Detroit Families to Share Health Care Stories at Roundtable With Health Insurance Plans

DETROIT (Map) - AHIP's Campaign for an American Solution listening tour comes to Detroit

DETROIT, Aug. 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Detroit families and community leaders will share their health care stories and their priorities for health care reform at a roundtable today with representatives from the health insurance industry.

Detroit, MI is the second stop on a listening tour conducted by America's Health Insurance Plans' (AHIP) Campaign for an American Solution. The campaign is a new national grassroots and educational initiative to build support for workable health care reform based on six core principles: coverage, affordability, quality, value, choice and portability.

"As we listen to the health care stories of families in Detroit and across the country, we are also seeking their input on our reform proposals and what the country can do to make coverage more affordable and more portable," said Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of AHIP.

The Campaign for an American Solution is engaging in conversations about health care with Americans from all walks of life--those with coverage and those without, small business owners and employees, union leaders and members, physicians and other providers, and working families from diverse communities.

"We are encouraging all Americans to have their voices heard in the health care reform discussion," said Ignagni.

Over the past two years, AHIP's Board of Directors has developed a range of comprehensive policy proposals to provide families with greater access to high-quality affordable health care coverage. AHIP's proposals would:

-- Ensure that all Americans have access to health care coverage;

-- Repair the health care safety net by expanding Medicaid to cover every uninsured American living in poverty and making all children from low-income uninsured families eligible for the Children's Health Insurance Program;

-- Strengthen the employer-based health care coverage system that enables tens of millions of working families to access insurance;

-- Guarantee access to health care coverage in the individual market to ensure that no one falls through the cracks;

-- Give working families a helping hand to afford health care coverage by providing tax credits on a sliding-scale up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line;

-- Give workers portability with a new tax-free portable health account that can be used to purchase any type of health care coverage. Individuals, employers, the federal government and state governments could all contribute to the account;

-- Slow the growth rate of the cost of medical services to help make coverage more affordable for working families; and

-- Improve the value that consumers get for their health care dollars by rewarding quality, promoting wellness and prevention, and providing consumers with better access to information about what medical treatments are most effective.

Currently, more than one million people in Michigan, or ten percent of the state's population, are uninsured, according to Urban Institute and Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured estimates based on U.S. Census Bureau March 2006 and 2007 Current Population Survey data. The same report estimates nearly 47 million Americans do not have health insurance coverage.

About the Campaign for an American Solution

The Campaign for an American Solution is a non-partisan, educational and grassroots initiative of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the national trade association whose members provide coverage to more than 200 million people. The Campaign's goal is to build support for workable health care reform based on core principles supported by the American people: coverage, affordability, quality, value, choice and portability. For more information, please visit www.americanhealthsolution.org.

America's Health Insurance Plans - Providing Health Benefits to More Than 200 Million Americans