What Is MHP?
MHP Principles
Healing Health Care
MNHealthPlan.org/
A comprehensive, coherent roadmap to universal health care.
In this new book, Minnesota Senator John Marty provides the most complete, well-researched, thoroughly documented proposal for universal health care; a blueprint not only for Minnesota but for people across the country who are eager to create a health care system that works.
People who read this short book cover-to-cover will come away with a fundamentally different understanding of our health care crisis, and a belief that we really can fix our health care system.
Senator Marty begins by spelling out principles we should expect our health care system to follow, then lays out a commonsense plan to meet those principles. Using Minnesota legislation as a model, he articulates a plan that covers all people for all of their medical needs in an accountable, comprehensible, fair, and affordable manner.
Marty cuts through and critiques layers of "reforms," from the Nixon era to the Obama administration, that led to the bureaucratic nightmare that causes Americans to pay almost twice as much as other nations, with worse coverage and poor health outcomes. Our health care system is so dysfunctional, one business executive quipped, "If you tried to design a health care system that doesn't work, you couldn't have done a better job."
Marty challenges the timidity of progressive politics: "If twenty-first century progressives had been leading the nineteenth century abolition movement, we would still have slavery, but we would have limited slavery to a 40-hour work week, and we would be congratulating each other on the progress we had made."
As a long-time state senator, he argues that politicians retreated from a "politics of principle" to a misguided "politics of pragmatism," which led President Obama to fight for, and pass a "universal" health care system that isn't universal.
Marty points out that the United States squanders outstanding health care resources—excellent providers, clinics and hospitals, medical research and technology—on a broken system that makes it difficult and expensive for many people to get the care they need. He asks, "why would any society make it difficult for its people to access health care?"
Senator Marty concludes, "It's time to develop the political will to build a system that gives health care to all instead of health insurance to some."
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