Professor to speak on health reform April 21
Health Care for All Illinois (HCAI), the Illinois chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), today called on Congress to emphatically reject proposals that would damage the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
Instead, said Dr. Diljeet Singh, HCAI co-president, Congress should assure high quality comprehensive care, while also making health care affordable for all Illinoisans and all Americans, by swiftly enacting HR 676, the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, which would create a single-payer health care system in the United States.
Rep. John Conyers of Michigan reintroduced HR 676 in the 112th Congress on Feb. 11, and it now has 41 co-sponsors.
Singh will present and discuss the HCAI position at a community forum to be held at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 21, at the Byron Colby Barn at Prairie Crossing, 1561 Jones Point Road, Grayslake. The public is invited and admission is free.
Single-payer Medicare-for-All, Singh stated, would save money for consumers, employers, and local governments, money that could then flow into local economies. It would do so by eliminating the wasteful bureaucracy created by the health insurance industry for the purpose of denying claims, and through other proven methods.
By contrast, decreasing Medicare benefits will not help the federal budget, and will ultimately impoverish millions of seniors and their families, with devastating effects on other parts of the economy. “Single-payer health care is the moral and economic solution to the U.S. health care crisis,” she said.
Singh is assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and co-director of Northwestern's Ovarian Cancer Early Detection and Prevention Program. She received her medical education at Northwestern, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins Universities, and at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, and has done research on women's health issues in low-resource countries including Thailand and Rwanda.
Singh shares the presidency of HCAI with Dr. Quentin Young, former head of Internal Medicine at Cook County Hospital. Young now serves as coordinator of PNHP, headquartered in Chicago, and in 2009 was appointed Illinois Health Advocate by Gov. Patrick Quinn.
"We urge lawmakers to work for a true health care reform, single-payer, that will give all the people of Illinois access to the health care they need; complete choice of doctors, hospitals, and other providers; and protection against unaffordable health care costs," Singh said. “If we just get rid of the expensive administrative burdens imposed by the bureaucratic private health insurance industry, we can take care of everyone."