Single payer would improve health care for everyone
By Madeline Zevon
Lower Hudson Journal News
February 19, 2009
The recession has been taking a toll on New York businesses, but it isn’t the only thing ailing us; the high cost of health care and the lack of access to care dog businesses and individuals. Here is a commentary from the League of Women Voters on single-payer national health insurance, a leading solution to the cost and accessibility problems plaguing health care in New York, where an estimated 1 in 6 people lacks insurance.
What is single payer? It refers to the administration of health-care funds by one payer, rather than by the current multiple insurance companies. This payer would be the federal government. Think of single payer as enhanced and improved Medicare for all. The League of Women Voters of Westchester, New York state and the U.S. League all advocate for single-payer health care.
Can we afford covering the 47 million uninsured and the 50 million underinsured nationwide? Yes, we can. Currently insurance companies have an overhead of approximately 30 percent, which is spent on marketing, administration, shareholders dividends and exorbitant CEO salaries. Medicare’s overhead is approximately 3 percent. We could save about $350 billion annually, enough to cover the 47 million uninsured and the 50 million underinsured. Both the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office say the U.S. could insure everyone for the money we’re paying now to insure seniors only.
Is this socialized medicine? No, it is not. With socialized medicine, doctors and hospitals are owned by the government. As with Medicare, hospitals would be semi-private just as they are now, and doctors would be in private practice just as they are now. Single payer would replace the costly, inefficient system of private insurance. Paperwork would be greatly reduced because there would be only one entity to deal with.
Fifty-nine percent of physicians support legislation to establish national health insurance; 65 percent of Americans agree that the U.S. should adopt a program like Medicare for all. We spend twice as much on health care as other industrialized nations, and they cover all of their population. Every other industrialized country in the world has national health insurance. We are the only country that uses private, for-profit insurance to finance health care for the majority of our population.
Do we need to improve our current Medicare system? Yes, we do. Medicare is suffering financially because of the intrusion of private health-maintenance organizations, which were initially put into place as a cost-effective system, but were actually less cost effective. HMOs are subsidized by the government, cherry-pick healthy patients, and yet their costs are 12 percent more than traditional Medicare. This system costs the taxpayers $15 billion a year.
Each year, half of all personal bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, and 75 percent of those bankrupted were insured when they got sick. Insurance premiums go up each year for policies that cover less and less. The goal of insurance companies is to make a profit for their shareholders and CEOs.
All of these issues obviously affect residents of the Lower Hudson Valley and New York. More and more groups are petitioning for single payer:
- The Westchester division of the League of Women Voters has a very active group working on this issue.
- Single Payer New York, an Albany group, has urged President Barack Obama to reject a Massachusetts-style plan and it urged Gov. David Paterson to provide leadership for single payer.
- In the Legislature, dozens of lawmakers in both the Assembly and Senate have sponsored single-payer legislation.
- Physicians for a National Health Program, a group of more than 15,000 physicians nationally and more than 1,000 from the New York metro area, has actively campaigned for single payer for several years. It is estimated that today’s physician spends about one-third of his or her time satisfying insurance company regulations and seeking approval for treatment, time that could be better spent with patients.
- Single payer would save New York $5 billion annually in administrative waste.
The government already pays for a significant proportion of our health care. Since 60 percent of our health-care system is financed by public money - Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Affairs and insurance for public employees. It makes sense to expand this coverage for all.
Major stumbling blocks are the drug and insurance companies. These industries spend more than any other industry lobbying Congress. They succeeded in making Medicare part D a windfall for drug companies. Both former Sen. Hillary Clinton and President Obama have said in the past that single payer makes the most sense but is not “politically feasible” at this time. The flaw in both their proposed health-care reforms (as seen during their respective campaigns) is that they involve insurance companies in the system, making reform financially unaffordable. This approach is not viable, as numerous state-based experiments have shown. Such plans fail because of the cost.
All we need is the political will.
The writer is vice president of the White Plains League of Women Voters and a member of the LWV of Westchester Health Committee.
http://lohud.com/article/20090219/OPINION/902190354/1076/OPINION01