Activists And Experts Hail Health Care For America Plan

America's Future and other groups that stopped Social Securityprivatization vow nationwide campaign on health care

Washington, DC (Jan. 11, 2007): Today the Economic Policy Institute released a progressive Health Care for America plan written by Jacob Hacker as part of EPI's new "Agenda for Shared Prosperity Project," which is designed to get Americans talking about "new solutions that challenge the conventional economic thinking." (EPI also published Globalization That Works for Everyone at their launch event today, written by EPI founding President Jeff Faux.) See www.sharedprosperity.org [1].

Institute for America's Future Co-Director Roger Hickey announced that his organization would launch a nationwide effort to discuss and debate how to get good health care coverage for all Americans while controlling spiraling health care costs. Hickey declared that, "The best way to get a real debate is to put a simple, clear and progressive health care plan on the table. The Hacker plan published by EPI today qualifies on all counts. It will be a benchmark by which all other plans can be judged."

Hickey is working in collaboration with Medicare Rights Center founder, Diane Archer, and a network of citizen action groups to foster public forums and internet discussion groups designed to create a groundswell of public support for action on health care for all. Many of these groups were active in the successful grassroots movement to stop President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security. Others are working to pass innovative health care coverage plans at the state level.

Other leaders of citizen organizations and health care experts made statements today about the important role the Hacker Health Care for America plan will play in the national debate. (See below for quotes.)

# # #

Key elements of Jacob Hacker's Health Care for America Plan released 1-11-07 by EPI
[Summary written and distributed by the Institute for America's Future.]

Health Care for America. Americans want and deserve to be guaranteed affordable health care. Health Care for America builds on the most popular elements of the present structure -- Medicare and employment-based health insurance -- to meet America's health care needs:

• It allows people to keep the health care coverage they have and offers Americans the choice to buy into a public plan like Medicare.
• It combines personal responsibility with choice and an employer contribution to create a new framework ensuring that everyone is covered, that risk is spread broadly, and that costs are controlled and quality improved.
• It guarantees lifetime coverage and health security.
• It's easy to understand.
• It's efficient to administer.
• It costs no more than the nation is currently spending on health care and offers substantial cost-savings to the 50 states.

What is the promise of Health Care for America? For about $120 billion a year in additional federal spending, it promises all legal residents the lifetime guarantee of affordable and better health care, lower costs, more choice, healthier citizens. It also promises the states real savings and relieves them of the responsibility of ensuring health care for their residents. Instead, it pools the resources of all Americans so that no matter where they live or where they visit, they can access the health care they need. Employers will also see real savings. And Health Care for America does not unravel existing sources of health security or force workers to obtain coverage on their own, or require people to settle for limited coverage or health plans that keep them from seeing the doctors they know and trust.

How does Health Care for America work?
It ensures lifetime coverage to most Americans automatically either through the workplace or, if they have no workplace ties, through their doctors' office. Rather than relying on private insurers to provide affordable coverage for the sick and those with costly medical conditions -- which they have been unwilling and unable to do-- it allows the private health care marketplace to continue to provide coverage as it currently does while guaranteeing all Americans an affordable coverage choice through the public sector. It levels the playing field among employers; every firm needs to make at least a modest contribution -- up to six percent of payroll -- to the cost of coverage for each of their workers.

What would change with Health Care for America?
Every legal resident would have health coverage. For most workers with good coverage though, Health Care for America would change little, besides eliminating the very real threat of losing coverage. But some employers would be required to upgrade their plans to make them comparable to Health Care for America. Others might find it cheaper to provide current levels of coverage by enrolling their workers in Health Care for America and providing supplemental benefits. Detailed micro-simulation estimates suggest that roughly half of non-elderly Americans would remain in workplace health insurance, with the other half enrolled in Health Care for America.

Why is Health Care for America Efficient and Cost Effective?
A single national insurance pool covering nearly half the population would create huge administrative efficiencies. Medicare's administrative costs amount to between 2 and 3 percent of total program spending, compared with between 13 and 14 percent, on average, in the private sector. Because Medicare and Health Care for America would bargain jointly for lower prices and join forces to improve quality, they would have enormous combined leverage to hold down costs. To ensure that bargaining for lower prices did not come at the expense of high-quality care, Medicare and Health Care for America would also team up to monitor and improve the quality of care, applying the positive models already developed or under development within Medicare and in the increasingly successful Military Health System. Because Health Care for America creates a constructive public-private dynamic, it ensures that the sector best able to control costs is rewarded with additional patients over time.

