Health Care:A Guide to Citizen Action

The best way to ensure access to care under our current health care system, according to Minnesota Compass, is health insurance. The uninsured are less likely to receive preventative care or care for routine medical conditions and injuries. This can lead to more serious illnesses and health problems, resulting in hospitalization or death. Both the uninsured and the insured feel the impact financially.

Clearly the current system is fraught with problems, however. People are locked into jobs out of fear of losing coverage, denied coverage due to preexisting conditions, terminated from policies when they need them most.

Physicians for a National Health Program Minnesota (PNHP) says that the U.S. spends more on health care and gets less in return than the rest of the world because we have a “patchwork system” of for‐profit private insurers. PNHP reports that nearly one‐third of all health dollars in the country go to overhead, underwriting, billings, sales, marketing, profits, and exorbitant executive pay. 

For many reform advocates, the Affordable Care Act isn’t nearly expansive enough. Growth & Justice contends that while tens of millions of Americans have already benefited from many of the Affordable Care Act’s reforms, “Reforms in the United States have focused on increasing access to health insurance, but insurance is not health care.” It reports that “a quarter of a million Minnesotans will remain uninsured and unable to access the care they need.” Health Care for All Minnesota, like Growth & Justice and PNHP holds that, “A single‐payer system is the only system that can provide comprehensive, affordable, high quality health care for each and every person.”

Meanwhile, critics on the right charge that the Affordable Care Act is intrusive. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has said that he has no intention of expanding Medicaid or establishing a health insurance exchange, two of the Affordable Care Act’s major provisions. He calls them: “brazen intrusions into the sovereignty of our state.” 

• In the United States, there are 46.4 million uninsured residents, or 16 percent of the population.

• The number rises significantly when inadequately covered Americans are added.

• In Minnesota, there are approximately 463,000 uninsured residents, nine percent of the population.

• In Massachusetts, there are roughly 328,000 uninsured, five percent of that state’s population.

• By contrast, in Texas there are 6.2 million uninsured—25 percent of the population, 33 percent of adults. In Houston, the state’s largest city, the percentage of uninsured is 30 percent. It’s 37 percent in Brownsville. (Sources: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Texas Medical Association.)

• More than four out of five of Minnesota’s uninsured residents, 82 percent, belong to working families.

• Although whites account for the largest number of unin‐ sured Minnesotans, residents of color are far likelier to be uninsured: 26 percent of Latinos, 18 percent of Afri‐ can Americans, 14 percent of American Indians, 12 or Asian Americans, compared to 7.6 percent of whites without health insurance in 2011.

• Minnesota has some of the greatest disparities in health status between populations of color/American Indians and whites in the U.S.

• The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $8,160 per capita.

• The U.S. is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not have a universal health care system.

• Administration of private insurance plans consumes nearly one‐third of every health care dollar spent.

• In 2007, 62.1 percent of personal bankruptcy filings, nationally, cited high medical expenses as a cause, and most had insurance; this according to the American Journal of Medicine.