» PNHP Press Room
PNHP is at the forefront of research and action for a single-payer national health program. Click to view press releases.
Our Mission: Single-Payer National Health Insurance
Greg Silver, MD
The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $8,160 per capita. Yet our system performs poorly in comparison and still leaves 46.3 million without health coverage and millions more inadequately covered.
This is because private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third (31 percent) of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.
Click here to learn more about single-payer national health insurance
What You Can Do
Click on your specific group to see how you
can help in this important cause!
Physicians
Medical Students
Citizen Activists
Labor Organizers
The Physicians' Proposal
Marcia Angell, MD
Past Editor
New England
Journal of Medicine
We endorse a fundamental change in America's health care - the creation of a comprehensive National Health Insurance (NHI) Program. Such a program - which in essence would be an expanded and improved version of Medicare - would cover every American for all necessary medical care.
Click here to read the entire proposal (pdf)
Join the list of endorsers
‘Single payer is your answer, Mr. President’
“If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know … I’m eager to hear it”. – President Obama, 1/27/10
The President’s State of the Union Address and the stalling of health care reform legislation in Congress in the wake of the Democratic defeat in Massachusetts has created a new opening for advocates of single payer national health insurance.
Margaret Flowers, MD
Dr. Quentin Young’s letter advocating Medicare for All appeared in the New York Times (below). Dr. Margaret Flowers’ heartfelt letter to the President and her attempt, with Dr. Carol Paris, to deliver the letter to the President in Baltimore resulted in their brief arrest and several media interviews.
You can add your voice to the growing chorus calling for Medicare for All here.
To the Editor,
President Obama’s State of the Union address had a high point when he pledged that anyone with a “better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know.”
Thank you, Mr. President. The answer is the reform supported by 65 percent of the public and even 59 percent of physicians. It’s remarkably simple, and the nation has already had 44 years of successful experience with it in financing health care for our elderly and the totally disabled.
It is, of course, Medicare-for-all, single-payer, not-for-profit national health insurance. Its superiority lies in excluding profit-seeking insurance companies and Big Pharma from controlling and undermining our health system. This is your answer, Mr. President.
Quentin Young
Chicago, Jan. 28, 2010
The writer, a doctor, is national coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program.
Quentin Young, MD
Let the President and Congress know about the “better approach” known as single payer by writing a letter to the editor or an op-ed to your local newspaper. You can also contact your representative and senators, urging them to take a new look at an improved Medicare for All.
If you haven’t already signed “Open Letter to President Obama to Support Single-Payer Health Care,” please do so today. Every effort counts!