What if we could end the health care crisis dogging our nation -- and grow 2.6 million jobs at the same time?
The good news is we can. If America summons the courage, and the will, to resolve our health care crisis, we can provide our national economy with a genuine and long-term stimulus, and continue moving towards the kind of sustainable development with quality jobs that our nation desperately needs.
A new study released today by the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy (IHSP) January 13 reveals the details.
Moving to a guaranteed health care system would provide a major stimulus for the U.S. economy by creating 2.6 million new jobs -- the same number lost in 2008 -- and would infuse $317 billion in business and public revenues, and another $100 billion in wages, into the U.S. economy.
How does it do that? A registered nurse colleague who works in an emergency room in San Diego recently told us about a retired teacher in her ER. Just before the medical team began a tube into his chest to relieve life-threatening respiratory distress, he looked up at them, pleading, "can't you wait until next week when I turn 65 and am eligible for Medicare?"
Medicare, even with all the efforts to privatize and erode it, guarantees you are covered. It's elegant and streamlined, unlike our current system, where hundreds of plans set different rules for coverage, eligibility, extra charges, and, of course, denial of care.
No wonder, then, that patients and families facing financial calamity from illness can only wish they were eligible for Medicare.
And now we know, extending and expanding full Medicare to cover all Americans, not only fixes our health care system, it would be a massive step toward promoting our economic recovery.
Perhaps most astonishing, the cost is less than you might expect.
Adding all Americans to an expanded Medicare could be achieved for $63 billion beyond the current $2.1 trillion in direct health care spending. The $63 billion is six times less than the federal bailout for CitiGroup, and less than half the federal bailout for AIG. Solely expanding Medicare to cover all the uninsured Americans could be accomplished for $44 billion.
Moreover, the majority of additional cost -- and virtually all of it if you are just expanding Medicare to cover the uninsured -- would be recouped in federal tax revenues generated by the massive increase in jobs.
This IHSP studies breaks grounds by, for the first time, applying the lessons of econometrics to health care; that is, by measuring both direct and secondary effects of our health care system.
Overall, every direct health care dollar creates nearly three additional dollars in the U.S. economy, emphasizing what a uniquely dominant role health care plays in our national economy.
Such changes make intuitive sense to the RNs on the front lines of today's health care and economic crises. RNs like myself struggle on a daily basis with an out-of-control of health insurance industry that pressures patients to defer taking needed prescriptions or keeping a scheduled doctor's appointment because they can't pay the skyrocketing cost.
We have a moral obligation to end this American tragedy, and make sure that no one else ever passes away in the richest nation on earth because they are denied life-saving treatment. We have a financial imperative as well; our broken health care system now endangers our status as the richest nation on earth, and undermines the possibility for us and our children to achieve the American dream.