1. Congress must pass the Healthcare Emergency Guarantee Act to ensure that everyone, regardless of employment, immigration, or insurance status, has access to the healthcare they need — including free testing, vaccines, and treatment — during the COVID pandemic.
2. If we want to save lives and beat COVID, we must put patients and healthcare workers over the profits of insurance and drug companies.
3. As a result of COVID, millions of workers are losing their jobs and their insurance. Even those with insurance struggle to afford the cost of hospital treatment (in some cases tens of thousands of dollars). The communities hit hardest by the coronavirus, such as the undocumented, largely do not have any health insurance coverage at all.
4. People infected with COVID who are struggling to pay bills have decided to not seek the vaccination or treatment they need because they are worried about the high costs of healthcare. Any barrier to care will discourage people from getting needed medical treatment and jeopardize everyone’s health.
5. Drug companies and insurance companies are making record profits during this pandemic through copays, deductibles, and expensive drugs. Democrats who take their money and refuse to support the Healthcare Emergency Guarantee Act are subsidizing Big Insurance and Big Pharma and are complicit in the deaths from COVID-19.
6. Waiting or refusing to act will result in hundreds of thousands of more deaths.
7. Because our system ties health insurance to employment, millions of workers are losing their healthcare in the middle of a pandemic.
8. Even before this crisis began, 87 million Americans were uninsured or underinsured — struggling to get to a doctor when they needed to. Now the situation is much worse.
9. The HCEG Act is the most comprehensive and cost effective way to guarantee that everyone in America gets all the healthcare they need, without cost, for the duration of the pandemic. (The HCEG Act is cheaper and more inclusive than plans to expand COBRA)
10. The HCEG Act would immediately free health care providers from the onerous administrative responsibilities of dealing with private insurance, while assuring them that they would be paid for delivering needed care. This means nurses and doctors can spend more time treating infected patients.
