For anyone who questions the value of commercial health insurance and wants to understand how to fix our health care system, Fix It: Healthcare at the Tipping Point is a must-see 58-minute film. It illustrates how commercial health insurers drive up costs and add little benefit. And, it shows us why an expanded Medicare system, which they call “single-payer,” is the smartest way to reduce costs and deliver value in our health care system.
The film focuses on how exorbitant health care costs put many businesses in the U.S. at risk and keep companies from opening factories here. And, it shows how the typical worker earning $18 or $19 an hour is wiped out if someone in his or her family gets sick. Even with insurance, people go broke paying the deductibles and other cost sharing, and businesses can go under when a few workers have costly conditions that drive up premiums substantially. “A few sick employees can take down a company.”
A wide range of health policy experts explain the waste that health insurers contribute to the system–effectively eating up a third of health care spending on sales, marketing, administration, profits–without adding real benefit and forcing hospitals and doctors to go through hoops to deliver needed care.
Choosing their health plan is not the “consumer choice” people want. Even top policy experts can’t understand their complex health insurance policies. People want choice of doctors and hospitals, not choice of insurance plans. Today, insurers ration care based on people’s ability to pay and keep people from seeing the doctors and hospitals of their choice. There’s no accountability.
We need one health plan–like Medicare–that covers everyone, and is transparent and accountable. Medicare for all brings costs under control, serves businesses and supports a free market.
Please sign this petition telling Congress to keep its hands off Medicare.
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