Proposal For Universal Health Care: Medicare For All
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Escalating health care costs, more than 42 million people uninsured, at least an equal number underinsured, 18,000 persons dying prematurely because of lack of health coverage, employers overwhelmed by double digit increases in company health insurance costs, employees overwhelmed with increased co-payments and deductibles coupled with reduced benefits, thousands more losing health care benefits concurrent with loss of employment and still others "stuck" in jobs because of pre-existing conditions... seems like a description, or prescription, for the "perfect storm"!

Instead of the usual band-aid approach to health care reform, this proposal presents a fbndamental change in the health care system. This proposal, Medicare for ALL, faces the challenge of universal access and cost control head-on.

With Medicare for ALL card in hand, every resident of the United States will have access to basic health care services regardless of age, income, health status? employment status, abiiity to pay or citizenship.

Medicare for ALL adds prescription medications? long term care and other vital basic health care services to the current Medicare program and invites ALL residents to participate, with the ability to select one's own state licensed practitioners.

Physicians can continue to practice on a fee-for-service basis? or receive salaries as staEin group practices, clinics or hospitals. Most hospitals and clinics will continue to be privately owned and operated.

Everyone shares in the cost of Medicare for All. All payments are deposited in the Medicare for ALL Trust Fund . A single entity (payer) in each state is established to promptly pay all providers. This is a publicly supported, privately delivered health care system. And the savings fkom this simple administrative structure are so enormous that it is possible to both expand access and reduce costs ! According to the Physicians Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance, this system "would squeeze out bureaucratic waste and eliminate the perverse incentives that threaten the quality of care and the ethical foundations of medicine."

Cardimal Joseph Bernardin has oft been quoted... "Health care is an essential sdeguard of human life and dignity, and there is an obligation for society to ensure that every person be able to realhe this right".

This is the right thing to do... and the right time to do it !

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