AMSA's Stance on Health Care Reform
The American Medical Student Association believes that the best solution to our health care crisis is a single-payer system of publicly funded, publicly accountable, privately provided, quality health care for all.
In the current legislative environment, however, we consider the following to be essential to health care reform that has the potential to effectively contain costs, improve quality, and ensure access for all:
- Establishing a single, federally administered public insurance option, providing uniform benefits across the US, enacted concurrently with other provisions of health care reform and available to individuals and employers widely. The public plan must be allowed to set premiums and payment structure in negotiations with stakeholders, independent of other insurance plans, but subject to all federal insurance requirements.
- Requiring all insurers, public and private, to (1) guarantee issue of insurance to all; (2) set premiums by community rating, without regard to health status; (3) offer comprehensive benefits packages that meet a common actuarial standard; and (4) not institute annual or lifetime caps on benefits.
Further, AMSA actively advocates for:
- Establishing a public insurance option that further (1) makes use of the existing administrative infrastructure of Medicare to maximize operational efficiency; (2) receives a level of subsidy that is no less than that received by private plans.
- Structuring of provider payment to improve quality and promote prevention, primary care, the medical home, chronic care management, and public health.
- Subsidies to make purchase of insurance truly affordable and reasonable limits on out-of-pocket expenses to protect individuals and families from the catastrophic financial effects of serious illness.
- A standardized and defined benefit to apply to all insurance plans, which covers comprehensive services related to prevention, mental health, maternal and child health (including reproductive health), long-term care, vision, and dental care, as well as prescription drug coverage.
- Standards for transparently outlining benefits that will enable individuals to choose between plans based on objective information.
- Requirements that insurers take positive steps to decrease health care disparities based on region, income, minority status, gender and disability
Written & Edited by: The Health Care for All Steering Committee 2009-2010