Imagine that these are ways to describe healthcare in New York:
- No insurance premiums
- No co-pays
- No out-of-pocket costs
- No deductibles
- No out-of-network charges
- No Exclusions. Covers every New Yorker, every single one of us.
- Covers all medically necessary care: Prescriptions, Durable Medical Goods, Physicals, Well-child Visits, Pre-natal Health Services, Emergency Room Visits, Long-term and Palliative Care, Office Visits, In-patient Care, Mental Health and Substance Abuse Treatment
Sounds utopian, doesn’t it? Lucky for New Yorkers, it isn’t. It’s very real, and it could become our reality…but only if the Senate follows the House in passing the New York Health Act.
Of course, the New York Health Act isn’t magic, and it does have costs. After all, doctors have to earn a living; hospitals employ hundreds of people and have technology worth millions of dollars. The dollars have to come from somewhere. And that’s the best part of it all.
The New York Health Act is a single payer system funded by a progressive tax on earned and unearned income. (Think Medicare for All and then some.)
Earned income is money you earn for working. (That’s why it’s called “earned income.”)
Unearned income is money you get from interest and stock dividends. You don’t earn this income by working. (That’s why it’s called “unearned income.”)
A progressive tax takes a bigger percentage of a bigger income and a smaller percentage of a smaller income. So, for example, if your taxable income is $30,000, you’d pay 15%, or $4,500, in taxes. If your taxable income is $300,000, you’d pay 35%, or about $105,000 in taxes.
Think of it this way: You’re trading paying out-of-pocket for insurance premiums, co-pays, and deductibles for a tax that’s taken out of your pay. It’s a good deal. For most of us, the tax would turn out to be way less than the premiums, co-pays, and deductibles we and/or our employer are paying now. Plus, the Medicare tax we’re paying would get rolled into this new healthcare tax. It would not be extra.
The New York Health Act is no progressive, “lefty” legislation. It’s an economically sound solution that’s best for our county and best for the state.
You can think of it this way:
Suppose you’re a teacher in a non-public school. You pay $350 every pay period for mediocre insurance coverage. After paying the premiums, you can’t afford co-pays of $40 for an office visit or $80 for the asthma inhaler you need. What happens? Your asthma goes untreated and one day, you wind up in the hospital. Medical bills mount from there with co-pays and deductibles galore.
If you would have been covered under the New York Health Act, you could have filled your prescriptions, and you could have gotten the care you needed right away. Chances are you wouldn’t have gotten sick in the first place!
Or you can think of it this way:
Imagine you wake up Monday morning not feeling so great. But because you have a high-deductible insurance policy, you push yourself to go to work instead of seeing your doctor. Unfortunately, you’re not at the top of your game. You’re slow; your mind is foggy; you waste time; you make mistakes. The pattern repeats for several days until one morning you can hardly crawl out of bed. Somehow you manage to get yourself to the doctor or the emergency room. There, you’re diagnosed with pneumonia. You’re home in bed for weeks, or worse, admitted to the hospital. On Monday, you were under productive. Now you’re out of work and saddled with a big medical bill. Plus, someone is fixing the errors you may have made at work and making up for time and effort lost while you weren’t feeling well.
If you would have had insurance under the New York Health Act, you could have seen your doctor and been treated before pneumonia took hold. The out-of-pocket costs to you and the cost of lost efficiency and mistakes to your employer could have been avoided.
These are just stories. But if you’re like most people, one of them, or something similar, has happened to you, perhaps more than once. Multiply the experience by the number of people in the county. So much time, some much efficiency, and so much money lost. It makes no sense at all.
What does make sense is the New York Health Act. Let’s get this passed…..for your sake and for the sake of all New Yorkers.
New York Health just makes sense.