ON ISSUES

On Health Care

I believe that the richest, most powerful country on Earth ought to be able to figure out how to guarantee all of its citizen’s affordable, high quality health care. Americans are justifiably proud of the remarkable medical advances our country has made, but we should be ashamed that tens of millions of Americans are currently uninsured and that many Americans can’t afford to get the care they need.

That’s why I worked with President Obama and the Democrats in Congress over the last year to develop and pass a comprehensive health care reform bill that will make high-quality affordable health care available to all Americans:

  • INSURANCE REFORMS: This bill, which the President signed into law recently, ends harsh insurance industry practices like discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions and dropping people’s coverage when they get a serious illness like cancer.
  • INSURANCE REFORMS: It also prohibits the insurance industry from putting caps on policy-holders’ annual and lifetime benefits; instead, the new law puts annual caps on policy-holders’ out-of-pocket expenses. That change was greatly needed since roughly half of all bankruptcies in this country are caused at least in part by high medical expenses.
  • CONTROL HEALTH CARE COSTS THROUGH MORE COMPETITION: The new law also contains a number of provisions to get health care costs under control by injecting more competition into health insurance markets. For example, since most regions of the country are, like Southwestern Pennsylvania, dominated by one or two large health insurance providers - which in the face of virtually no competition are free to charge pretty much whatever they want – the new law will establish health insurance exchanges – essentially health insurance supermarkets – across the country where a number of insurance companies will compete for individuals’ money. Changes like this are essential to get the skyrocketing cost of health care under control. Health care costs in the United States doubled over the last 10 years, and they were projected to double again if nothing had been done.
  • HOW WILL IT AFFECT YOU? For most Americans, little will change in terms of their health care. Senior citizens will continue to get their health insurance through Medicare. The poor will continue to get health insurance through Medicaid. And the majority of working-age Americans will continue to get their health insurance through their employers. Everyone will still have at least as much choice of doctor, hospital, and other health care provider as you do now (barring any decision by your employer to change the insurance policies it offers). But small businesses and individuals who currently have no health insurance will be able to buy insurance at reasonable rates through the new health care exchanges.
  • HOW WILL IT AFFECT YOU? The new law also extends insurance coverage to 30 million Americans who are currently uninsured now through no fault of their own – by banning the insurance industry discrimination that has kept millions of Americans from getting insurance because of pre-existing conditions and by providing tax credits to low- and moderate-income households that couldn’t afford health insurance before.
  • HOW WILL IT AFFECT YOU? These reforms will reduce the growth rate of health care costs in the years to come by increasing competition in the health care and health insurance industries.