Page:Medicare for All Act of 2022 Executive Summary.pdf/1

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Since the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, there has been widespread discussion in this country about the need to guarantee health care to all as a fundamental human right. Today, at a time when every other major country on earth guarantees health care to every man, women and child it is time for the United States to fulfill that goal.

As important as it was to defeat Republican attempts to throw as many as 32 million Americans off of health care by repealing President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) that is not the end of our work. It is only the beginning.

In the midst of a pandemic that has claimed nearly one million American lives, the need to guarantee health care as a fundamental human right through a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system has never been more apparent.

Over one-third of all COVID-19 deaths and about 40 percent of all infections in the United States were linked to a lack of health insurance. Some 27 million workers and their dependents lost their employer-sponsored private health insurance at some point during the pandemic. Life expectancy in our country plummeted during the pandemic and now stands at just 76.6 years – the lowest since at least 1997.

In America today, over 30 million Americans are still uninsured and even more are under-insured because of high deductibles and premiums. Tens of thousands die each year because they can’t see a doctor in time and millions more suffer unnecessarily because of delayed treatment. Unbelievably, nearly one out of four Americans are unable to afford the prescription drugs their doctors prescribe.

Meanwhile, despite so many uninsured and under-insured, the United States spends far more per capita on health care than any other nation. According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), we spend $12,530 per capita on healthcare. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom spends just $5,268, Canada spends $5,370, France spends $5,564 and Germany spends $6,731 per capita on healthcare even though all of these other countries guarantee health care to all of their people. Despite this huge expenditure, our life expectancy is lower than most other industrialized countries and our infant mortality rates are much higher.

57 years ago, the United States took an important step towards universal health care by passing the Medicare program into law. Guaranteeing comprehensive health benefits for Americans over 65 has proven to be enormously successful and popular. Now is the time to expand and improve Medicare to guarantee health care to every man, woman and child in the country. Rh