WASHINGTON — Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is very direct when it comes to the issue of universal health care coverage for Americans.
“Is health care a right or a privilege? If it's a right, then it's appropriate for the government to have a role” in providing it, Rep. Kucinich said at a forum on health care policy sponsored by Families USA and the Federation of American Hospitals.
Rep. Kucinich, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, is the only candidate who supports a single-payer system financed by the government.
“If it's a privilege, and it's a market-based thing, then we're left to the predations of the market, which is, if you can't pay for it, you're out of luck. And you know what—47 million [uninsured] Americans are now out of luck,” he said at the forum, part of a series of forums with the presidential candidates underwritten by the California Endowment and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
Under Rep. Kucinich's proposal, which has been introduced in Congress as H.R. 676, all for-profit health care entities would be converted to nonprofit entities, with shareholders being compensated by the government. That compensation would be financed through Treasury bonds, he said. Physicians would continue to have private practices, but they, along with hospitals and other providers, would be paid by the federal government, which would disseminate federal funds through a series of regional budgets. There would also be separate budgets for capital expenditures and for medical education.
Coverage under Rep. Kucinich's plan would include inpatient and outpatient services as well as dental care, vision care, mental health care, and long-term care. There would be no deductibles or cost sharing.
When a reporter pointed out that other countries with government-financed health care ended up seeing a private system develop alongside the public one for those who could afford it, Rep. Kucinich, a fifth-term congressman and former mayor of Cleveland, said that was no surprise. “Privatizers are at work in every country,” he said. “If health care is such a losing proposition, why are these companies trying to privatize it? Because there's huge amounts of money to be made. But the minute you have a for-profit system, you're going to have people cut out of it.” Another government-run system that people are trying to privatize is Medicare, Rep. Kucinich said. “Right now, Medicare is discouraging doctors by cutting their fees. There's a strategy to privatize Medicare by getting doctors to walk away from [it].”
The passage of the Medicare prescription drug benefit was another part of that plan, he added. “We want to encourage doctors to improve their performance, but under a for-profit system, doctors have cost pressures. That's sure not to encourage the results you want.”
During the forum, Rep. Kucinich said “Years ago, when I was a city councilman in Cleveland, I had a proposal I thought would do a lot to protect the environment. I proposed free [public] transit,” he said. “And the people who attacked the idea threw up their arms and said, 'My God! If we have free transit, everyone's going to be riding the bus!' Exactly. That's what we want. You want people to use the health care system, so that they're healthy.”
'If … it's a market-based thing, then we're left to the predictions of the market … if you can't pay for it, you're out of luck.' REP. KUCINICH
