Healthcare Reform Platform

Principals of Health Care Reform

AMHP believes in comprehensive health care reform that will increase access to high-quality, affordable care for all Americans.  To achieve this overarching goal, AMHP supports the following reforms:

Expand access by:

• Creating a public insurance option for all Americans.
• Regulating the private health insurance industry to ensure guaranteed issue, prevent rescission, and other egregious practices.
• Increasing the health care workforce, particularly in primary care and underserved areas, while also encouraging the rise in diversity within that workforce.
• Creating a National Health Exchange that will help consumers compare various health plans and purchase the most appropriate plan.
• Expanding Medicare, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)
• Requiring all large employers provide all employees with health benefits or pay into the system toward the public option.
• Subsidizing the purchase of private insurance or offering the public option on a sliding-scale for all those who cannot afford the cost of care.

Control costs by:

• Focusing on prevention, including an emphasis on lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise, while changing public policies that affect those lifestyle choices.
• Building the public health infrastructure and workforce at the local, state, and national level.
• Aligning payments to highlight the value of preventative services and primary care.
• Strengthening disease management services to ensure that chronic conditions are handled in the most efficient way.
• Aligning payments to reflect an emphasis on quality of care, rather than the quantity of procedures or tests performed.
• Promoting and incentivizing the use of health information technology (HIT) of all providers.
• Empowering Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) to not only make recommendations about Medicare payments but requiring Congress follow those recommendations. 
• Improving all public programs to help lower costs by such changes as negotiating rates with pharmaceutical companies and device manufacturers.
• Eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse in public programs.
• Collecting and disseminating relevant data to build robust data sets for various applications, such as comparative-effectiveness research and eliminating health disparities.
• Using comparative-effectiveness research to encourage the most appropriate intervention.
• Helping prevent the provider practice of “defensive medicine” by advocating responsible tort reform.

AMHP believes the status quo is untenable and is prepared to work with all stakeholders to ensure that all Americans have access to high-quality and affordable health care.

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Priorities of Health Care Reform

AMHP believes in comprehensive health care reform that will increase access to high-quality, affordable care for all Americans.  To achieve this overarching goal, AMHP supports a comprehensive reform agenda with a special focus on the following reforms:

• AMHP strongly supports the creation of a public insurance option.  This option will help control costs by:
  • Using economies of scale
  • Spreading risk across a large group
  • Lowering administrative costs
  • Increasing competition within the highly concentrated insurance market
  • Expanding the number of providers
  • Promoting stability within the market by not tying benefits to employ

• AMHP fervently backs the strict regulation of the private health insurance industry to ensure that consumers are treated fairly and receive the best care possible by:
• Requiring guaranteed issue and renewal
• Preventing exclusions of pre-existing conditions
• Prohibiting rescissions due to illness
• Obliging the use of community rates
• Forbidding the denial of specific claims
• Limiting medical-loss ratios to be no less than 90%
• Capping out-of-pocket expenses
• Banning annual or lifetime caps on benefits
• Inhibiting excessive premium increases

• AMHP passionately believes in emphasizing prevention as a way to control costs and increase the health status of all Americans by:
• Improving the public health infrastructure and increasing the public health workforce
• Expanding the number of primary care providers
• Aligning payments to encourage the use of primary care
• Eliminating co-pays, co-insurance, and other payment structures for preventative services
• Changing public policy to promote prevention
• Shifting education policy to require physical education classes and nutritious school lunches
• Modifying environmental policy to ensure limiting of exposures that are hazardous to human health
• Transforming food policy to encourage eating fruits and vegetables, while discouraging the use of processed foods
• Adjusting urban-planning policy to build communities that are conducive to physical activity

AMHP commitment to health being a human right leads us to believe the status quo is untenable.  We are prepared to work with all stakeholders to ensure that all Americans have access to high-quality and affordable health care.

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Fact Sheets

To help our members advocate for comprehensive health care reform, AMHP has created a number of fact sheets that address major issues addressed in current legislation.  The following are downloadable fact sheets that can be used to educate yourself on the issues and as talking points when advocating for change.

• Public Health Insurance Option
• Private Health Insurance Regulation
• Public Health and Prevention
• Health Exchange
• Employer Mandates
• Individual Mandates
• Subsidies to Low-Income Individuals
• Health Information Technology
• Existing Public Program Expansion
• Workforce Expansion and Diversity
• Comparative-Effectiveness Research
• Tort Reform
• MedPAC