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McCain: Deregulate health insurance, like banking

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McCain: Deregulate health insurance, like banking

Better Care at Lower Cost for Every American

By John McCain
Contingencies
September/October 2008

We can no longer afford to promise more than we can deliver. Nor can we risk misdiagnosing the problem and devising a cure that might harm the patient.

The problem is not that most Americans lack adequate health insurance. The vast majority of Americans have private insurance, and our government spends billions each year to provide even more.

Fundamental health care reform must begin with restoring control to individuals and their families as health care consumers and patients and making them the central focus of our health care system.

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

http://www.contingencies.org/septoct08/mccain.pdf

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

Let there be no doubt about John McCain’s plans for health care in America: Just as reducing the burden of government regulation of real estate lending has allowed more individuals to achieve the American dream of owning their own homes, reducing regulatory oversight of private insurers will make health care more affordable for all of us.

Many people made a lot of money in home loans while the regulators turned their backs. Of course, those people have walked away with their siphoned-off money in hand, and left us with a market that has destroyed the finances of individuals and shattered their dreams of home ownership. The magnitude of the crisis is so great that the government had to step in and use our tax dollars to prevent the collapse of the economy.

John McCain now wants the regulators to turn their backs on the private insurance industry. By selling us insurance products that are affordable, many people will make a lot of money. When those underinsurance products fail to protect us from financial hardship whenever we need heath care, our personal finances will collapse, and the financing of the health care industry will be disrupted, resulting in the impending collapse of the health care delivery system. By then, those who profited will have walked away with their siphoned-off money in hand, leaving us with a health care crisis that only the government will be able to repair, using our tax dollars to prevent the collapse of our health care system.

Just as a robust deregulated market in sub-prime lending and mortgage-backed securities was not the solution to expand home ownership to more Americans, a robust deregulated market in private health underinsurance plans can never make health care affordable for those who need it.

Barack Obama understands that if private insurance plans are to fulfill their function of making health care affordable, then the market must be tightly regulated, and underinsurance products must be prohibited. He also understands that private plans that actually work are no longer affordable for the majority of Americans. That is why he decided against mandating universal health care coverage; you can’t buy a plan if you don’t have the money to pay for it.

Neither a market of deregulated private plans nor a market of tightly-regulated private plans will work. Continuing to rely on the private insurance market will compound the crisis in health care financing, eventually forcing a government buyout of the system. Instead of waiting for more pain, suffering, financial hardship, and even death, let’s adopt a system that actually would make health care affordable for all of us: a single payer national health program.

Isn’t prevention better than a salvage operation?

On the Single Payer Road Again: It'll Be a Tough Lobby to Beat

Doctors, Nurses, Med Students and Patients Join Government and Business Leaders

Calling for Single Payer Reform in Pennsylvania and the Nation

By Donna Smith, community organizer

LANCASTER, PA — I haven’t seen Dr. Walter Tsou of PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Program) as much as I would like to since a sweltering June day last year when he welcomed the huge SiCKO bus into Philadelphia. It isn’t that both he and I haven’t been out talking about single payer healthcare reform, but we don’t often get the opportunity to be in the same place at the same time — until tonight.

We both were panelists for a forum entitled: Single-Payer, Guaranteed Healthcare for All, A Mainstream Solution. We were at the historic Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, and we were joined by medical students, doctors, nurses, business leaders and legislators.

This was a powerful bunch of people — each told a piece of the picture of a broken system and of the single payer solution. And this is one lobby group I’d match against any in tenacity, intelligence and just plain humanity. As each spoke, it was clear that respect and passion are hallmarks of this movement. You cannot buy that sort of lobby effort — it rises up from the heart and soul of decent Americans fed up with what we know can be so much better.

Talk about family values… with young women like Mary Carol Jennings, medical student and leigislative director for the 67,000 member American Medical Student Association, working on publicly funded, privately delivered, single payer health care, we clearly have strong, purposeful young women who know how to be political powerhouses and stay grounded in compassion and justice for all. I’d sure choose her to be my doc and she’ll be a fine one in the future… but she’ll be working on single payer in the coming year for AMSA.

