To thrive, people need an approach to health care that increases access to quality, affordable care.
- According to Gallup, the percentage of uninsured Hispanics is nearly four times greater than the percentage of non-Hispanic white Americans.
- More than one-quarter of Hispanics went without a health care visit over the course of a year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
- Twenty-two percent of Hispanics went without care over the course of a year due to cost.
Clearly health care remains an important challenge. That’s why we need policies that expand choice, improve quality, lower costs, and encourage the innovation that could transform health care for all.
Such an approach would entail:
- Resisting expansion of government-controlled health care: Centralized approaches to health care reform, like “Medicare for All” or a “public option” cannot give Americans what they want and deserve: a comprehensive health care agenda that expands access to high-quality care, reduces costs, and strengthens safety nets for the most vulnerable. Top-down centralized approaches lead to bureaucratic rationing, wait-lists, and shortages— burdens that fall hardest on the most vulnerable.
- Improving access to personal health care options: We must begin working to enact policies that remove barriers and strengthen the way health care is being delivered to patients. Congress should pursue patient centered reforms such as the expansion of tax-free health savings accounts, including for Medicare recipients.
- Combatting COVID-19 with a comprehensive approach to recovery: We must curb the spread of the coronavirus and protect public health for the economy to recover—and we can do so without additional blanket shutdowns that harm people’s livelihoods. Congress should pursue an aggressive “all-of-the-above” approach combining smarter testing, better access to self-administered home rapid-tests, quicker vaccine approvals and deployment, more therapeutic tools, and making COVID-19 health reforms permanent.
