A Call to Service: on Health Care

Simultaneously address costs, coverage, and choice

There are four ways we can deal with healthcare problems as a country.
• First, we can confront the issues of cost, access and quality in a piecemeal way, much as we did during most of the last decade.
• Second, we could try to overwhelm the problems with a massive expansion of the federal government's role in health care.
• Third, we could choose not to institute any reforms-the position of the Bush administration.
• I offer is a fourth proposal that simultaneously addresses three challenges: bringing costs under control; offering access to affordable coverage to every American; and guaranteeing that every child in America will have health insurance coverage.

Cut $350B of bureaucracy and cover 90% of Americans

We have the opportunity, if we act now, to make health care a fairly straightforward matter in the future. Here, in summary form, I my bottom line:
• All Americans will have access to the same health-care coverage that their member of Congress has today.
• A commitment to work until every American has affordable health insurance-starting with a plan that covers 99% of children and 96% of all Americans.
• Contain soaring health-care costs by making prescription drugs more affordable, getting rid of frivolous lawsuits, reducing uncompensated care, and giving patients affordable health-care choices.
• Releif to employers who offer affordable coverage to their employees by covering a portion of their highest cost cases.
• Save costs by cutting bureaucracy; that cuts nearly $350 billion a year out of the health-care system.