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“Medicare For All” Will Save Billions
By admin | February 3, 2006
“MEDICARE FOR ALL” WILL SAVE BILLIONS AND GIVE ALL AMERICANS THE CARE THEY NEED
January 31, 2006
Washington, DC: Today, as President Bush focuses on health care in his State of the Union address after ignoring it for five years, Senator Kennedy will put forward real health care reform that would give quality affordable health care for all Americans. America’s health care system is the most economically inefficient in the industrial world. Kennedy’s plan would fix our fractured system of care, by extending Medicare to all Americans, from birth to the end of life, while allowing any American who wishes to stay in their current employer-sponsored plan to do so. Under Kennedy’s bill, employers can tailor their health plans to provide additional services to their employees that wrap around Medicare coverage.
Tonight, as he attempted to do last year with his Social Security privatization fiasco, President Bush will try to make the American people believe that the solution to rising health costs is to shift more and more of those costs to ordinary Americans, or to deny care to those in need. Kennedy believes that’s the wrong prescription for health care.
“America’s failure to guarantee the basic right to health care for all its citizens was one of the great public policy failures of the 20th century, and we must not allow that failure to continue in this new century,” Senator Kennedy said. “Like his Social Security privatization fiasco, President Bush’s health savings accounts are a gimmick that will only make a bad situation worse. Our goal should be an America where no citizen of any age fears the cost of health care, and no employer stops creating jobs because of the high cost of providing health insurance.”
The “Medicare for All” plan will make health care coverage available to every American by expanding the Medicare program to the under 65 population. To promote competition and choice, enrollees will also have the option of choosing any of the plans offered to members of Congress, the President, and Federal employees.
Costs will be reduced by administrative savings from moving to a Medicare-style financing system, by bringing modern information technology to health care, by improving quality of care, and by rewarding health care providers based on performance, not just on the number of procedures performed. International competitiveness and job creation will be enhanced by reduced costs and by shifting some of the burden of financing from business contributions to general revenues, as well as the healthier and more productive work-force that will result from universal health insurance coverage.
To ease the transition to the new system, coverage will be implemented in phases. In the first, coverage will be extended to individuals 55-65 and to children under 20 years old. In later phases, coverage will be extended to all other Americans not already covered under Medicare.
To see full proposal to:
www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=5319
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