Hillary Clinton, Democratic presidential candidate, says that the USA cannot continue down this path. “It is a moral imperative that we provide health insurance for the 47 million uninsured Americans,” she said on the Fox on Sunday program. Clinton believes she can achieve universal health care coverage with a combination of cost savings and raising taxes on the wealthy – repealing $52 billion in tax breaks George Bush had offered people earning over $250,000 per year during his first term.

According to H. Clinton, efficiency measures in the health system could save $55 billion.

Clinton’s proposal is that every American have health care insurance. American citizens would be able to join a plan run by the government. Clinton’s plan also means that insurance companies would not be able to refuse applicants.

Hillary Clinton made a speech at the Broadlawns Medical Center on September 17th. Below are extracts and quotes from that speech:

According to Clinton, half of all personal bankruptcies in American are cause by medical bills. In this new economy, when people move jobs more than ever before, their health insurance should move with them. “..doctors and nurses, not insurance company employees, should be calling the shots on patient care.. in a nation where we split the atom, sent a man to the moon, mapped the human genome, where we have some of the most promising treatments and cures available, hard working people should get the care they need when they’re sick.”

Clinton pointed out that the USA spends more on health care than anyone else in the world – two trillion dollars a year. However, the USA is ranked 31st in life expectancy and 40th in child mortality. “Each year, 18,000 people die in America because they don’t have health care. Let me repeat that. Here in America, people are dying because they couldn’t get the care they needed when they were sick.”

She criticized Medicare’s inability to use its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices; making families poorer and drug companies richer. “This is unconscionable, it is intolerable and it is time to put an end to it. It is time for us to come together and to start living up to our own values.”

Clinton says that if she becomes President she will call on drug companies and insurance companies to do their part, adding that it is time patients are put first, rather than drug and insurance companies. “That means changing the way they do business. Now clearly with drug companies we have to do more to get generic drugs to market, including the new biologics that are coming into the marketplace and are often extremely expensive. We do have to provide more negotiation to get drug prices down and to import from Canada and other countries that are similar to ours. Because ultimately, the American tax payer pays for the development of a lot of these drugs through NIH grants and other kinds of research grants; we pay for the clinical trials, and then we pay the highest prices in the world. And we’re going to begin to rein that in.”

It is wrong that insurance companies can cherry pick – choosing just the healthiest patients and shutting out anyone who seems to them like a bad risk. According to Clinton, insurance companies spend $50 billion each year working out sophisticated schemes to figure out how to exclude people.

“And everyday they deny people coverage because of pre-existing conditions or the result of genetic testing. Think about what this might mean down the road with advances in genetic testing. The vast majority of us could wind up being bad risks because genetically most of us will probably show we are susceptible to something and therefore we will become uninsurable. So one of the urgencies behind this plan now is that the insurance industry as it has been constructed and executed over decades now will no longer be able to take care of increasing numbers of Americans if they stick with the policy that eliminates our fellow citizens. This legalized discrimination against the sickest of Americans is unfair and immoral and it defeats one of the central purposes of insurance, which is to share risk.

My plan puts an end to this. It forces insurance companies to compete based on cost and quality, not how skillfully they can weed out the sickest patients. My plan also has a prevention initiative, requiring the insurance industry and public programs like Medicare and Medicaid to promote wellness as well as treat illness and provide every American with comprehensive preventive care.”

Click here to read the full speech

Written by: Christian Nordqvist