All Michigan residents will be eligible for comprehensive coverage including
hospitalization, mental health care, dental care, reproductive health, and prescription
drug coverage, and more!

MiCare will be publicly administered, not contracted out to insurance companies. This will remove the profit motive that currently incentivizes insurers to deny necessary healthcare. It will also create cost savings; publicly run systems like Medicare spend 2-3%, on overhead, while private insurers spend 12-18%.

Doctors and other providers will maintain their autonomy, and patients will remain free to choose among providers who accept MiCare.

MiCare will cover employees so that businesses don’t have to bear the administrative hassle and the cost of health insurance. Without these burdens, Michigan businesses will be better positioned to compete on a national and global scale.

Single-payer systems give all of us the power to unite in negotiating health care costs. MiCare will supercharge this consumer leverage by pegging prescription drug prices to those negotiated by the federal Veterans Affairs system and setting healthcare prices at Medicare plus 10%. 

Based on projections for similar proposals in other states, MiCare is expected to result in a net savings of $20 billion. By eliminating out-of-pocket costs like co-pays, co-insurance, and deductibles, MiCare will also eliminate the large unexpected medical expenses that even insured families face under the current system.

MiCare will redirect existing healthcare spending to a single payer system. The state will seek to include federal healthcare dollars from Medicaid and the ACA marketplace in the system. Although new state revenue will also be needed, this is expected to displace private healthcare spending, resulting in a direct savings for the vast majority of Michiganders. Funding would come from a graduated health care assessment on payroll and other types of income such as capital gains. In order to maintain employers’ responsibility to contribute to employees’ healthcare as a business expense, employers would pay 80% of the payroll assessment. However, employers should on average see a savings over what they are paying now.

More than 1,000 Michigan residents die each year because they lack health insurance. Many more are disabled by health conditions they cannot afford to treat. Life expectancies in the U.S. have been falling behind those of our peer countries for more than a generation. We have the resources to fix this injustice; every other industrialized nation provides some form of universal health coverage while spending far less. It is time for the people of Michigan to decide what kind of healthcare system we want for ourselves and our neighbors.