We Want JUST Health Care

Help revive the campaign for health care for everybody

LOOK back to 1992, when 38 million people in this country were without health insurance. Annual inflation in health care costs was in the double digits. Political candidates made promises and designed their own blueprints for reform. All failed.

IT'S 1998 and we've had enough of the schemes to insure a few more kids, to "allow" older people not yet 65 to purchase Medicare coverage, or to force corporate HMOs to treat those of us lucky enough to have insurance a little better. While politicians posture about passing a few watered-down laws to curb the worst HMO abuses, it's up to us to take a prominent role and focus the debate away from the Band-Aids and toward what's really needed in the United States - just health care for everyone!

In the `90s, things have gotten worse for a lot of Americans:

  • The number of people without health insurance is higher than ever - 42 million (one-sixth of the U.S. population!). And over 200 million are under-insured.

  • Workers are paying more for their health insurance. Between 1988 and 1996, the average premium contribution workers paid for family coverage increased by 146 percent.

  • A study by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research shows that as workers' out-of-pocket costs rise, more workers turn down coverage to avoid the extra hit on their paychecks. In fact, 85% of the uninsured are workers and members of working families.

  • Seniors with Medicare are spending on average 20% of their annual incomes on out-of-pocket costs.

  • The amount of administrative waste by insurance companies in the U.S. continues to increase - 20 to 30% of our health care dollars - and it's spent for mergers, advertising, scandalous CEO salaries, consultants, and lobbyists to stall reform and maintain the status quo.

    We all know that keeping health insurance in the private sector has given us less choice as patients, more gaps in coverage, more clinical interference by bureaucrats, and a backlash of ineffective government regulation.

    While the statistics have changed, OCAW's position hasn't - we support universal health care for all, and it's time to put this back on the political radar screen. In fact, we now have a golden opportunity to re-open the national debate over universal access to health care in America.

    What can we do now?
    It's time to start the campaign - your elected officials need to know that you support comprehensive health care for everyone including preventive care, doctor visits, hospital care, home nursing care, mental health care, drugs, and long-term care. They need to know that you support a universal system that eliminates the private insurance industry which spends billions of dollars trying to target the well and avoid the sick. They need to know that you want access to complete health care, not "insurance portability" from job to job; not a "kinder and gentler" HMO deciding your treatment.

    OCAW Research and Education Department

    Take the information in this Fight Back With The Facts and:
     
         * Write letters to the editor of your local paper.
     * Write letters to your elected officials.
     * Meet with your elected officials.
     * Support the Labor Party - its program includes health care
       reform.
                        Speak up and speak out!