private health insurance would remain a nightmare for consumers and physicians with continuing co-pays, deductibles, delays, and denials of coverage. The cost of what is already the world’s most expensive system would continue to climb, with no effective cost control mechanisms in place. Those who think they are insured will still find, when they are sick, that their insurance has failed them and that they can’t afford the care they need.
In short, what the Campaign is proposing would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the cost of the system and yet would fail to solve the many problems Americans face in trying to get care. We will only solve these problems when we get the private insurance companies out of our health care. Only a publicly-funded system modeled on the very popular Medicare program can cover everyone while making it possible to contain the continually rising cost of care.
We believe that the leaders of many of the organizations involved in HCAN, as well as many of their members, know that creating a single payer system is the only truly workable remedy for what ails our health care system. Instead of adopting an approach that appears to be politically expedient, we urge them to support the only program that can truly accomplish their goal of quality affordable health care for everyone: a single payer national health program.