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Making Health Care Affordable

When it comes to health care, our families and businesses are in a serious crisis. High health care costs are causing cuts in benefits and increases in premiums, adding to the ranks of the uninsured at alarming rates. But the impact of this problem goes beyond individual families. Skyrocketing health care costs make our businesses less competitive in the global marketplace and cost us good-paying jobs.

As a member of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Stabenow is very involved in efforts to reform our health care system.

Senator Stabenow believes that health care is a right, not a privilege. To that end, Senator Stabenow is focused on a number of initiatives to provide every American with affordable health insurance that gives real choice to consumers

• Lower the cost of health care for families and businesses. Insurance companies have raised their premiums by nearly 120 percent over the last two decades, while household income has only increased by 8 percent. These costs are unsustainable, and are having a devastating effect on our families and businesses.

• Keep what works, and fix what’s broken.  If you like your current health insurance company, you can keep it; but if you don’t, you should have other, affordable options, including a competitive public health care plan. 

• Assure affordable, quality health care for all Americans. In this great country, health care should be a right, not a privilege. More than 46 million Americans are uninsured and millions more are underinsured. Every time someone without health insurance needs medical treatment, it raises the cost of insurance for everyone else.  That is why insuring all Americans won’t just help the uninsured; it will help everyone else as well.

• Offer a competitive public health care plan. Despite years of promises to reign in administrative costs, most insurance companies spend between 12 and 30 percent of your premium dollars on overhead costs. A public option will introduce real competition into the health care market, keeping insurance companies honest and bringing costs down for everyone.

• Strengthen Consumer Protections through Insurance Reform. No American should be denied coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition, and every American should be able to keep their coverage even if they lose or change jobs.

• Encourage quality and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in our health care system. Despite the fact that we spend far more on health care than any other industrialized country, Americans are not healthier. We need a different approach to health care that rewards doctors, nurses and hospitals for working together to provide better care, rather than paying the most to those who perform the most tests and procedures.  Programs like Michigan’s Keystone Center for Patient Safety are leading the way in these efforts, and should be a model for the rest of the country.

• Expand the use of electronic medical records.  We have already started this process in the Recovery Act. This will improve communication between health care providers and patients, reduce duplicative tests and medical errors, and decrease the piles of endless paperwork. This initiative will improve quality health care and save lives.

• Treat both the physical and mental health needs of Americans. Mental illness is the leading cause of disability in the United States for people between the ages of 14 and 44, and severe mental illness reduces life expectancy by an average of 25 years. Mental health services must be an integrated part of our health care system.

• Encourage healthy lifestyles. Our current health care system focuses on those who are sick, but it does very little to prevent people from getting sick in the first place. Preventative medicine and wellness programs can reduce the rates of many chronic health conditions. Preventing childhood obesity, for example, will help prevent diabetes and other long-term conditions. The best way to treat a disease is always to prevent it from ever happening in the first place.

• Support home and community based care for the elderly and people with disabilities.It is vital that we give people with long term care needs the necessary support to live independently and with dignity in their own communities.

• Train doctors, nurses, and other health professionals for the future. America is facing a severe shortage of trained doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals. If we don’t act, we may face a shortage of 124,000 doctors by 2025. In many parts of the country, it can take months to get a doctor’s appointment because of the backlog. We must do more to encourage and support talented young people who want to go into these careers.

• Eliminate health care disparities. In the United States today, a pregnant white woman is twice as likely to get the care she needs in the first trimester as a pregnant African-American woman. It is unacceptable that access to appropriate health care still varies widely based on gender, race, and ethnicity.  All Americans must have access to basic standards of care.

• Lower the cost of prescription drugs.  We must provide help for seniors caught in the Medicare prescription drug gap, or “donut hole.” Lowering costs will also require us to increase access to more affordable generic drugs, and allow for safe and effective reimportation of drugs from other countries.