The U.S. now spends $3.5 trillion a year on health care, that’s over $10,000 per person per year, and more than enough to guarantee high-quality, affordable, equitable, and sustainable health care for all in America.
Our current system not only makes essential healthcare services unaffordable for many, but it also allows pharmaceutical companies to charge unjustifiable prices for life-saving medicines and fails to provide affordable, high quality, comprehensive care to all patients and families. Our patients deserve to have access to a physician whenever they get sick. As physicians-in-training, a healthcare system that continues to tell us who deserves healthcare and who does not is not the answer for equitable health outcomes. We need a long-term solution that puts our patients first; not corporate or special interests.
As an organization of future physicians, the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) seeks to improve the health and enhance healthcare access for everyone in America, true healthcare for all; and the federal single-payer system proposed in the Medicare for All Act would be a momentous step toward that vision.
Medicare for All would:
- Guarantee high-quality, equitable, & affordable health care all
- Relieve employers from the burden of providing health insurance
- Provide coverage for all regardless of workplace changes
- Harness our federal government’s negotiating power to bring down prices
- Reduce administrative waste, overtreatment & unnecessary care
- Cover all needed medical care & expand coverage to include dental, vision, long-term care
- Be sustainable for local, state, & federal governments, as well as for individuals & families
AMSA stands in strong support of Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Medicare for All Act of 2019, H.R. 1384, and of Sen. Bernie Sanders Medicare for All Act, S. 1129. We, the undersigned call on our U.S. Senators and House Representatives to co-sponsor these important bills and to pass "Medicare for All" legislation:
