Muslims For Kucinich

An issue statement on healthcare:

Major Issues / Major Changes in Health Care: Dennis J. Kucinich
February 17, 2004

UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

"I am the only candidate in this race with a detailed plan to provide universal health care. Others use that phrase, but their plans leave many Americans without coverage. Under my plan patients and doctors are put in charge of the system, not HMOs and private insurance companies. Patients are able to select their doctors. The costs are completely covered by the government. And we don't end up paying any more than what we're paying now. We're already paying for universal coverage. We're just not getting it. We're pouring a large portion of every health care dollar into the waste of the private insurance companies, their executive salaries and stock options, their lobbying and advertising. My plan would remove that waste by making the government the single payer for health care.

"My plan is called Enhanced Medicare for All -- a universal, single-payer system of national health insurance, carefully phased in over 10 years. It addresses everyone's needs, including the 45 million Americans without coverage and those paying exorbitant rates for health insurance. This approach to health care emphasizes patient choice, and puts doctors and patients in control of the system, not insurance companies. Coverage will be more complete than private insurance plans, encourage prevention and include prescription drugs, dental care, mental health care, and alternative and complementary medicine.

"This plan is based on a bill I introduced together with Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, H.R. 676. Under this plan individuals would not have to pay premiums, deductibles, or co-pays. Other candidates would leave the insurance companies in charge. The insurance and the pharmaceuticals companies right now, they own us. We need to take our health care system back.

"Health care is currently dominated by insurance firms and HMOs, institutions that are more bureaucratic and costly than Medicare. Right now, private companies are charging about 18 percent for administration, while the cost of Medicare administration is only 3 percent. People are waiting longer for appointments. Fewer people are getting a doctor of their choice. Physicians are being given monetary incentives to deny care. Pre-existing illnesses are being used to deny coverage. It's important to understand that insurance companies make more money by NOT providing health care. A single-payer system can save money by investing in preventive care, as well as by cutting out the insurance companies' profits.

"Over time, my plan will remove private insurance companies from the system -- along with their waste, paperwork, profits, excessive executive salaries, advertising, sales commissions, etc -- and redirect resources to actual treatment. Insurance companies do not heal or treat anyone. Physicians and health practitioners do.

"Non-profit national health insurance will actually decrease total health care spending while providing more treatment and services -- through reductions in bureaucracy and cost-cutting measures such as bulk purchasing of prescriptions drugs. A study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Public Citizens found that health care bureaucracy last year cost the United States $399.4 billion. The study estimates that national health insurance could save at least $286 billion annually on paperwork, enough to cover all of the uninsured and to provide full prescription drug coverage for everyone in the United States.

"Funding for my health plan will come primarily from existing government health care spending (more than $1 trillion) and a phased-in tax on employers of 7.7 percent (almost $1 trillion). Employers who provide coverage are already paying 8.5 percent on average. That would raise about $920 billion. In addition to that, there's already over a trillion dollars being spent a year in local, state and federal dollars for health care. The American people are already paying for universal health care, they're just not getting it.

"It is time to take the profit out of health care coverage, time to provide for the American people, not for the insurance companies. I am not running for insurance salesman in chief.

"The type of system I am proposing -- privately-delivered health care, publicly financed -- has worked well in other countries, none of which spend as much per capita on health care as the United States. The cost-effectiveness of a single-payer system has been affirmed in many studies, including those conducted by the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office. The GAO has said: 'If the US were to shift to a system of universal coverage and a single payer, as in Canada, the savings in administrative costs (10% to private insurers) would be more than enough to offset the expense of universal coverage.'

"Over the years, groups and individuals as diverse as Consumers Union, labor unions, the CEO of General Motors, the editorial boards of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and St. Louis Post Dispatch, and Physicians for a National Health Program have endorsed a single-payer approach. In the 'Physicians Proposal for National Health Care,' 7,782 physicians agreed that, 'Proposals that would retain the roles of private insurers -- such as calls for tax-credits, Medicaid/CHIP expansions, and pushing more seniors into private HMO's -- are prescriptions for failure.'

"It is sound economics -- what actuaries call 'Spreading the Risk' -- to extend Medicare to younger and healthier sectors of our population, thereby putting everyone in one insurance pool. It permanently saves and improves Medicare, while eliminating duplicative private and government bureaucracies.

"While enhanced Medicare for All makes economic sense, it has not made political sense to some, due to the power of the private insurance lobby. My streamlined plan is very different than the 1993 Clinton HMO-based plan, a complex proposal that left big insurance firms in a central role. After President Clinton's 'Managed Competition' plan failed without coming up for a vote, talk-radio host Jim Hightower asked President Clinton why he hadn't put forward a 'simple, straightforward' single-payer plan 'instead of all this bureaucracy.' Clinton replied, 'I thought it would be easier to pass' a bill that left the insurance industry in place. 'I guess I was wrong about that.'

PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

Today there are senior citizens throughout America who are forced to make cruel choices between paying the high cost of prescription drugs or buying food, between prescription drugs or clothing. Seniors are splitting their pills to make prescriptions last, splitting their budgets with $600 monthly prescription bills, splitting their physical and economic health.

The pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable in America, even more profitable than the banking industry. America is a captive market. Americans pay 64% more than Canadians pay for the same pharmaceuticals. Canadians have a system to control prices.

Solution:
Our government should place limits on the price that any manufacturer can charge for prescription drugs. We need a new Prescription for America, a regulatory structure which puts a ceiling on drug company profits the same way credit laws establish what constitutes usury. As with utility rates, our government should be empowered to lower prices and impose windfall profits taxes to correct excess pricing.

