Healthcare
I support:
- Bringing all hospitals in the city into public municipal ownership
- A city-based Medicare-for-all system that includes dental care and vision
- Investing in building public hospitals in the city’s underserved areas
- Investing in preventive healthcare such as nutrition and other public health measures
- Ensuring at least one public clinic per 20,000 residents
I believe strongly that the US’s private insurance-based healthcare system has been a complete and utter failure. The facts speak for themselves: tens of thousands of people die every year because of lack of access to healthcare and hundreds of thousands more go bankrupt due to inability to pay incurred healthcare costs. Meanwhile, a 2015 study by BMC Health Services Research found that under the current privatized US healthcare model a staggering $345 billion is wasted every year on billing and other wasteful paperwork. In a cruel irony, comparably developed nations in Europe spend about half as much as the US yet generally end up with better public health outcomes. The reason why is simple – their systems of public universal healthcare deliver care more efficiently at a lower cost.
In spite of this country’s obvious need to catch up to our European counterparts, the federal government has failed to enact meaningful reform. The so-called ‘Affordable Care Act’ enacted by the Obama administration led to only cosmetic reforms and failed to provide universal public coverage. Based on an earlier Republican plan offered as an alternative to Hillary Clinton’s proposal in the 1990s, the ACA did not even contain a public option. Clearly, the federal government cannot be relied on to deliver real change and states and localities therefore need to begin to take matters into their own hands.