Illinois Insurance

Dir part of the Rod Blagojevich healthcare expansion plan in the balance because a legal challenge, but a collaborator Democrat proposal for a national system of universal health insurance Illinois another house and the committee last week for consultation public.

The adoption of a Canadian-style single-payer “health insurance system in Illinois is a long shot legislature, but the availability of health care and access Committee agreed to send 8 -4 House Bill 311 on Full House. The bill provides, furthermore, the Senate should be approved and the governor’s signature, and rightly so.

The sponsor, Rep. Mary Flowers, D-Chicago, said the group Tuesday that the bill would “control of the health care system in the hands of the health sector rather as liberators health of companies’ insurance. ”

– Democrats on the panel supports the bill, but Republicans said the plan is too radical, it lacked specificity and more authority to a state that the government has already dealt with mistakes of the Medicaid program.

“It is somewhere on the left of the Socialists,” said Rep. Mary Rose Mulligan, R-Des Plaines.

Supported by a variety of social services groups that AFL-CIO and the Chicago-based Physicians for a National Health Program, a bill is against the practice of nursing home industry, the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, health insurance companies and the Illinois State Medical Society.

The plan was put into circulation in the General Assembly for several years, but this is the first time, it could be a full vote of either chamber. A stated the Committee of flowers is in all its hearings before a State Full House vote takes place later this year.

Some countries - particularly Massachusetts - coveragethrough universal want to achieve a combination of expanded public programs and private insurance programs more affordable.

Blagojevich’s Illinois Covered proposal contains a mixture similar, but the General Assembly of Illinois has never been a vote on the plan. And a Cook County Circuit Court decision in this week temporarily froze the expansion of the Governor’s Family Care Plan, a Medicaid expansion Blagojevich says he has the power to develop its own.

No country has a single payer. California was the next. Hence, democratically controlled legislature authorizes a single payer system in 2006, but Republican Arnold Schwartz Dir en Egger veto against the proposal.

It is estimated that 1.7 million Illinoisans are without health insurance, and many others are underinsured.

Bill flowers background would be a system disease for all. The funding would be under Medicare and Medicaid means, combined with the income tax and income tax increases. This money is to replace an estimated $ 13 billion per year, that employers and individuals currently pay premiums, Co-pay, deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses picnic in scale, the founder of health care for all Illinois coalition.

The bill would allow all citizens, regardless of coverage already existing hygiene.

Committee member Czech Michael Tryon, R-Crystal Lake, has already had its problems, to find doctors who are willing to accept payments from the State all children in the program because of low reimbursement rates.

And he spoke of hospitals complain about the disease, a federal program, often do not pay enough to cover its costs.

But, said a scale single payer system would allow doctors and hospitals to pay higher rates through a redeployment of billions of dollars currently insurance company profits. The administrative unnecessary waste, “adds that 30 percent of health care costs, he said.

Ron Jackson, 59, Springfield, skimped resident in medicine and the combined $ 25000 in bills of health care over the past five years, if not ensured, said he would support a single payer proposal, even if it is to pay more taxes.

“Millions of people suffer without health insurance,” he said. “Everything is better than nothing.”

But his wife, Janice, works at Springfield clinic for processing applications for Medicaid patients, wants legislators to monitor improvements in the system of private insurance.

“There is too much government,” she said.

Ruth Igoe, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Health Care Services and family - a monitoring agency of the governor - said the single-payer bill has flaws, but we are certainly interested, with legislators to develop care Health people options they need. ”

Anne Marie Murphy, Blagojevich a consultant in human resources in health care, state intervention, the tab Journal last year that the governor has not been a single payer system , Because the idea is not politically viable. ”

House Speaker, spokesman for Michael Madigan, Steve Brown, said Madigan is open to the idea of a single payer system and believes that income tax would be more logical source of funding.

House majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie said a single payer plan would be a “hard sell” in the legislature, “because this is really a fundamental change in how we did health.

“But I think it is legitimate, a portion of health care debate, and I think it deserves a full analysis and clear, open in committee and ventilation in the house with sticks,” she said.