Assembly Seeks APA Policy to Obtain Coverage for Uninsured

The Assembly action emphasizes that such a policy must include legal immigrants, a group facing the loss of publicly funded health, disability, and other benefits in August under a new federal law designed to discourage immigration to the U.S. The action now moves to the Board of Trustees for its consideration.

The Assembly proposal originally stated that a single-payer plan is the "optimal solution" to the insurance crisis and called on APA to advocate for such a policy, but the representatives modified it to call for evaluating data on several options for enacting universal access to health care. The paper also suggests "interfacing" with other medical organizations and the National Institutes of Health during the process of developing these policy recommendations.

The Assembly's distress about the impending cutoff of benefits to legal immigrants is also reflected in a vote to add to APA's legislative priority agenda a policy that "legal immigrants [are] entitled to fair and equal access to mental health and substance abuse treatment and disability benefits in federally funded programs."

The New York County District Branch representatives who introduced the measure stated that under the immigration provisions of the 1996 welfare reform, legal immigrants will even be barred from Medicaid eligibility in their first five years in the U.S. They predicted "serious public health and public safety problems will result" if these cutoffs are allowed to stand.

The Assembly also asked the Board of Trustees to charge appropriate APA committees and councils with collecting data on various health care options that could "achieve uninterrupted universal health care access and coverage." Specifically included in this study would be information gathered on single-payer systems, which continue to be attractive alternatives in the view of several Assembly members.

Continuing its push to undertake actions that will remedy the consequences of an inadequate health insurance system, the Assembly recommended that the Board of Trustees adopt as APA policy the American Medical Association's position supporting individually selected and owned health insurance as a method for increasing access to health care coverage.

Such a program would eliminate the differential tax treatment that currently favors group policies bought by employers over individually purchased ones. It would also, its advocates say, make it more likely that mental illness treatment would be a covered service, because surveys continue to show the strong interest individual Americans have in obtaining this coverage. With an overriding focus on the bottom line, group policies usually have inadequate levels of mental illness coverage, but with individuals having more influence over the insurance market, payers would be more likely to accede to demands to boost mental illness coverage.

In other actions, the Assembly