Public Employee Press

Join DC 37’s Fight for Affordable Health Care

The time for national health care and
drug price controls is now!

Our nation’s health care system faces a crisis

• 46 million Americans have no health insurance.
• 18,000 Americans die each year because they have inadequate coverage or none at all.

Health care for profit is wasteful and inefficient

• The United States spends $5,000 per person on health care — more than any other nation — yet we rank 24th in life expectancy and 20th in infant mortality among high-income industrialized countries.
• Up to 30 percent of health care spending is wasted on corporrate profits, and goes toward marketing, executive salaries and bureaucracy.

National health insurance and price controls would provide affordable care for everyone and benefit workers and retirees

• Unions would no longer be forced to give up wage increases to preserve members’ health care coverage.
• A single-payer system would save at least $200 billion a year by eliminating super profits and administrative waste — enough to cover all the uninsured.
• Seniors would no longer have to choose between buying their medicines and putting food on the table.
• Eliminating health care obligations would get rid of the fiscal strain on city and state budgets — freeing up money for services and better pay for public employees.

President Bush’s “trickle-down health care” policies won’t curb skyrocketing costs or increase access to health care

• His promotion of individual private health savings accounts for medical expenses is mainly a tax-beating scheme for the wealthy, who can accumulate the money tax-free until retirement and then spend their funds on anything.
• Banks and Wall Street firms will stuff their pockets with fees by managing the private accounts.

Runaway prices are crippling prescription benefits and straining city and state Medicaid budgets

• By charging excessive prices and politically blocking cost controls, pill manufacturing has become the country’s most profitable industry.
• Lobbying by pharmaceutical firms got Congress to prohibit the government from negotiating fair prices in the legislation that created the new incompetently run Medicare drug benefit.
• Drug prices in countries with national health insurance are a third to a half lower than in the U.S.

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