Let's be clear. Our health care system is disintegrating. Today, 46 million people have no health insurance and even more are underinsured with high deductibles and co-payments. At a time when 60 million people, including many with insurance, do not have access to a medical home, more than 18,000 Americans die every year from preventable illnesses because they do not get to the doctor when they should. This is six times the number who died at the tragedy of 9/11 - but this occurs every year.
In the midst of this horrendous lack of coverage, the U.S. spends far more per capita on health care than any other nation - and health care costs continue to soar. At $2.4 trillion dollars, and 18 percent of our GDP, the skyrocketing cost of health care in this country is unsustainable both from a personal and macro-economic perspective.
At the individual level, the average American spends about $7,900 per year on health care. Despite that huge outlay, a recent study found that medical problems contributed to 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007. From a business perspective, General Motors spends more on health care per automobile than on steel while small business owners are forced to divert hard-earned profits into health coverage for their employees - rather than new business investments. And, because of rising costs, many businesses are cutting back drastically on their level of health care coverage or are doing away with it entirely.
Further, despite the fact that we spend almost twice as much per person on health care as any other country, our health care outcomes lag behind many other nations. We get poor value for what we spend. According to the World Health Organization the United States ranks 37th in terms of health system performance and we are far behind many other countries in terms of such important indices as infant mortality, life expectancy and preventable deaths.
As the health care debate heats up in Washington, we as a nation have to answer two very fundamental questions. First, should all Americans be entitled to health care as a right and not a privilege - which is the way every other major country treats health care and the way we respond to such other basic needs as education, police and fire protection? Second, if we are to provide quality health care to all, how do we accomplish that in the most cost-effective way possible?
I think the answer to the first question is pretty clear, and one of the reasons that Barack Obama was elected president. Most Americans do believe that all of us should have health care coverage, and that nobody should be left out of the system. The real debate is how we accomplish that goal in an affordable and sustainable way. In that regard, I think the evidence is overwhelming that we must end the private insurance company domination of health care in our country and move toward a publicly-funded, single-payer Medicare for All approach.
Our current private health insurance system is the most costly, wasteful, complicated and bureaucratic in the world. Its function is not to provide quality health care for all, but to make huge profits for those who own the companies. With thousands of different health benefit programs designed to maximize profits, private health insurance companies spend an incredible (30 percent) of each health care dollar on administration and billing, exorbitant CEO compensation packages, advertising, lobbying and campaign contributions. Public programs like Medicare, Medicaid and the VA are administered for far less.
In recent years, while we have experienced an acute shortage of primary health care doctors as well as nurses and dentists, we are paying for a huge increase in health care bureaucrats and bill collectors. Over the last three decades, the number of administrative personnel has grown by 25 times the numbers of physicians. Not surprisingly, while health care costs are soaring, so are the profits of private health insurance companies. From 2003 to 2007, the combined profits of the nation's major health insurance companies increased by 170 percent. And, while more and more Americans are losing their jobs and health insurance, the top executives in the industry are receiving lavish compensation packages. It's not just William McGuire, the former head of United Health, who several years ago accumulated stock options worth an estimated $1.6 billion or Cigna CEO Edward Hanway who made more than $120 million in the last five years. The reality is that CEO compensation for the top seven health insurance companies now averages $14.2 million.
Moving toward a national health insurance program which provides cost-effective universal, comprehensive and quality health care for all will not be easy. The powerful special interests - the insurance companies, drug companies and medical equipment suppliers - will wage an all-out fight to make sure that we maintain the current system which enables them to make billions of dollars. In recent years they have spent hundreds of millions on lobbying, campaign contributions and advertising and, with unlimited resources, they will continue spending as much as they need.
But, at the end of the day, as difficult as it may be, the fight for a national health care program will prevail. Like the civil rights movement, the struggle for women's rights and other grass-roots efforts, justice in this country is often delayed - but it will not be denied. We shall overcome!
To keep up to date on the health care debate in the Senate, sign up for the Bernie Buzz newsletter here.
Loading comments… 
That you allow the corporatis
Score one for the PR industry.
Once you go public, you will never go back. The vested interests know this and will do everything they can to maintain the status quo which allows them to charge you exorbitant rates for "Health Care" which they then don't even provide when you need it.
It is truly appalling the profiteeri
It will take a similar grassroots effort to the one that got Obama elected to break the hold of big money on Congrees.
