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The legislation is largely similar to the House bill to provide all lawful US residents with health care services. It establishes a State-Based American Health Security Program, an American Health Security Standards (developmental and administrative) Board, and an American Health Security Quality Council to review and evaluate guidelines, quality standards, performance measures, medical review criteria, and develop minimum competence criteria. It also creates the Office of Primary Care and Prevention Research at NIH within the Director's office and amends the Internal Revenue Code to fund the program.
Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP)
With over 16,000 physician members nationwide, PNHP believes universal single-payer coverage is a human right no different from food, shelter, clothing, and other essentials to life and well-being. High-quality health care "should be provided equitably as a public service rather than bought and sold as a commodity." All barriers to proper treatment must be removed for "the uninsured, the poor, minority populations and immigrants, both documented and undocumented."Â
Social justice demands democratic, not corporate, control, "public administration, and (equitable) single-payer financing" by progressive taxation. Doctors should be "professional advocates for (their) patients," not burdened under a wasteful system or constrained from delivering essential care by bureaucratic gatekeepers denying expensive treatments and excluding pre-existing conditions to control costs. Providers should be care-givers, not manipulated tools of marketplace medicine.Â
The Hippocratic Oath should be sacred under which physicians observe the highest ethical and moral standards - above all to deliver high quality care using their full range of knowledge, skills and tools. Only under universal single-payer coverage, freed from a for-profit bureaucracy, is that possible.
In testimony before Congress on June 24, PHNP's Dr. Quentin Young said:
Current congressional legislation "will fail miserably in its purported goal of providing comprehensive, sustainable health coverage to all Americans. And it will fail whether or not it includes a so-called 'public option'....."
"....single-payer national health insurance is not just the only path to universal coverage, it is the most politically feasible path to health care for all, because it pays for itself, requiring no new sources of revenue." It eliminates costly private insurance, achieves huge administrative savings (over $400 billion), and redirects them for care.Â
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