![]() The drawback would be that without a mandate, health care gaps would most likely still exist.Ĭontrolling health care costs is a problem that has long confounded Americans. An altogether different plan, a public option, would preserve Americans’ choice to buy private insurance. Multiple iterations of single-payer plans have sprung from Medicare for All, including some that would preserve private insurance. ![]() This standard insurance would eliminate patients’ out-of-pocket expenses and make it harder for hospitals and doctors to cherry-pick those with more lucrative insurance. Medicare for All, as proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders, would eliminate private insurance that duplicated what was offered in the single-payer system. ![]() The hard work of constructing that system and a way of paying for it would start there. If the referendum resulted in a majority of “yes” votes, it would send a clear message to Congress and the president: Build us a universal health care system. If history is any indication, those who benefit from our bloated system - the large corporations that keep American consumers in a stranglehold - would brew confusion about the plans in an effort to resist any change. Americans are already split about how private insurance would figure into the equation. Scholars have indicated that it may take multiple election cycles, along with volunteers collecting millions of signatures across the country, to achieve such a monumental feat. Another study conducted in my home state showed the same, with seven out of 10 Texans declaring universal health coverage important. In a recent survey, about two out of three Americans said it was the government’s responsibility to provide universal health coverage. There’s reason to believe that a direct vote could help us solve our health care quagmire. A referendum would ask Americans to focus on the proposal rather than on a candidate or political party. Americans should vote yea or nay on a system that provides basic health care for all.Ī federal ballot measure like this has never been held in our country. As Donald Berwick, a former administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, noted, the “glorification of profit, salve lucrum, is harming both care and health.”Īfter listening to partisan rants on both sides that aim only to tweak rather than remake our system, I suggest we hold a national referendum on health care. In the meantime, the people not sick or tending to sickness - the corporate middlemen in charge of insurance companies, private hospitals, doctor practices and pharmaceutical companies - are feasting. Whether through Twitter rants or opinion pieces or surveys quantifying how many of us grade the system as a failure - 56 percent at last count - we are fed up. Fewer than half of Americans rate the quality of U.S. Visiting a hospital or clinic today feels like facing a firing squad, with rounds and rounds of bills coming from every direction. I’ve also seen patients hit with unexpected medical bills showing arbitrary prices after visiting the emergency room of a private hospital. ![]() I’ve felt the injustice of a patient dying after he was dropped by his insurance. hours after receiving inadequate treatment elsewhere. I often see the back end of our insurance fiasco: I’ve cared for dozens of patients who were sent to our E.R. I work as an internal medicine doctor at Houston’s Ben Taub Hospital, which is part of a public health system that treats Harris County’s most vulnerable patients, many of whom don’t have insurance. This is the level of confusion and complexity we’ve come to accept as normal in our health care system. ![]()
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