Feedback Invited on U.S. Health-Care Plan

A national group has been holding meetings in communities around the country since January to take the pulse of Americans’ views on our health-care system.

Results of those meetings show that most people are in favor of health care for all citizens. At some meetings, complementary and alternative medicine was suggested for inclusion in a core health-care benefits package.

The Citizens’ Health Care Working Group, which was authorized in the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, is accepting additional comments on its Web site and via postal mail, until August 31. The group is a nonpartisan, independent body whose members were tasked with engaging the public in a nationwide discussion of the nation’s health care system and charged with developing recommendations for the President and Congress to provide U.S. citizens with health care for all Americans.

In June the group released its Interim Recommendations on how to make health care work for all Americans. The recommendations reflect input from more than 20,000 citizens who participated in more than 75 community meetings nationwide or provided their input online.

The group’s final recommendations will be issued at the end of September and will be sent to the President for review and to the Congress, which will hold hearings.

The group recommends:

• A public policy that all Americans have affordable health care

• A core benefits package for all Americans

• Guaranteed financial protection against very high health-care costs

• Development of integrated community health networks

• More intensive efforts to improve quality of care and efficiency.

• New ways to provide and finance palliative care, hospice and other services, so that people living with advanced incurable conditions have access to them in the environment they choose

Comments on the interim recommendations may be submitted at www.CitizensHealthCare.gov; by postal mail at Citizens’ Health Care Working Group, Attn: Interim Recs., 7201 Wisconsin Ave., Ste. 575, Bethesda, MD 20814; or by email at CitizensHealth@ahrq.gov.

— Karen Menehan