A bill that would provide universal health care coverage for all Pennsylvanians is being considered in the PA Legislature, and a new study about the plan says it would be just as healthy for the commonwealth's economy as its citizens.
MLK
Having to deal with a debilitating illness or injury is difficult enough without having to worry that it will drive you to bankruptcy, or whether you should seek treatment at all for fear of medical debt. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously
said, "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane."
Sen. Ted Kennedy
Ted Kennedy
railed against the American health care system for only truly taking care of the wealthiest people and fought for health care to to be "a right and not a privilege" for everyone. Social inequities in health care are literally a matter of life and death for those of us not at the wealthy extreme of the socioeconomic spectrum; it's a moral outrage to have so many peoples' lives hinging on whether they have a spare fortune lying around waiting to be spent. Unfortunately, despite President Obama accomplishing perhaps the greatest stride towards health care equity in American history with the Affordable Care Act or "ObamaCare," the decades-old words of King and Kennedy still ring painfully true for many Americans dealing with health problems.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, as of 2011 there were well over one million Pennsylvanians with no health insurance. Nearly a quarter million of the uninsured are children. Step aside, cliche right-wing talking points, because over 800,000 of them are in families with at least one person employed full-time. And step aside, racist right-wing talking points, because over 900,000 of them are white. In today's world, America is starkly alone among so-called developed nations for not having a universal health care system that covers everyone equally. If you're thinking we don't cover everyone because it saves us money, think again, because the average country with a universal system has less than half the per-patient cost of what we spend. There's both a moral and economic imperative here.
Now, Pennsylvania has the opportunity to catch up with the rest of the world and establish our own universal health care system. State Senator Jim Ferlo (38th District - Allegheny, Armstrong & Westmoreland counties) and state Representative Pamela DeLissio (194th District - Montgomery & Philadelphia counties) have announced their intention to reintroduce the Family and Business Health Care Security Act, which has been considered in the past in the PA Senate as SB 400 and in the PA House as HB 1660, to the PA Legislature in this session.
PA State Representative Pamela DeLissio
Here are some bullet-points Ferlo is
highlighting to promote the bill for co-sponsorship among his fellow Pennsylvania legislators (slightly edited down by yours truly):
- Quality medical, dental, vision, and mental health care for every Pennsylvanian.
- Establishment of an efficient Health Care Trust owned and controlled by the people of Pennsylvania as the single payer for health care services, thus eliminating the existing wasteful and inefficient system of multiple third party payers.
- Relieving employers from the responsibility of selecting, pricing, and administering health insurance.
- Elimination of all traditional health insurance premiums, co-pays, and deductibles.
- Full funding of prescription drugs while leveraging the buying power of 12 million Pennsylvanians to lower costs.
- Support for the swift transition to a secure electronic medical record system to reduce costs and errors.
- Full funding for substance abuse treatment.
- A centralized data collection and analysis approach that will identify physicians and hospitals with patterns of preventable errors leading to prompt remedial action designed to eliminate future occurrences.
- Preservation of the private practice of medicine and the right of the patient to choose their doctor and hospital.
- Assuring that every Pennsylvanian in need of long term care can qualify for assistance without having to spend themselves into poverty.
- Sparing Pennsylvanians forever the humiliation of personal bankruptcy due to family health care expenses.
PA State Senator Jim Ferlo
A
recent study of this legislation by Gerald Friedman, Ph.D. of the Department of Economics of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst concluded that the Family and Business Health Care Security Act would be great for Pennsylvania's economy as well as its health care system. According to a summary of the research by
Healthcare4AllPA, Friedman found that:
By reducing administrative costs and anti-competitive market practices, [the Family and Business Health Care Security Act] could save $33 billion in 2014, almost 23% of existing medical spending. These savings would allow the expansion of coverage to all Pennsylvania residents while still saving over $17 billion, or $1,335 per person.
[The Family and Business Health Care Security Act] would be funded by a 10% payroll tax paid by employers and a 3% levy on income paid by recipients. The shift from insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses to taxes linked with income would lower health care spending for over 80% of Pennsylvanians.
Businesses and local governments would also benefit, saving on payroll costs as well as the premiums paid to cover the "administrative costs" associated with private health insurance. By lowering payroll costs, [the Family and Business Health Care Security Act] would make Pennsylvania businesses more competitive, producing an additional 120,000 – 200,000 new jobs.
Healthcare4AllPA also used the research to create this chart of which sectors projected health care savings in PA would come from if this bill became law:
With all these lives to be saved and improved, all this money we could stop wasting on our current inefficient health care system in Pennsylvania, and all these jobs that could be created, it's hard to think of any reason outside the conspiratorial
"death-panels" that anyone in PA would be against this. A 2010 poll released by the Pennsylvania Medical Society
showed that two-thirds of Pennsylvanians support universal health care. Even Republican former state legislator and current business-owner David Steil
vocally supports it.
Here is our collective chance as a state to finally catch up with the rest of the world and have a universal health care system that provides for everyone. It may seem greatly improbable or too-good-to-be-true in the abstract, but that is only true if we allow it to be. There's no doubt it seemed that way in other countries before reforms happened there. I urge all my fellow Pennsylvanians to contact your state legislators and tell them to support the Family and Business Health Care Security Act and universal health care for PA, with emphasis on the duel imperative of morality and economics. They take calls from constituents seriously. You can look them up and find their contact information here.