Should the U.S. Have Universal Healthcare?

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•    It costs more to put someone on dialysis than to treat early hypertension.

•    It costs more to handle an asthma attack in the ER than to manage the disease.

•    Starbucks spends more on health care for its employees than on coffee beans.

•    Each car made by GM has more costs related to employee health care than to the steel.

Today in the US, people with health coverage receive it through a variety of federal and state-financed programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, or the Veterans Administration, or through private insurance provided by employers or purchased individually. This complex arrangement leaves nearly 16% of the population, without the safety and protection of health insurance. Eighty-one percent of the uninsured are employed by small businesses, the service industry, or hold blue-collar jobs and are either not offered health insurance or cannot afford their share of the premium.   Meanwhile, employer-sponsored insurance coverage rates are falling.   

Underinsurance too is becoming an increasing barrier to care. Half of all bankruptcies are related to medical costs, and shockingly, three in four of the medically bankrupt have health insurance.   

America spends more per person on health care than any other industrialized nation, and more of our national income. There are many reasons for this high level of spending, some of which include the lack of a nationally coordinated health care system, the high administrative costs of private insurance, a fee-for-service reimbursement structure that skews reimbursement of physicians and hospitals toward treatment of disease rather than disease prevention, the reliance on a primarily profit-driven system and the unregulated cost of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and medical services.

The lack of a coherent national health insurance system drags down our economy and puts American businesses at a disadvantage in the global marketplace. The National Physicians Alliance believes that guaranteed, affordable, high quality health care is a moral, national, and economic imperative for the United States.