But let me tell you, as someone who would likely be long dead if my country's health system was anything like yours: It will be worth it.
President Barak Obama will be speaking at the AMA annual meeting sometime on Monday.
Single payer activists and supporters plan to use the occasion to demonstrat
When: Monday June 15, 11:00 am
Where: Tribune Tower, 435 North Michigan Avenue, near the American Gothic sculpture
The location is some distance from the hotel where the AMA meeting is being held to prevent demonstrat
If you believe "Health Care For ALL. Not Some. Not Most. ALL" please show your support!
I also believe that our so called health care system is anything but that. It is a disease treatment system.
There have been numerous studies that point out that 80 percent of all illness is 'preventab
I am all for providing financial support in the event of catastroph
Perhaps if we stopped using the misnomer health care and started using the more accurate and responsibl
And yes, housing, food and clothing are a right too. . . or would you prefer that the myriad homeless, many of them mentally ill, fend for themselves forever, capable or not of providing for themselves
Drawing the line is difficult: is a job a right or a privilege? how about an education? how about vacations in the countrysid
The way I see it, true responsibi
Insurance companies are a major issue but simply insisting that a notoriousl
But things cannot simply remain as they are. Industry greed and population boom has caused a meteoric rise in cost in the last generation which will result in a collapse far exceeding the banking crisis. There are many places for free market ideology. The healthcare industry is NOT one of them. A healthcare industry which profits on human death toll is absurd and abominable
If this regulation isn't adopted willingly by the industry or forced upon them by legislatio
These kinds of lies need to stop.
The only problem with your argument when it relates to healthcare is for all the choices suppliers have, consumers don't have any choice at all. It's either get treatment or die. Doesn't sound like a very fair business model to me on basic supply and demand economic standards. So we're left with the fourth option then where an unregulate
But we can simplify it even more, it's just Darwinism really right? Strongest survive and all? Only thing is, we're not animals, at least not most of us. We can be reasonable
If federal and state government refuse to regulate because of lack of courage or their dedication to lobbyist bribery then we as citizens need to open our eyes and truly decide whether our structure of government has become too corrupt to continue. And if so we need to usher in third and fourth party candidates with revolution
A nation's problems are only as deep as the laws which ignore them, the lack of enforcemen
"Our current private health insurance system is the most costly, wasteful, complicate
Yes, but how is it that the government is the solution? Really, the government has such an impressive record on reducing cost, waste and buracracy.
Let's say for the sake of argument it is a right. Isn't food also, then, a right? How is it that that the nation seems able to feed itself without government running farms?
Thing is eating is not a choice, so people are forced to budget their income for food. Difference is people can choose to go without health care and thus not budget for it. They then complain that they can't afford it. If people are expected to budget for food and housing on their own, they why is it not appropriat
Life is about choices. We all have to budget for our neccessiti
If you think private health insurance is such a screaming deal, then no one's going to take it away from you.
All people want is the choice to make that decision for themselves
And the problem is that it is not _all people want to make that descision for themselves
Now that's not to say nothing should be done about costs. I'm sure there is a lot that can be improved with careful study and considered problem solving. But all of the hyperventi
But it is not a right.
As someone posted downstream
New forms of therapies have to be approved faster. Combinatio
Who are these mysterious 46 million without insurance? Mostly higher income individual
http://spe
Why do some try to portray health care as a right? So we the tax payers will allow us to be saddled with higher taxes and fewer choices to pay for those who will not purchase insurance for themselves
Of course healthcare isn't a right!
No siree, we can't have you paying a penny out of pocket for those Welfare kings/Quee
Can't pay - well f$%k 'em - go get a job you hosers!
Also - you forgot them - all those millions of ilegals rushing to our borders to avail themselves of our superior healthcare
Those hardworkin
Aside from the semantic redundancy of being “entitled to a right,” there are, simply with the statement, two problems:
1- What does Saunders mean by “health care”? Is it only band-aids, does it extend to triple-byp
2- Saunders writes as if everything that is not a right is a privilege. Obviously not so.
You live in a bubble and have no incentive to better anyone's life but your own.
Seriously, its everyone for themselves
you are perfectly entitled to exchange your brutish life of labor for the luxurious leisure of those unfairly living in the the social service bounty of cheating wastrels and slackers. but somehow no put-upon, abused taxpayer slaving under the socialist lash ever wants to change places with those basking in the infinite, ill-begott