Why Are People with Health Insurance Going Bankrupt?

[marmar]

from the Real News Network:

Dr. Margaret Flowers is a pediatrician from Baltimore who advocates for a national single payer health system, Medicare for all. She is an organizer of October2011.org/Occupy Washington, DC and co-director of ItsOurEconomy.us.

Kevin Zeese is co-director of It's Our Economy, an organization that advocates for democratizing the economy. He's also an attorney who is one of the original organizers of the National Occupation of Washington, DC.

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JAY: So tell us now. You have been critical about this from the beginning. You were for single-payer during the health-care debate. But now it's passed. It's starting to be implemented. You have a better idea what it is. So how's it looking?

FLOWERS: Right. Well, it's looking pretty much like what we expected. Right now the United States is the only industrialized wealthy nation that has a market-based health care system, and the Affordable Care Act moved us further in the direction of a market-based health care system by requiring people who don't qualify for the public programs to purchase private health insurance. That will be going into effect. The exchanges where people will buy that insurance roll out in October of this year. By January 2014, people have to have insurance or face a penalty.

But what we're seeing in terms of the type of insurance that people are going to be offered and the trends of what people are actually purchasing right now is we're moving more in the direction of what we call underinsurance, where people may have an insurance plan, but there are significant financial barriers to getting actual care and significant financial risks if someone has a serious accident or illness.

.....(snip).....

FLOWERS: Right. And also, you know, the thing that I often point out is that the United States is already spending more than enough for a universal, comprehensive, high-quality health-care system. We spend two and a half times what the average OECD nation, you know, industrialized nation spends per person on health care. So we have the money to do this and we have the resources to do this, and it's really just up to us to demand that we have the kind of health-care system that we need. And you can't get the cost—that was my point was that you can't get the real cost savings unless you do this at a national level.

ZEESE: What I was laughing about was I was thinking about Congress (incompr.) all this craziness about deficit. Health care's 18 percent of our GDP and going up, and you're not going to solve the deficit for the long term without solving health care. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=9986