Single payer health care makes sense

Some advantages to Single Payer Health Coverage
a/k/a Medicare for All from Health Care for All Colorado:

* Comprehensive medical benefits.

* Choice of primary care provider and medical providers.

* Health decisions made by patient and provider instead of HMOs.

* Improved Health Planning.

* Health coverage would be portable, not tied to employment.

* Eliminates the high (up to 33 percent) overhead cost of multiple private, for-profit insurances by including coverage for everyone in a single-risk pool (reducing administrative costs to 1-5%).

* Instead of hundreds of insurances with differing requirements (requiring increased office staff), providers would deal with only one form.

* The plan would be financed with a progressive tax, at less per-capita cost.

* Companies would avoid hassles of managing health care, and become more competitive without annual inflationary health costs.

* Consumers would pay less for goods and services that are inflated by businesses? high health costs - e.g., currently $1,500 is added to the cost of each U.S.-made automobile due to health costs.

* U.S. Consumers , who now spend twice as much per capita as consumers in other developed countries (with poorer outcomes), would save as administrative health costs are reduced.

* Single-risk-pool coverage would permit negotiation of lower, bulk rates for medications.

* Increased U.S. life expectancy: Similar socioeconomic single-payer European countries enjoy average two-year longer life expectancies.

* The over-45 million uninsured Americans and 50 million more underinsured would have access to preventative care, without having to resort to delayed, crisis Emergency Room care. at 4 to 5 times higher cost.

* Lessening demands on the nation?s emergency rooms for primary care would stem the tide of closures of overburdened emergency rooms.

* Retirees would not face loss of health coverage by employers.

Eliminates the profit motive that places priority on stockholders? profits, and creates a perverse incentive to deny health coverage to the ill or high-risk.

http://healthcareforallcolorado.org/?p=10