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Indiana Health Care Facts
• In Indiana, there are 1,600,000 (1.6 million) Hoosiers with no health insurance coverage at all. That is 29% of the state’s population. And the last data on children showed 159,000 were without coverage.
• The number of uninsured in Indiana is growing at twice the national average. Indiana ranks 23rd among the states in the number of uninsured persons.
• We have the highest per capita rate of medically bankrupt families, over 77,000 Hoosiers. And surprisingly, 75% of those declaring bankruptcy for medical reasons had health insurance when they got sick.
• Insurance companies are for-profit entities who exist for the sole purpose of making money. With health care being a profit driven industry, our health, yours and mine, has become a commodity for sale. This is personal.
• We lost 138,000 manufacturing jobs from 2000 to 2004. Many of the service sector jobs replacing those jobs lack health insurance.
• Indianapolis is the second most expensive city in the nation for per family health insurance premiums. Anthem/WellPoint, headquartered in Indianapolis, is one of the largest health insurance companies in the nation. The CEO, Larry Glassock, received a bonus of $42.5 million in 2003.
• Indiana has a history of innovation in the medical arena. Eli Lilly and Indiana University Medical Center are known for creative ideas and innovative thinking. In the 70’s we passed medical malpractice legislation that served as a model for many other states. We can lead the way again.
• The most efficient, cost effective way to care for the state’s population is to have a government sponsored program of insurance, like Medicare, to cover everyone. Patients would have free choice of doctors and hospitals. There is simply no better way to do it.
• Do we really have a coordinated health care system in this country? No, we do not. Should we, YES!
National Health Care Facts
• Health care costs have risen three times faster than wages since 1999. Insurance premiums have risen 119% in the last nine years.
• Health care costs per capita will rise from $8,300 per person to $13,000 per person by 2019 without changes.
• Single payer is NOT socialized medicine. We already have a program of government sponsored insurance to cover many of our citizens – Medicare. It could be expanded to cover everyone. This would be social insurance, not socialized medicine.
• For every one percent increase in unemployment, one million people become uninsured.
• America wastes $350 billion in “administrivia” costs by having 7,000 separate insurance companies. That $350 billion could be redirected into Health Care for every person in the United States.
• Medicare for All (Single Payer) Reform Would Be Major Stimulus for Economy. There would be 2.6 Million New Jobs, $317 Billion in Business Revenue, $100 Billion in Wages. The number of jobs created by a single payer system, expanding and upgrading Medicare to cover everyone, parallels almost exactly the total job loss in 2008, according to the findings of a groundbreaking study released in Spring of 2009.
• As insurance premiums rise and more employers drop coverage, an increasing number of Americans are living without health insurance. Nearly 90 million people—more than one in three non-elderly Americans—went without health coverage for all or part of 2006-2007. And four out of five of those individuals were in working families.
• Wall Street Journal: More Small Firms Drop Health Care. Accelerating health-care premiums and sharp revenue shortfalls due to the recession are forcing some small companies to choose between dropping health insurance or laying off workers -- or staying in business at all.
• A study, published in April 2008, in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that 59 percent of doctors surveyed “support government legislation to establish national health insurance.” Thirty-two percent oppose it and 9 percent were neutral, according to results of a survey conducted last year of 2,193 physicians across the U.S.
• The uninsured live sicker and die younger. As documented in an essay to medical and public health students of the Johns Hopkins University in 2003, over 100,000 people die purely because they don't have any insurance (and that was based upon research in 1997). And having health insurance does not always translate into having health care.
• America’s health care system is ranked 37th in the world, right after Costa Rica, by the World Health Organization. We rank 36th in infant mortality, after Cuba and Taiwan, and well behind Canada and the European nations.
• In the US, we spend more per capita on health care than any other country on earth. We spend about twice as much as the Canadians, and almost three times as much as the English and the Japanese.
• Medical bills are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy. Even more surprising is that 75% of those declaring bankruptcy had insurance at the time they got sick. Even with insurance you’re not safe.
• Public opinion polls consistently find that 65% or more of Americans surveyed favor government Health insurance, even if it means tax increases. More and more, business and labor groups are coming to the same conclusion. In a 2002 poll of U.S. physicians, 49% favored national health insurance versus 40% opposed.
• Both the General Accounting Office (GAO) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reached the same conclusion: if we eliminated private health insurance and covered everyone under a single government program, we would increase efficiency and cut overhead so much that it would leave enough money to cover all the uninsured.
• Every other industrialized nation in the world has come to the same conclusion –a government sponsored program of universal health insurance. The United States stands alone spending the most, covering the least, and with poor health outcomes compared to the rest of the developed world.
Need more information? Visit Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan (www.neindianahchp.org)
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