Issues Briefing
The U.S. National
Health Insurance Act (HR 676)
We already pay for national healthcare — we just don't get it!
BACKGROUND
UPDATED FOR 2009: Our profit-driven healthcare “system” is broken beyond repair. Treatment is rationed by your ability to pay for heathcare or to pay for heathcare insurance. Working people are forced to pay more and more for private insurance coverage, which covers less and less of the actual costs. Never have costs been so high, with satisfaction so low.
Every UE member is faced with this heathcare crisis directly at the bargaining table, in both the private and public sector alike. Bosses try to push the enormous (and still soaring) heathcare costs onto the backs of union members at every available opportunity.
Unorganized workers are forced to pay up or lose coverage altogether.
Almost 50 million Americans lack heathcare coverage and millions more woefully under-insured. Those numbers increase every day as the recession deepens. Unpayable medical bills remain the largest single cause of individual bankruptcies.
The push for sweeping national health insurance reform peaked with the ill-fated Clinton plan promoted in the early 1990’s. President Clinton watered-down his reform plan until it was finally destroyed by the health insurance companies and the Republican Party in the 1994 elections. The need for reform languished until the 2008 elections, when the election of Barack Obama to the White House broke the log jam and unleashed the renewed push for substantial reform.
CURRENT STATUS
The U.S. National Health Insurance Act/Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act (HR 676) has helped revive and unify those forces promoting a real solution to the crisis. This legislation is being reintroduced into the 111th Congress. In the previous Congress there were 92 Representatives who co-sponsored the bill, more than any other heathcare reform legislation. There is, as yet, no companion bill in the Senate.
UE POSITION
Our union has supported the creation of a national health insurance program for many decades. We support this national “single-payer” heathcare program that eliminates the private health insurance companies altogether. The new national heathcare agency would become the “single-payer” of medical and hospital bills, as Medicare currently does for retirees. Everyone in our country would be covered, regardless of employment status or age. The funds for the new system would come from a payroll tax on employers, and small out-of pocket contributions by individuals.
FAST FACTS
- In the U.S., more than 50 million people lack health insurance altogether.
- Millions of working people simply cannot afford health insurance premiums.
- Medicare, a single-payer plan, covers millions of seniors at only a 2 percent (2%) administrative cost.
- Private insurers waste over 30 percent (30%) of every healthcare dollar on profits, advertising, duplication of services, and sky-high pay (and bonuses) for executives.
- Catastrophic medical bills account for a majority of personal bankruptcy filings.
- Every industrialized country except the U.S. provides for some kind of national healthcare.
- Healthcare spending per capita in the U.S. is approximately double that of most other industrialized countries, and escalates at three to four times the rate of inflation.
- Schemes to force working people to buy private health insurance must be stopped; feeding more money to the health insurance companies is no solution at all. The insurance lobby is working feverishly to maintain their super profitable and completely counterproductive role in the heathcare system, a fact that will need to be dealt with if real progress is going to be made.
- A "reform" scheme that leaves the insurance companies in complete control is not reform at all. In fact, forcing the uninsured to buy private insurance will only deliver even more profit to the insurance companies.