MEDICARE

In my judgment, the so-called "new" Medicare bill passed just before Thanksgiving is not about reforming Medicare, it is about dismantling it. It is a Republican bait and switch of historic proportions, and if it is allowed to stand, it may well result in the unraveling of Medicare itself. Actually, it is a curious kind of Medicare reform: a giveaway to HMOs, big insurance companies, and obscenely profitable drug companies-but a debacle for America's senior citizens.

Because I don't want to believe that the AARP's national leadership willfully sold out its members, I guess I prefer to say that they naively allowed themselves to be sold a bill of goods. But senior citizens aren't being fooled-and the AARP membership is now engaged in the biggest revolt against its leadership since the 1980s, with somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 members resigning from the organization in just the last couple of weeks.

The problems with the bill are many-fold. For one thing, it does nothing to restrain the skyrocketing escalation of drug prices-and that failure is largely responsible for the bill's exorbitant price tag-$400 billion-for American taxpayers. Second, the bill does not restrain exorbitantly priced drugs or allow for a blanket re-importation of American-made drugs from Canada, where the same drugs are sold for 30-70% less than they are here.

Third, the bill's new "asset tests" and eligibility requirements means that many low-income seniors (perhaps as many as 3 million) will no longer qualify for pharmaceutical subsidies. Fourth, the bill loosens requirements for health-plan quality assurance, makes the health care labyrinth ever-more complex, and fails to provide any standardized systems or adequate tools to allow patients to make informed health-care choices.

And, maybe worst of all, the bill doesn't even provide much of a drug benefit! Instead of paying a modest co-payment for prescription drugs like most seniors were anticipating, under this bill, seniors with $5100 of drug costs will have to pick up $3600 of the cost themselves. And this, of course, is after and in addition to paying an average premium of $420 a year for the so-called "benefit." What it all adds up to is this: According to the highly-respected Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, because of the bill's meager drug benefit and its failure to contain drug prices MOST seniors will be spending MORE on drugs in 2007, when the so-called benefit is fully in effect, than they do today when there is no Medicare drug benefit at all.

Of course, some folks make out very well, indeed, under this bill. It's absolutely larded with handouts to drug companies and private insurers, many of whom are, unsurprisingly, major campaign contributors to President Bush and the Republican Congress.

In the end, however, I think one of the worst things about this bill is that by forcing traditional Medicare to compete against private plans beginning in 2010, it may well lead to the privatization of Medicare and putting seniors in the hands of "insurance sharks" who are more concerned about profits than providing quality medical care.

To understand why the privatization of Medicare is such a bad idea, you have to understand that insurance companies don't want to insure too many people who might actually need actual health care. They make money by "cherry picking"; that is, by insuring healthy and wealthy customers and excluding the less healthy and less fortunate. Under this bill, they will be free to do that, thus leaving the poorest and the sickest elderly folks to be insured by Medicare. Of course, that will allow the private insurance companies to make money, while the Medicare program loses it--thus giving the Republicans another chance to crow about the efficiencies of the private sector over the public sector. In truth, of course, private insurance companies in America-which fail to cover over 40 million citizens--now spend more than $1,000 per person on health care administration costs, while Canada's system of public health care-which covers everyone in that country-spends only about $300 per person on administrative costs.

As a Congressman, I am proud to have voted against this shameful Medicare "reform" bill. And as President, I will do everything in my power to reverse it and again make Medicare a solemn contract with America's seniors. Nor will I stop there. I will also lead the fight to make enhanced Medicare, truly comprehensive coverage, available to all Americans.

MENTAL HEALTH

Millions of citizens in this country are being neglected by our current leadership. Among them are the homeless, veterans, convicts, and the mentally ill. These members of our society are intricately linked, because there is much overlap between them. Those who are mentally ill are often homeless because they are unable to work. Homeless people often develop mental illness because of the conditions in which they are forced to live. Hundreds of thousands of mentally ill citizens are arrested and locked up every year -- most for non-violent crimes like disorderly conduct or trespassing. In fact, our nation's prisons are now the largest provider of mental health in the nation, despite the fact that it is much more expensive to incarcerate a person than it is to provide psychological treatment. There are a half-million mentally ill veterans who are homeless. These fellow citizens need help, but it is not always available.

For those who are not homeless, incarcerated, or living in a shelter, treatments for mental illnesses can work -- if they can afford them. Unfortunately, mental illness is not treated as an insurable illness by most companies, forcing patients and their families to pay the high expenses out of pocket.

This climate of neglect towards the mentally ill must and will change under a Kucinich Adminstration. Dennis Kucinich has long been an advocate of increased funding towards mental health programs. He is a strong supporter of The Paul Wellstone Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act and co-sponsored numerous other acts that also address the issue of insurance companies charging significantly more for mental ailments than they do for physical ailments.

He co-sponsored the Mental Health Juvenile Justice Act, which aims to divert our youth who need mental health counseling and substance abuse counseling away from detention halls and into treatment centers. He has also written letters in support of mental health treatment and services, and has addressed congress about the essence of these issues.

Dennis Kucinich believes that mental health care is a right, not a privilege. As President, he will ensure that everyone has access to the treatments and counseling they need, as part of his not-for-profit universal health care plan. This fundamental change in our health care system will provide full coverage, including mental health, to every American, both working and unemployed. By taking the profit out of health care, we will be able to direct our resources towards doctors and patients, not corporations and CEO's.

When people start getting the mental help they need, not only will we be a healthier society, but our prisons will benefit and there will fewer people forced to live on the streets.