By Claudia Wright
The United States needs to make affordable healthcare available to everyone. I believe that Medicare for All–expanding the existing Medicare system to cover all Americans–is the solution. Medicare uses six cents of every dollar for administrative overhead; private health insurance companies use 27 to 33 cents of every dollar for administrative costs, including shareholder profits and CEO salaries and bonuses. We pay twice as much per capita as the next industrial nation in the world for healthcare. However, we are ranked 37th among industrialized nations for quality of healthcare.
Where does the money go? The average CEO of a major healthcare insurer received a bonus (not salary) of 11.4 million dollars in 2008. Medicare for All would eliminate the profit motive that drives up healthcare prices and has resulted in the average Utah family’s healthcare premium rising 84.7% from 2000 to 2007.
Furthermore, expanding the existing Medicare system to cover all Americans would rescue Medicare by changing its risk pool from the oldest and sickest Americans to a diverse pool including millions of young, healthy Americans who require inexpensive preventative care.
I believe that hospitals need to share freely their most effective practices. Studies have illustrated that when a hospital cuts costs and adopts streamlined procedures, the quality of healthcare actually goes up. In other words, better healthcare costs less. Sharing strategies for effective, cost-efficient care and offering incentives for adopting best-practices would substantially cut costs. And of course, the cost of pharmaceuticals needs to be capped.
Having Medicare open to all citizens as a single payer is the only way, but then you can allow people and/or companies to provide supplemental insurance if they choose. Social Security, remove the salery cap, every dollar earned should be subject to Social Security taxes. When the cap was put in place less than 1% of the people earned over the cap, now we have millions earning over the cap.