Universal Health Care

PSR/Sacramento endorses the principle that access to timely, high quality, necessary health care, without regard to one’s income or ability to pay, is a basic human right. We believe that it is deplorable that the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not provide some form of health care coverage for all of its citizens, yet spends two to three times more per capita than other developed countries on health care expenditures, and ranks lower than most other developed countries in global measures of health care quality. We believe that if our state and our country were to adopt an efficient, not for profit, universal health care system, it should be possible to provide excellent health care coverage for every resident of our country for the same total expenditure that is now leaving 15-20% of our residents uninsured and many more under-insured.

PSR/Sacramento is working with other health care professionals, state legislators and other policy makers, and the general public on the issue of universal health care. We support the principle of single payer, universal health care that has been put forth in SB 810 by State Senator Mark Leno. While we believe that there are some practical aspects of converting from the present, chaotic system of health care coverage to the efficient, integrated system envisioned in SB 810 that still need to be worked out, we believe that universal health care should not be viewed just as a distant, theoretical goal, but rather as an urgently needed practical solution to the problem of health care access in our state and our country.

For more information, please read Dr. Bill Durston’s January 2012 “Reforming Health Care Delivery in the United States.”