Enact Universal Healthcare

May 10, 2023

Happy Wednesday Healthcare Advocates

Please enter requests for research using the comment button at the bottom. Remember our advocacy educates our representatives and lets them know what we want them to do for us.

This will be especially important after May 16th when Universal Healthcare will be reintroduced into both houses of Congress by Rep. Jayapal (WA) and Sen. Sanders (Vt.)

Problems in Healthcare

Because Universal Healthcare will be reintroduced next week into both houses of Congress, I decided to head to the Congress’ website and check out healthcare bills in the current legislative session. I suppose we could have an office pool to guess the right number but it is 319. Yup, 319 proposed pieces of often contradictory band aids for a broken system.

The band aids are myriad. Many are important like the Women’s Healthcare Protection Act that insures reproductive rights, or protecting providers who provide reproductive healthcare, helping organ donors, helping caregivers of those with autism. Some are ludicrous like HR 1553 to cut the budget of the Health and Human Services, or HR 106 - Abortion is Not Health Care. BTW both of those are by Andy Biggs (R. Az) pretty much anything he submits is hurtful and hateful.

Let’s remember the problems we have with the way healthcare is delivered in the US.

Super expensive 20% of GDP, more than any other industrialized country
At least $400 billion of what is spent on healthcare is wasted overhead labor
Providers are incentivized to hustle patients through quickly and serve as many as possible because most billing is fee for service (which leads to its own upcoding and cheating)
About 30 million people have no insurance and so no preventive care resulting in many early deaths
About 40 million are underinsured and have catastrophic policies with high deductibles (like $15K) and so also don’t make use of preventive care and have high early death rates.
Because our healthcare systems are not set up to support public health with everyone covered the US spent a small fortune on COVID testing, vaccines and treatment.

What Universal Single Payer Healthcare will do:

Universal Single Payer Healthcare will make sure that everyone is covered cradle to grave.
It will allocate special funding to help build up rural healthcare so that the 20% of us that are rural will have better access. (That was in the previous version of the bill)
It will give all of us access to preventive care and that will save many lives.
In many cases, based on what was in the previous version HR 1976, funding profiles for healthcare networks will incentivize keeping people healthy, rather than just straight fee for service. This is important because it makes your doctor your partner in obtaining better outcomes for a higher quality of life.
It will also help reduce the vast number of deaths today that are amenable to treatment but, due to cost or access, are untreated.
When the next pandemic comes around all of us will be covered and the number of deaths reduced.
Based on the previous version of the Universal Healthcare bill I expect there will again be no copays or deductibles because a Rand Corporation experiment in the 1990s found that even small co-payments drastically reduced access to healthcare.

The 3 leading causes of death in the US are cancer, heart disease, and COVID-19. Making sure everyone has access to healthcare will help reduce those numbers.

We can do this. We need to let our representatives know how important it is to us and it is their job to see that it is enacted for all of us and we can have the same high quality care at lower cost as our 35 industrialized peer nations.

Action

Here is a sample script to call or email your Congressperson and Senators. Here is a link for their contact info or use Resistbot below.

“Hi, My name is _______ and I’m calling from [zip.]. I am your constituent. Next week Congresswoman Jayapal (WA) and Senator Sanders (VT) will be introducing their Universal Single Payer Healthcare Bill. There are so many reasons we need this now. It will save lives in the next pandemic, it will provide access to 70 million people who are uninsured or underinsured, It will dramatically cut what the US pays for healthcare by about $400 billion/year (according to the Congressional Budget Office - 2020 report. This is so important for all of us. I want you to cosponsor and be a vocal support for this for all of us. Thank you.

RESISTBOT VERSION

Text SIGN PISGXR to 50409 to send the message above.