It’s time to look again at single-payer
Capital Times – Madison, WI
By Dave Zweifel
April 2, 2004
Marjie Colson, Madison’s passionate champion for the rights of the powerless, shipped me an e-mail a few days ago saying it is time to talk about single-payer health coverage again.
Colson is convinced, like many of us, that we’re never going to solve our health care problems by continuing down the same path that has left an estimated 42 million Americans, many of them children, without any insurance coverage and tens of millions more sacrificing pay raises to keep the coverage they have.
She’s been invited to a meeting in Washington in early May that’s aimed at drumming up support for Michigan Rep. John Conyers’ proposal that would establish national single-payer health insurance by extending Medicare coverage to everyone in the country. The meeting will bring together for the first time two major organizations that have long been pushing single-payer: Physicians for a National Health Program and the Universal Health Care Action Network.
The organizations are optimistic that the tide is finally turning in favor of a national health program as more and more people are becoming fed up with the current mess.
Conyers envisions paying for his plan, known as the U.S. National Insurance Act, with a 3.3 percent payroll tax that employers would pay Medicare on each of their employees. The employer would pay less than $1,200 per year – $100 a month – for an employee earning $35,000 annually, for example. Full private health insurance is now costing employers who provide it an average of $755 per employee per month.
Conyers figures that a single-payer system based on Medicare would save Americans about $150 billion on paperwork per year and another $50 billion by pooling drug purchases. It is estimated that our current private insurance and HMO plans are eating up close to 18 cents of every health dollar just for administrative costs. Medicare administration, meanwhile, runs less than 3 cents on every dollar.
The problems with our health system today are being felt not only by the 42 million Americans who have no coverage, but by small business owners who simply cannot afford to continue providing their workers with coverage.
“We’ve got to get the profiteers out of health care,” Colson wrote. “They don’t belong. They never did.”
Colson is concerned, though, that so far there are no Wisconsin members of Congress among the 29 co-sponsors of the Conyers bill.
“I can’t believe that,” she said. Neither can I.
Dave Zweifel has been editor of The Capital Times since 1983. A native of New Glarus, Wis. and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his life-long goal was to be the editor of this newspaper. He has had more luck achieving that than his other fondest hope watching the Chicago Cubs win the World Series. He served for many years as president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council and served two years as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes.