What ID National Health Insurance (NHI)?
To begin with, it is NOT "Socialized Medicine", far from it in fact. Also it does not mean that our medical system will be taken over by the government and run like the post office as many of our opposition friends would mistakenly have you believe.
Basically, House Resolution (H.R.) 676, the "New Expanded Medicare" bill now in sub-committee in the House of Representatives simply creates a new and far more functional "single payer" method of paying for medical services while leaving the medical system itself completely alone and intact. This will eliminate the hundreds of complicated and redundant payment plans currently imposed on the system by private "for profit" health insurance companies and save literally BILLIONS of dollars every year by eliminating such wasteful duplication. This will allow your doctors offices and hospitals to function much more efficiently and serve your needs much more effectively as well. Just imagine what huge benefit this will be!
Taxes: We all know that nothing of any real value is ever free, but if you think of the taxes that will be required to support national health insurance as simply a lower cost alternative to the staggering private health insurance premiums that most of us already have to pay but will be totally eliminated under the new system, then it becomes immediately clear that this could be a really good deal after all.
Check out some of the tremendous benefits that NHI will bring and see what you think:
- Every citizen of the US will be covered from birth to death.
- No more pre-existing conditions be be excluded from coverage.
- No more expensive deductions or co pays.
- All prescription medications will be covered.
- All dental and eye care will be included.
- Mental health and substance abuse care will be fully covered.
- Long term and nursing home services will be included.
- You will always choose your own doctors and hospitals.
- Costs of coverage will be assessed on a sliding scale basis.
- Tremendously simplified system of medical administration.
Existing Medicare benefits for those over 65 will remain the same of be vastly improved in many cases.
The real irony is that this new system will be a lot less expensive and provide much better services than the largely dysfunctional system currently in place and still leave us with the best health care system in the entire world, only with the New Medicare it will be even better!
Don't be put off by all of the misleading and often inaccurate rhetoric that you so often hear about changing our system. For example uninformed critics will ask "Do you really want your medical decisions made by some government bureaucrat in Washington?" Well, the truth is that with NHI just about every medical decision will be made privately by you and your doctor. But ironically, under the current system, many medical decisions about what's best for you are now being made by some corporate bureaucrat working for a private insurance company whose main concern is making larger profits by denying your claims. How exactly does that work out to be better for you??
Change is indeed often a very scary thing to most people, but when the need is so great and the proposed changes are so much better than the status quo, maybe changing to a NHI system in the USA is something that we can all think about supporting, whether you are a moderate, liberal or conservative, after giving it a lot of careful study and thought. Please call your congressperson and let them know what you think. They really need to hear from you.
Personally, I can't wait until this bill is passed. It will help so many people who are delaying medical treatment because they cannot afford it. An American citizen should not have to choose between food and medicine. This is a disgrace to our country.
