United States National Health Care Act

United States National Health Care Act

Long title	To provide for comprehensive health insurance coverage for all United States residents, improved health care delivery, and for other purposes.
Acronyms (colloquial)	USNHCA / Single-Payer Health Care
Legislative history
Introduced in the House of Representatives as H.R. 676 by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) on February 3, 2015 Committee consideration by Committee on Energy and Commerce, Committee on Ways and Means, Committee on Natural Resources

The United States National Health Care Act, or the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act (www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/676) is a bill introduced in the United States House of Representatives by Representative John Conyers (D-MI). The bill had 49 cosponsors in 2015. As of April 12, 2017, it has 96 cosponsors, which amounts to 50% of the Democratic delegation to the House of Representatives and is the highest level of support the bill has ever received since Rep. Conyers began annually introducing the bill in 2003.[1]The act would establish a universal single-payer health care system in the United States, the rough equivalent of Canada's Medicare and Taiwan's Bureau of National Health Insurance, among other examples. Under a single-payer system, most medical care would be paid for by the Government of the United States, ending the need for private health insurance and premiums, and probably recasting private insurance companies as providing purely supplemental coverage, to be used when non-essential care is sought.

The national system would be paid for in part through taxes replacing insurance premiums, but also by savings realized through the provision of preventative universal healthcare and the elimination of insurance company overhead and hospital billing costs. An analysis of the bill by Physicians for a National Health Program estimated the immediate savings at $350 billion per year. Others have estimated a long-term savings amounting to 40% of all national health expenditures due to preventative health care. Preventative care can save several hundreds of billions of dollars per year in the U.S., because for example cancer patients are more likely to be diagnosed at Stage I where curative treatment is typically a few outpatient visits, instead of at Stage III or later in an emergency room where treatment can involve years of hospitalization and is often terminal.

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