Cut Out Insurers, Save $400 Billion on Healthcare?
Interviews Available
QUENTIN YOUNG, M.D., via Mark Almberg, (312) 782-6006, cell: (312)
622-0996, mark@pnhp.org
National coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program,
Young will be testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee,
chaired by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), on Wednesday. Young is past
president of the American Public Health Association and is a master in
the American College of Physicians. A longtime friend of Barack Obama,
he was the Rev. Martin Luther King's doctor when King was organizing in
Chicago.
Young said today: "The health reform bills emerging from the House
and Senate are deeply flawed. The crisis in health care is due to one
big thing: our multi-payer system of private insurance companies.
Everybody knows that. Obama knows that. He said he was for single payer
not that many years ago, and has said if he were starting from scratch,
he would go with it. He also said we'd first have to take back the White
House, the Senate and the House. ...
"Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume nearly
one-third of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a
single, nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year,
enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.
"The system, as Obama aptly notes, is running amuck, and it's
costing our nation up to $2.5 trillion annually, rising at a rate two or
three times the rate of inflation. And he’s right in saying the economy
can’t tolerate it.
“A so-called public plan option won't touch the foundations of this
dysfunctional, wasteful, multi-payer system of insurers. It will not
provide cost control."
Background:
"I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care
program." [applause] "I see no reason why the United States of America,
the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent
of its Gross National Product on health care, cannot provide basic
health insurance to everybody. And that's what Jim is talking about when
he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a
universal health care plan. And that's what I'd like to see. But as all
of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to
take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have
to take back the House."
-- Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama, 2003
Videos and background: http://www.pnhp.org/change,
http://1payer.net/videos.html
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167