By Johnathon Ross, M.D., M.P.H.
Toledo (Ohio) Blade, October 26, 2019
The government needs to stop trying their failed for-profit health-care solutions and give the American people what they’ve been demanding for years.
After President Truman called for a national health insurance program in November, 1945, a Gallup poll found 59 percent approved of the plan and 25 percent disapproved. Despite this overwhelming popularity we did not get national health insurance for everyone, thanks to corporations buying politicians to do their bidding and stopping any efforts until Medicare and Medicaid were finally passed in 1965. These popular public programs only covered the poor and the elderly and left tens of millions uninsured.
Over the next 50 years, Band-Aids have been added to our for-profit system in attempts to expand access to care and to control costs. We have tried HMOs, PPOs, ACOs, DRGs, bundled payments, high co-payments and deductibles, narrow provider networks, pre-existing condition exclusions, high risk pools, pay for performance, and, the holy grail for doctors, malpractice reforms.
These efforts did little to increase coverage or control costs. The Affordable Care Act did increase coverage but added $100 billion annually to our already-excessive costs and aggravated the extreme administrative waste of our unstable, complex health-care financing system. Republicans continue to propose ways to cut poor citizens off from life-saving health care through Medicaid work requirements and crippling the Affordable Care Act insurance market.
Such efforts have increased the number of Ohioans without insurance by 60,000 over the past year, and insurance premiums and drug costs continue to skyrocket. It’s clear this profit-driven health-care system has failed. “Medicare for all” legislation has already been introduced in both chambers of Congress and the Ohio legislature that would improve and expand the single-payer system Americans are continuing to ask for.
The administrative simplicity and power of price negotiation of these single-payer plans will save the nation nearly $400 billion yearly. This is enough money to cover everyone with comprehensive benefits including dental, hearing, and long-term care, allow patients the complete choice of doctors and hospitals with no narrow provider networks, no surprise bills, no co-pays, no deductibles.
We have seen how financially crippling doctor visits can be for patients, mothers forgoing important prenatal care, the elderly cutting their medication to make it last longer, and countless families put into debt because of unexpected medical procedures.
By replacing our current premiums with fair progressive taxes, ordinary families will no longer pay a greater percentage of their income for health care than the rich, and 95 percent of us will pay less. Everyone pays something, and all benefit.
The health-insurance industry and their paid-for politicians have a lot to lose under an improved and expanded Medicare for all and are already spending hundreds of millions on lobbying, TV ads, and campaign contributions.
The rest of us have power too. If we want affordable quality care for all, then we must demand it.