DRAFT
Plan to Provide National Medicare (Single Payer) and
Strengthen Social Security For All
(Updated August 18, 2011)
(Readers - please provide constructive comments and additional items to Fisher@WeThePeopleNow.org)
The purpose and objectives of this plan and the other documents and web sites linked from it are to:
• Provide national, universal, privately and publicly delivered comprehensive
healthcare
for all
now under an expanded and improved Medicare (single payer)
system and ensure it is adequately financed into the indefinite future
.
• Strengthen social security for all now and ensure it is adequately financed into the indefinite future
• Improve effectiveness of and reduce health care and social security costs and accomplish the above with “transfers” but no involuntary layoffs
BACKGROUND:
According to an article Europe's Quiet Revolution by Steven Hill, published by RootsAction on August 15, 2011:
European nations are rated by the World Health Organization as having the best health care systems in the world, .... they spend only about half the amount (per capita) as the United States, which has a for-profit system, to provide universal coverage, even as 47 million Americans, many of them children, don't have any health care except a hospital emergency room. Despite spending far more money, U.S. health care is ranked 37th in the world -- just ahead of Cuba and Kuwait. Even European nations like Croatia, with far less wealth than America, provide health care for all, truly a damning indictment of the American for-profit system.
According to A SUMMARY OF THE 2011 ANNUAL REPORTS of the Social Security and Medicare Boards of
Trustees available at http://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/index.html:
Through 2022, the annual cash deficits [in Social Security Programs will be made up by redeeming trust fund assets from the General Fund of the Treasury. Because these redemptions will be less than interest earnings, trust fund balances will continue to grow. After 2022, trust fund assets will be redeemed in amounts that exceed interest earnings until trust fund reserves are exhausted in 2036, one year earlier than was projected last year. Thereafter, tax income would be sufficient to pay only about three-quarters of scheduled benefits through 2085.
Cost of the Disability Insurance (DI) program is increasing
Medicare’s Hospital (HI) Trust Fund is expected to pay out more in hospital benefits and other expenditures than it receives in income in all future years. The projected date of HI Trust Fund exhaustion is 2024, five years earlier than estimated in last year’s report, at which time dedicated revenues would be sufficient to pay 90 percent of HI costs.
Part B of Supplementary Medical Insurance (SMI), which pays doctors’ bills and other outpatient expenses, and Part D, which provides access to prescription drug coverage,are both projected to remain adequately financed into the indefinite future because current law automatically provides [taxpayers dollar] financing each year to meet the next year’s expected costs.
The very expensive, complicated and bureaucratic Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and the Medicare Part D Pharmaceutical Legislation provide billions of taxpayers dollars to health insurance and pharmaceutical companies that do not contribute to health care.
According to the report, Single Payer /Medicare Healthcare for All, such a system would:
• Create 2,613,495 million new permanent, good-paying jobs
• Boost the economy with $317 billion in increased business and public revenues
• Add $100 billion in employee compensation
• Infuse public budgets with $44 billion in new tax revenues
Funding is available for all this in the Social Security and Medicare trust fund and from Potential Funding Sources to pay for the work in the Common Agenda
ACTION:
A. Replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and Medicare Part D Pharmaceutical Legislation with meaningful legislation using the Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act, H.R. 676 as a starting point. The new legislation should include requirements to:
1. Pay doctors, dentists, nurses, nurses aids, interns, radiologist, anesthesiologists, pathologist, digital health record keepers, staff personnel, other healthcare professionals, reasonable wages/salaries etc. for the time they work rather than for each appointment, examination and treatment. Eliminate multiple billings for individual patients. (Currently doctors, radiologist, anesthesiologists, pathologist bill separate for operations in many hospitals.) These health care workers should work as part of team and each patient should be able to communicate with certain members of the team taking care of him.
2. Entire Government, including DoD, VA, Medicare, Medicaid, Public Hospitals and clinics negotiate prices of volume sales of prescription drugs, over the counter drugs, bandages, durable medical equipment, tools, equipment and essentially all other items and supplies used in hospitals.
3. Build approximately 1000 new modern hospitals and clinics equipped with the latest technology purchased at negotiated prices for volume sales.
4. Set up a system similar to a public library to check out/in durable medical equipment including crutches, wheel chairs, blood pressure monitors, thermometers, hospital beds for home use and rollators..
5. Develop and employ universal, standard, comprehensive, private, secure, digitized, health records to be used throughout the public and private sector. These records must use relational data bases with compartmented data that allows the information to be used for such things as data for actuarial and cost study purposes without divulging the identity of the patient/individual.
6. Reward individuals who practice preventative medicine, don’t smoke, eat properly, exercise and control their weight, blood pressure and cholesterol.
7. As appropriate make city, county, state and federal hospitals/clinics and community health centers) into government owned and operated or government owned, not for profit contractor operated (GOCO) Medicare/Medicaid, hospitals/clinics that educate, train and qualify doctors, nurses, dentists, nurses aids and other health care personnel, This should have been done with Walter Reed which is scheduled to be closed in September - perhaps it is not too late..
8. Study and implement best practices and lessons learned from health care systems in other countries and Medicare/Medicaid and Tri-Care for Life programs.
9. Pay family and friend care-givers who are taking care of disabled, mentally retarded or elderly needing long term care.
10. Forbid government funds, including medicaid and medicare, being used to buy health insurance from private companies.
11. Oppose forcing individuals to buy health insurance from for profit companies.
B. Modify social security legislation to strengthen social security and reduce social security costs. Ways this can be done include:
1. Increase Social Security payments so that they equate to 50% of retirement income instead of the current 39%
2. Do not establish private social security investment accounts. Ban stock market investments from individual social security accounts.