National Health Insurance Fact Sheet
Did you know that...
America's health care system is ranked 37th in the world, right after Costa Rica, by the World Health Organization. We rank 36th in infant mortality, after Cuba and Taiwan, and well behind Canada and the European nations.
In the US, we spend more per capita on health care than any other country on earth. We spend about twice as much as the Canadians, and almost three times as much as the English and the Japanese.
1 in 6 Americans has no health insurance coverage at all. That's 46 million people, 16% of the population. Millions more struggle with increasing premiums, deductibles, and co-pays.
The uninsured live sicker and die younger. The Institute of Medicine calculates that 18,000 people die every year purely because they don't have any insurance. That's almost 6 World Trade Center disasters every year.
Medical bills are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy. Even more surprising is that 75% of those declaring bankruptcy had insurance at the time they got sick. Even with insurance you're not safe.
Public opinion polls consistently find that 65% or more of Americans surveyed favor government health insurance, even if it means tax increases. More and more, business and labor groups are coming to the same conclusion. In a 2002 poll of U.S. physicians, 49% favored national health insurance versus 40% opposed.
Both the General Accounting Office (GAO) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reached the same conclusion: if we eliminated private health insurance and covered everyone under a single government program, we would increase efficiency and cut overhead so much that it would leave enough money to cover all the uninsured.
Every other industrialized nation in the world has come to the same conclusion -a government sponsored program of universal health insurance. The United States stands alone spending the most, covering the least, and with poor health outcomes compared to the rest of the developed world.
We already have a program of government sponsored insurance to cover many of our citizens - Medicare. It could be expanded to cover everyone. This would be social insurance, not socialized medicine.
You can get more information from Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan (www.hchp.info)
and from Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org).
You can get involved. Together we can work for change!
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