Health Care For America Now

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• How will we pay for it?
• How much will it cost? Where will we get the money?
• How will health care reform save money?
• Given our economic mess, how can we afford health care reform?

HCAN believes that families, employers, and government have a shared responsibility to pay for health care. Families will pay on a sliding scale. Employers will either provide health coverage or pay into a fund based on a percentage of employees’ wages, with little or no costs for small, lower-wage businesses. And we will need the government to provide assistance to families and small businesses to keep coverage affordable.

In the long run, reforming the system will bring down the cost of providing care and control future increases. The only way to achieve savings and reduce the level and rate of increases in the future is with comprehensive reform that provides coverage to everyone and institutes cost controls that improve quality. We’ll need to invest in health coverage upfront to cover everyone and put reforms in place. The cost will be around $100 billion a year for 10 years. President Obama proposes raising most of that money by raising taxes on people who earn more than $250,000 a year and by stopping overpayments that Medicare is now making to private health insurance plans. Congress will need to come up with additional funds or savings.

Comprehensive health care reform will save money through:

• Prevention and primary care for everyone so that people don’t need expensive treatment for diseases that could have been prevented or treated early at a much lower cost.
• Giving everyone access to a doctor or other provider instead of uninsured people crowding expensive hospital emergency rooms. Good care and management of the chronic diseases, which make up most of our nation’s health care costs.
• Investment in health information technology that will help reduce wasteful spending across the health care system. Some examples include eliminating duplicative diagnostic tests and preventing medical errors.
• Researching which health care treatments work the best and encouraging their widespread use.
• Requiring hospitals to collect and report health care cost and quality data.
• Lower drug costs by bargaining for lower drug costs, allowing the importation of safe medicines from other developed countries, and increasing the use of generic drugs.

As President Obama has said, “Now I know that at this moment, when we stand in the midst of a serious economic crisis, some might ask how we can afford to focus on health care…. the question isn’t how we can afford to focus on health care – but how we can afford not to. In order to fix our economic crisis, and rebuild our middle class, we need to fix our health care system too. So it’s clear that the time has come – right now – to solve this problem: to cut health care costs for families and businesses, and provide affordable, accessible health insurance for every American.”