How To Provide Healthcare for ALL Ohioans

Does Ohio healthcare leave you stressed? You're not alone. Many Ohioans struggle with high costs, complex plans, and limited coverage.

We've found a better way. Healthcare for All Ohioans (HFAO) advocates for a statewide healthcare payment system, which is the most comprehensive and efficient way to achieve affordable, accessible coverage for everyone in the state.

This would create what's called a "single-payer" healthcare system and would deliver comprehensive coverage for everyone, including medical, vision, dental, and mental health services.

Imagine:

  • No more sky-high premiums!
  • No surprise co-pays or deductibles!
  • Financial security in the face of medical emergencies!

We believe that healthcare is a basic human right, and that everyone in Ohio deserves access to quality, affordable care.

Join us in advocating for a healthcare payment system that would serve all Ohioans across the state, and eventually nationwide. Together, we can create a win-win situation for everyone.

Diagnosis (What's Wrong)

The problems with American healthcare arise from the way we currently pay for it. In the United States, people receive health insurance through their employers. This means a person must have a full-time job with a company that can afford to offer health insurance, which leaves tens of millions of people without health insurance.

Each insurance company is called a payer of healthcare. Because we have hundreds of payers, each with their own coverages and rates, healthcare providers have to pay large teams of people to do the paperwork to get paid. This adds expense and time, and it results in insurance plans dictating care, instead of the healthcare providers.

Prescription (The Fix)

Healthcare for All Ohioans (HFAO) advocates for a single national health insurance program, also known as “Medicare for all.” This would move payment for healthcare into a single public or quasi-public agency, while leaving the delivery of care largely in private hands.

All residents of the U.S.A. would be covered for all medically necessary services, including doctor, hospital, preventive, long-term care, mental health, reproductive health care, dental, vision, prescription drug, and medical supply costs.

What about Obamacare?

The goal of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) was to expand coverage to about 30 million Americans by requiring people to buy private insurance policies (partially subsidizing those policies by government payments to private insurers) and by expanding Medicaid.

However:

  • About 30 million people were still uninsured in 2023, and tens of millions remained underinsured.
  • Insurers have continued to strip down policies, maintain restrictive networks, limit and deny care, and increase patients’ co-pays, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket costs.
  • The law preserves our fragmented financing system, making it impossible to control costs.
  • The law continues the unfair financing of healthcare, whereby costs are disproportionately borne by middle- and lower-income Americans and those families facing acute or chronic illness.

This handy chart by PNHP compares a national healthcare plan and the ACA.

The Cost (How To Pay for It)

We would fund the program with the savings obtained from replacing today’s inefficient, profit-oriented, multiple insurance payers with a single streamlined, nonprofit, public payer, and by modest new taxes based on ability to pay.

Premiums would disappear, saving 95 percent of all households money. Patients would no longer face financial barriers to care, such as co-pays and deductibles, and would regain free choice of doctor and hospital. Doctors would regain autonomy over patient care.

How To Make It Happen

HFAO is working to implement this health insurance program in Ohio by introducing bills in the Ohio House and Senate titled "Establish and Operate The Ohio Health Care Plan." Learn more about these bills and their sponsors here. 

We also support the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, based on Physicians for a National Healthcare Plan (PNHP)’s JAMA-published Physicians’ Proposal, which would establish a national health insurance system in the USA. Learn more about national legislative efforts here.

Need More Information?

Over the past two decades, peer-reviewed research by Physicians for a National Healthcare Plan (PNHP) leaders framed the debate on healthcare and focused it on the need for fundamental reform. These proposals detail what a universal healthcare system in the U.S. could look like.

You can find more information in this list of "single payer" resources and in this FAQ, both created by PNHP.