Progressive Talking Points 1/25/06

The State of…Health Care

By spending $1.7 trillion on health care in our country – roughly 15 percent of the nation’s economy – one would imagine the United States would have the best health care in the world, yet sadly this is not the case. We are in fact ranked 37th in the World. The reality is that the American health care system is broken. The number of Americans without health insurance has increased by 6.2 million, to 46 million. The administration’s lack of leadership and mismanagement has put our country on the wrong trajectory, with no help in sight. The time for real, comprehensive reform is now - and that will take real leadership from Washington.

• The administration’s new health care solutions have helped their intended targets, the pharmaceutical industry. The administration has done a phenomenal job of crafting a prescription drug bill for the drug companies, but has once again left those in need far behind. The new “consumer driven health care plan” has only caused confusion among beneficiaries and has shifted costs from the healthy to the sick and elderly. The plan has even found a conservative critic in Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN), who said, "The new federal program is too complicated for many people to understand, and the implementation of the new program by the federal government has been awful."
  
  
• Racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities still pervade America's health care system. Poor Americans and people of color receive substandard health care across the board. The death rate for African Americans is substantially higher than that of white Americans, and the infant mortality rate for African Americans is twice the rate for whites. Poor people are less likely to seek preventative medical care, which results in higher health care costs when they get sick. These disparities end up being a drain on all Americans.
  
  
• Americans want a health care solution that controls cost and makes prevention a priority. By a margin of nearly 2-to-1 Americans have identified health care as the number one threat facing the economic well-being of individual Americans. With American families feeling increasingly helpless in the face of skyrocketing costs and stagnant wages, they are desperate for real reform. To meet this need American Progress has progressive solutions for real changes.