Health Care for America Guarantees Coverage and Controls Health Spending. It promises substantial cost savings over time for employers, individuals, states, and the federal government. By bargaining for lower prices and encouraging cost-effective care, Health Care for America-working with Medicare-provides the best realistic hope for finally bringing American health spending under control.

###

**Note: Video and audio of the event will be available on January 12, 2007at sharedprosperity.org [1].**

Praise for "The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement-And How You Can Fight Back":

"The essential policy book of the year." -E.J. Dionne, Washington Post

One of the "two most important books on American politics to appear this year, maybe in many a year...Hacker's is one of those prescient books that names and anatomizes a potent, ubiquitous trend that has been hidden in plain view...His book deserves the widest possible audience, for having nailed the most powerful and underappreciated economic trend of our era, thereby inviting a discussion of the political opportunities." -Robert Kuttner, American Prospect

"Jacob S. Hacker, a 35-year-old political science professor at Yale, has become something of an intellectual "It boy" in the Democratic Party over the last decade...The patchwork safety net created in the decades after World War II truly is shriveling, and there will be rewards for the party that comes up with a convincing solution. Hacker has done the Democrats a favor by developing a story and a catchphrase - the great risk shift - to describe the problem." -David Leonhardt, New York Times

"The Great Risk Shift is a powerful and timely account of the forces driving the ascendance of economic insecurity in America. But Hacker does more than describe the problem; he offers a thoughtful and ambitious policy agenda and explains how each of us can make our own families more secure. This is an important book for anyone concerned about the continuing vitality of the American dream." - Senator John Edwards

"What Hacker so effectively documents in The Great Risk Shift is that for too many Americans, Washington's pursuit of a so-called Personal Opportunity Society has instead brought about deepening economic insecurity. From job tenure and health coverage to retirement planning, corporations and governments are offloading longstanding institutional responsibilities onto the fragile psychologies and balance sheets of ordinary families and households. Small wonder the public doesn't trust the national economy and its circumstances." - Kevin Phillips, author of American Theocracy

"Hacker's important and illuminating book-with its call for creating an "insurance and opportunity society"-should inform every discussion of progressive political strategy in the coming decade." -David Moberg, In These Times

"By framing what usually are treated as distinct issues...within a unified thesis, Mr. Hacker tells a coherent story about economic insecurity. And, by and large, the thesis is compelling....Provocative and worth reading. And it is chock-full of details that bolster his case that-in regard to risks that in other countries are handled by government and that in this country were once met by employers-Americans now must go it alone." -Roger Lowenstein, New York Times

"In cutting-edge polemics like Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift, the smartest liberal voices are focusing on voter anxiety about health care and income volatility-anxiety that the GOP hasn't even begun to find a way to address." -Ross Douthat & Reihan Salam, Weekly Standard

"As Jacob Hacker argues persuasively in The Great Risk Shift, America's middle class finds itself living with far more risk and income volatility than it did a generation ago." -Christopher Hayes, Nation

"Don't be surprised to see...Hacker ideas batted around during the 2008 presidential race." -James Pethokoukis, U.S. News and World Report

Thoughtful Democrats like Clinton aide Gene Sperling and Yale professor Jacob Hacker have argued that Americans, even amid prosperity, are increasingly insecure in our globalized economy and wary of downside risks if they have to change jobs or learn new skills. -Michael Barone, Washington Times

"Jacob Hacker's research on the uneven state of the American safety net has made the young Yale University political scientist a top idea merchant to Democratic think tanks." - Business Week

"Jacob Hacker, a Yale University political scientist, has emerged as an incisive voice on issues relating to retirement security and income volatility." - AARP Bulletin

"America's largest social class isn't upper-income, middle, or poor. It's our sprawling anxious class. As Jacob Hacker shows in this lucid and riveting account, American families are experiencing more and more uncertainty about their future, and the reigning conservative orthodoxy is exposing them to ever greater risk. Hacker lifts up the floor boards of conservative's much touted "opportunity society" and reveals the extended rot. But he also offers up a new foundation for economic security. This is an important book." - Robert B. Reich, Professor of Public Policy, Berkeley, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor

"Hacker shows that the decline in economic security is the major economic issue of our time, far more important than the occasional recessions and blips in the unemployment rate that preoccupy so many economists. This book powerfully illuminates the real scope of the problem." - Robert J. Shiller, author of Irrational Exuberance