Closing The Gap
The Maine Hospital Association
December 2001
"A Guide to Understanding and Improving Health Insurance Coverage"
"Maine is not unique. Over 38 million Americans, or 14% of the total U.S. population, do not have health insurance. Maine's hospitals believe that this national problem would best be resolved with a national solution: the United States should ensure that everyone has health insurance coverage as a right of citizenship. Recognizing that, for a variety of political and economic reasons, nationally guaranteed insurance coverage is not likely to occur in the foreseeable future, hospitals believe that states should take deliberate incremental steps to move us toward the goal of universal coverage."
The full report is available at: <http://www.themha.org/art/pdf/closing%20the%20gap.pdf>http://www.themha.org/art/pdf/closing%20the%20gap.pdf
Comment: For the lack of a national program, the Maine Hospital Association is recommending a ten step program of incrementalism. The report suggests that enacting only a few of the measures will not be adequate. The measures include flawed policies such as tax credits, and politically impossible goals such as making Medicaid payment rates comparable to the commercial market. Unfortunately, their proposals would only perpetuate the inequities and inefficiencies of our current fragmented health care system.
Maine is well on its way to serious consideration of a state-level single payer program. The authors of the Maine Hospital Association report recognize the need for universal health insurance coverage. They should abandon the tried and repeatedly proven wrong approach of incrementalism, and join the single payer advocates in supporting an equitable, efficient health care system that includes everyone.
Beth Capell, Ph.D., California legislative representative for Health Access, responds to the Maine Hospital Association's report on health care coverage:
Even sadder than the Maine Hospital Association's endorsement of non-solutions such as tax credits is their proposal that health coverage be limited to citizens.
Doing that in California would deny millions health coverage---including not only legal immigrants but those whose legal status is unclear. Solutions to the problems of the uninsured in California must take into account our large immigrant population, both Latino and Asian Pacific Islander, and their grave barriers to obtaining care.
One of the lessons we have learned in California in the last decade is that almost all immigrant families have a family member whose immigration status is clouded for some reason or another.
And the ultimate goal is to get everyone the health care they need when they really need it---not just coverage.