Mike Gravel on Health Care Libertarian for President; Former Democratic Senator (AK)

Expand Medicare coverage & child healthcare programs

Gravel supports the following principles regarding healthcare:
• Implement a universal healthcare program to guarantee coverage to all Americans, regardless of income.
• Allow the importation of prescription drugs into the United States.
• Support expanding prescription drug coverage under Medicare.
• Support expanding child healthcare programs
• “My plan, called The Healthcare Security Plan, provides standard, quality healthcare for all Americans regardless of health of wealth.”

Universal coverage with guaranteed equal care

A: I’d pay for it with a retail sales tax. I favor universal coverage of quality medical care. I favor it through a device of using vouchers where everybody would be able to get a voucher. They’d sign up for it every year. It would guarantee them equal health care. All citizens would get the same health care. They would be able choose from insurance plans or a government plan like Medicare. That’s how we would have health care, and the only way you’re going to pay for it is not by saddling business. All you do by forcing business to pay for health care or passing a law telling people they have to go buy insurance, which is a subsidy for the insurance companies, all these plans are going backwards.

Reforms fail because pharma companies control Congress

A: By one, making the whole process competitive. Two, by changing the control that’s held by the pharmaceutical companies, by the insurance companies and the health-care industry over the Congress so that they cannot properly design a health-care system that meets everything that you defined. Stop and think what failure we have in this country. Bismarck put this in place in 1888. Truman advocated this in 1946. And we still can’t get it right. Maybe there’s something failing in our society. And there is. It’s called representative government. And what we need to do is to equip the American people to then step in and be able to make laws in partnership with their elected officials.

Everybody should have the same health care

A: It’s not so difficult, and it doesn’t take a lot of rethinking. There’s nothing wrong with a wealthy--supposedly wealthy--country like ours to define that everybody should have the same health care. And that’s what I’ve done with my program, [designed by] people that have really fought, they’ve spent their lives at this. It’s not that difficult if you have a commitment. But when the industry that profits from health care calls the shots on the way health care is going to be delivered, then you are going to see the anomalous situation that you have in this country where they can’t even deliver it to everybody fairly.

Q: So, how would you prohibit that kind of influence?

A: Well, you can’t. This is representative government. They put up all the money.

Applies lessons from his healthcare-related bankruptcy

A: I’d very simply recognize that we have to provide a system where everybody is treated equally, and that’s a voucher system. You would sign up for a voucher, you would not pay for it; they would give you the choice of five insurance plans, and the insurance companies would not determine what care you’ll get. They’ll compete on the basis of administration. But the difference between the voucher plan, which gives you freedom to pick a doctor, pick a hospital, is different from all the others because they’re financing their plans via business enterprise. And there’s no reason why businesses in this country should have to carry the cost of health care. It disadvantages them in the world competitive market. It makes no sense. You’re given the choice of either a job or health care, but you’ll never get both

Need to do better job on treating Americans with HIV

A: The obvious answer is that we need to do a better job on health care. We need to do a better job with respect to how we treat Americans. I feel very deeply.

End subsidization of the insurance companies

GRAVEL: Understand that the health care that we’re talking about, by and large, is going backwards. We’re subsidizing the insurance companies. And all the plans that I’ve heard of, except Dennis’s, is a continued subsidization of the insurance companies.

Doctors do a lot of testing today to cover their backsides

A: Doctors do a lot of testing today to cover their backside, you know, because they don’t want to be sued. One of the features of these regional boards is we’re going to do away with what we see that the attorneys love, and that is to go sue doctors or raise the costs where they can’t even stay in business.

Single-payer health care plan via vouchers you can add to

Real reform impossible under mercantile lobbying system

Reforming employer-based system keeps historical accident

Now, what can we do? Real simple. We can turn around and say let’s have a health care program that establishes equality. It’s called the universal single-payer -- by single-payer I mean all Americans pay for it regardless of the system you have now but the system you’re going to get, single-payer Health Care Voucher plan.

Vouchers provide freedom of choice and perhaps public plan

And the vouchers are set up for risk on an individual basis, not on a collective this fits all, because if you’re young, you probably don’t have a cost of more than $3,000. When you’re my age, it could be $180,000 in one year, which is what I got hit with and I went bankrupt as a result of that.

There will be no lemon-dropping-- no “you don’t qualify, you got a preexisting condition.” This plan can work. All we need to do is bring the people in. The people are not empowered to do anything.

President has role to energize people for preventive health

A: There is a role for the president in his or her leadership capacity, and that is to change the culture, to really energize people to exercise, to eat the right foods. [A constituent] showed me she could have got this junk bar for 50 cents but they were asking for $.125 for an apple. Doesn’t that tell you something about the dynamics of what’s going on? We need a leadership that sets a tone. We know the problem of obesity. I try to diet all the time, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so successfully. But when all you’ve got in your field of vision is junk food, you got problems. The government is a tool. [But now] the special interests determine how the tools of government is handled by the lobbyists to manipulate you to vote for them. That’s the process that we live under and that’s process that has to change.

Phase out Medicare and Medicaid over time

A: One of the facets of my plan would be to keep in place Medicare and Medicaid and phase them out over time. Because plans to put everybody on Medicare aren’t going to fly financially and just can’t be met. We are in deep economic difficulty and in debt. So when you talk about the seniors, this is where you have these health regional boards where in that region they’ll be defining what goes into these various vouchers. And they’ll change every year depending upon your personal history as you get older. We know it costs less for young people and it costs more for old people. That’s just the nature of the situation. So I don’t have any magic to take care of the seniors. All I can say is I can set up a structure that will have checks and balances where they’ll have a better say, they’ll have a better say than they have today.

Citizen Power includes universal health care

Almost all developed nations provide healthcare for all

We have impressive resources but need delivery to people

Comprehensive care that provides for early detection of disease is unavailable. There are not enough facilities in the right places. There is no effort to assure that health problems will be checked in the whole population.

A fundamental principle of a people’s platform must be to establish citizen control over the public and private medical-industrial complex. A national health administration must coordinate efforts with local health districts. The concept of a national health service is not new. It has worked successfully in England & other nations. The difficulties & dislocations will be great in implementing it here, but the step must be taken.