Even after billions of dollars have been spent on the Affordable Care Act, some 30 million Americans remain without health insurance. And not by choice, mind you! Most of the uninsured agree that health insurance would be good to have, if only they could afford it.
The solution isn’t throwing a few more billion dollars at the problem by having the government buy private health insurance for the uninsured. The solution is to rethink healthcare reform.
Sadly, with the Affordable Care Act, a decision was made early on to retain much of the system that we had. Meaning the federal government would continue to pay for the health care of the most vulnerable people with programs such as Medicare for seniors, Medicaid for the indigent, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and the Veterans Administration for soldiers.
And the private health insurance industry would continue to insure those of us who can afford it, at a profit – mainly through employer-provided insurance.
Holding on to that old system meant that lots of people would fall through the cracks. And today there are 30 million people who have done just that.
Why? Because when you divide the healthcare system into thousands of different parts, there are lots of cracks for people to fall through. Most insured people get their insurance through their jobs, but what happens when they’re laid off? Or if they earn so little, they can’t afford to pay their share?
Even people who qualify for government insurance, like Medi-Cal, face coverage gaps depending on where they live. That’s because Medi-Cal is administered county by county in California, and available care varies widely.
The bottom line is that our old system created dramatic inequity in health care access and affordability. And the Affordable Care Act did little to correct it.
HEAL California supports universal healthcare. That means instead of each person having to navigate a complicated and expensive private health insurance marketplace, or get a job with a big company that provides insurance, or qualify for a government program, coverage would be automatic and include everybody.
There would be ZERO uninsured people, because everybody would be included.
Sounds, great, huh! But, you’re thinking, “That sounds pretty expensive, how would we pay for it?” And you’re right. In our current “corporate healthcare” set up, the options for including everybody are pretty expensive.
That’s because a fractured system like ours is extremely complicated to administer. A January 2015 study showed that we waste $375 billion on billing and health-insurance-related paperwork each year. (Here’s more on billing and insurance-related costs (BIR) costs.)
By basing our healthcare reform on that pre-existing wasteful model, we drove those costs up even higher! In May 2015, CNBC reported on a study that showed the Affordable Care Act added an additional $270 billion in overhead to what was already an obscene waste of our healthcare dollars.
How? Because the biggest increase in the number of insured people did not come about because more of us could afford to buy insurance (which has not become more affordable because of the Affordable Care Act).
It’s because we expanded Medi-Cal to cover more people, and in the most expensive way possible – paying private health insurance corporations to run it and adding billions in overhead to what should have remained a government program.
Yes, we privatized government programs and drove up costs for taxpayers. Now you’re paying more in premiums to insure yourself and your family, and you’re paying more in taxes to insure people who can’t afford to buy insurance themselves. Talk about a double whammy!
What could we have done instead? Well, we could have taken the most cost-effective healthcare program in the country (which only costs about 2% to administer – instead of 20%) and expanded it to cover everybody.
And what’s that program? It’s traditional Medicare.
According to Steffie Woolhandler, MD, of Physicians for a National Health Program, “Traditional Medicare is a bargain compared to the ACA strategy of filtering most of the new dollars through private insurers and private HMOs that subcontract for much of the new Medicaid coverage. Indeed, dropping the overhead figure from 22.5 percent to traditional Medicare’s 2 percent would save $249.3 billion by 2022.”
So what’s the answer? How can we afford universal health care without breaking the bank? Simple. We make every single dollar count. We streamline our healthcare system by improving Medicare and expanding it to cover everybody.
Read more here about the HEAL California solution, and join us! Together we will win!
Want to know more?
Kaiser Family Foundation: Key Facts about the Uninsured Population
Obamacare Facts: Uninsured Rates
Five arguments for universal health care