Issue Position: Health Care for All

Issue Position

I support universal health care because I believe that quality, affordable health care coverage should be a right, not a privilege available only to those who can afford it. I truly believe that a national system of health care can insure every American and cost us less than our current bloated and inefficient "sick care" system.

As the former Chairman of the Connecticut Public Health Committee, I have made the fight for increased access to health care for the people of Connecticut my defining mission as a public servant. In the State Senate, I wrote and passed legislation banning smoking from the workplace, ending overly aggressive bill collection practices by health care providers, and investing in low cost prescription drug programs. In 2005, I authored Connecticut's landmark Stem Cell Investment Act, marking the first time a state legislature had invested funds in stem cell research.

In Congress, I start from a simple premise -- our health care system is badly broken and incremental fixes will no longer suffice. The United States, the wealthiest nation in the world, has the highest health care spending per capita. In 2006, $2.1 trillion was spent on health care in the United States. The amount of money spent on health care is expected to increase to $4 trillion by 2015. 47 million Americans are uninsured -- including 8.3 million children. Those that do have health insurance have seen their premiums rise almost 8 percent a year since 2000.

Because of the way we finance health care in this country, seventeen cents of every dollar that we spend on health care covers administration, including marketing, overhead costs, and profits. As a result, many health insurance companies have been seeing record profits in recent years. By comparison, only 2.1% of Medicare spending accounts for administrative expenses.

Since almost 60 percent of Americans purchase their health care through hundreds of different private health insurance plans, no one is leveraging the bulk purchasing power of health care consumers, despite the fact that we know bulk purchasing works. For example, the Department of Veterans Affairs negotiates for lower prescription drug prices, and veterans pay far less for prescription drugs than the nation's seniors. For the 20 drugs that seniors use most, the top five Medicare Part D insurers charged prices that were an average of 177 percent higher than those obtained by the VA. One of the first votes I cast as a member of Congress was in support of legislation that requires the federal government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to lower the costs of prescription drugs for Americans on Medicare.

Further, in April of 2007, I introduced H.R. 2065, the Medicare Drug Savings Through Choice Act, which would establish a Medicare drug plan managed by the government as an alternative to the numerous private plans currently available to senior citizens. My plan would be available nationwide at a uniform cost, and it would allow the federal government to use the savings from its negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to reduce the coverage gap and terminate late enrollment fees.

As a precursor to a national health care guarantee, we must, at the very least, provide health care for all children. Despite overwhelming support from the American people, President Bush vetoed bipartisan legislation to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) program to cover ten million new children nationwide, including 28,000 in Connecticut. SCHIP currently provides health care coverage for 6.6 million kids from low-income, working families. Connecticut's SCHIP program, known as HUSKY B, currently covers more than 23,000 kids in Connecticut. If we don't expand this program, more kids will go without care, putting children at risk and adding to the strain on our broken health care system.

Spiraling health care costs stifle small and medium sized businesses as well as consumers. It is time our nation had a national discussion about the importance of revolutionary health care reform, and I intend to be one of the leading voices for universal coverage. Such a system is the right thing to do for patients, and it's the right thing to do for our economy. By reducing waste, improving efficiency with the use of health information technology, reducing medical errors, and creating a health care system that makes health coverage truly available to all, we can accomplish the goal of covering all Americans through a cost-effective system of care.

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