Boston DSA
Health Care for People - Not For Profit

Real health care reform should be designed to meet the needs of you and your family, not to preserve the profits and prerogatives of insurance companies. Real health care reform will provide:

• Guaranteed Coverage for All in a Single Class of Care. We'll know we have high quality care because U.S. Senators, corporate executives,and professional athletes will be in the same system as factory workers, store managers, and homemakers.
• Comprehensive Benefits with an Emphasis on Preventive Care. All medically necessary treatment will be covered, including long term care, mental health and prescription drugs. Preventable problems won't end up in the emergency room.
• Consumer Choice of Provider and Patient/Doctor Control of Treatment. You will be able to see any doctor you wish, without having to pay more. You and your doctor will determine your treatment - not your insurance company.
• Fair Financing. We will all pay our fair share based on our ability to pay. No one will be denied care because they don't have enough money.
• Cost Control. Wasteful bureaucracy and unnecessary profits will be eliminated. Expensive equipment will not be unnecessarily duplicated by competing hospitals. Hospital costs, doctors' fees and drug prices will be limited.
• Public Accountability. The voters will make fundamental decisions about health care, not corporate executives. If the system isn't meeting our needs, we can change it, because we control the plan.

Single Payer - The Proven Solution

Only a single payer health care system can deliver on all these promises. A single payer system replaces the hundreds of insurance companies in the current system with a single government agency which collects premiums (through taxes) and pays medical bills. Studies, including one by Congress's General Accounting Office (GAO) have demonstrated the efficiency of single payer. A single payer system can cover everyone, with the same high quality care, without costing any more than our present, inefficient system. Cost savings are built in through simplification of billing and administration, and elimination of insurance company profits. The health care authority, as the sole purchaser of health care, bargains with providers over fees and budgets; it has the clout to keep costs down.

Other health care reform proposals are based on complicated, unproven ideas. "Managed Care" in HMO's has been a disaster! Yet a simple, single payer system has been working in Canada for years. Canadians pay far less for their health care than we do, yet by all measurable standards, their health care is as good as ours, or better. And they cover everybody!

Support the Single Payer Health Care Solution

Boston DSA is active in Mass-Care (the Massachusetts Campaign for Single Payer Health Care) - a coalition of groups and individuals working to pass single payer legislation in Massachusetts.