Then there was Alan Jacobs, president of the 20-restaurant Isaac’s Deli corp, who shared his objections to hearing John McCain say he didn’t want bureaucrats involved in healthcare. Alan said as an employer under the current healthcare system in the U.S. he becomes the first-line bureaucrat for his employees as he decides which coverage the company will offer with what scope of benefits and at what price. Then he noted that the private insurance company itself becomes the next bureaucrat injected into the patient’s healthcare or lack thereof.

But then Alan finished by talking about his frustration and pain in watching an employee who suffers the onset of a health issue struggle to keep working then ultimately lose his or her job due to illness followed by a lack of income making the former employee unable to afford the insurance once held through employment. “So it is in this final brutality I am forced to participate,” he said.

Dr. Tsou gave a lively talk about the failures of various incremental programs in individual states over the years — Oregon, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Maine — and his prediction that other plans like the one currently being touted by Pennsylvania’s Governor Ed Rendell would not enjoy any different results.

Dawn Ali, RN, of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professions, told the crowd about how many nurses she knows who just cannot stand the physical and emotional strain of being nurses at the bedside under current conditions. She talked about the medical errors that follow — like night follows day — the pressures placed on nurses to handle unworkable patient loads and work mandatory overtime shifts. All this, she said, the result of a system gone mad on profit.

From one speaker to the next, the case for single payer grew ever sharper and more contrasted with the status quo. Audience questions revealed strong support for making the right sorts of political pressures heard in the right places. And this is one lobby with motivations so focused and strong that it was energizing just to be in the room.

Single payer history tonight. Onward.

Allies rally for health care reform

By John Morgan
The Pennsylvania Progressive
Sept. 19, 2008

LANCASTER, Penn. — “No person’s well being can be reduced to a price and bought and sold without moral and ethical considerations. Persons are more than ‘consumers’ of the goods and services produced by the health care system: all are entitled to care, respect, and compassion, regardless of their state of health, their medical history, their personal circumstances or their ability to pay.”

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On the Single Payer Road Again: It’ll Be a Tough Lobby to Beat

Doctors, Nurses, Med Students and Patients Join Government and Business Leaders

Calling for Single Payer Reform in Pennsylvania and the Nation

By Donna Smith, community organizer

LANCASTER, PA — I haven’t seen Dr. Walter Tsou of PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Program) as much as I would like to since a sweltering June day last year when he welcomed the huge SiCKO bus into Philadelphia. It isn’t that both he and I haven’t been out talking about single payer healthcare reform, but we don’t often get the opportunity to be in the same place at the same time — until tonight.

We both were panelists for a forum entitled: Single-Payer, Guaranteed Healthcare for All, A Mainstream Solution. We were at the historic Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, and we were joined by medical students, doctors, nurses, business leaders and legislators.

This was a powerful bunch of people — each told a piece of the picture of a broken system and of the single payer solution. And this is one lobby group I’d match against any in tenacity, intelligence and just plain humanity. As each spoke, it was clear that respect and passion are hallmarks of this movement. You cannot buy that sort of lobby effort — it rises up from the heart and soul of decent Americans fed up with what we know can be so much better.

Talk about family values… with young women like Mary Carol Jennings, medical student and leigislative director for the 67,000 member American Medical Student Association, working on publicly funded, privately delivered, single payer health care, we clearly have strong, purposeful young women who know how to be political powerhouses and stay grounded in compassion and justice for all. I’d sure choose her to be my doc and she’ll be a fine one in the future… but she’ll be working on single payer in the coming year for AMSA.

Then there was Alan Jacobs, president of the 20-restaurant Isaac’s Deli corp, who shared his objections to hearing John McCain say he didn’t want bureaucrats involved in healthcare. Alan said as an employer under the current healthcare system in the U.S. he becomes the first-line bureaucrat for his employees as he decides which coverage the company will offer with what scope of benefits and at what price. Then he noted that the private insurance company itself becomes the next bureaucrat injected into the patient’s healthcare or lack thereof.

But then Alan finished by talking about his frustration and pain in watching an employee who suffers the onset of a health issue struggle to keep working then ultimately lose his or her job due to illness followed by a lack of income making the former employee unable to afford the insurance once held through employment. “So it is in this final brutality I am forced to participate,” he said.

Dr. Tsou gave a lively talk about the failures of various incremental programs in individual states over the years — Oregon, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Maine — and his prediction that other plans like the one currently being touted by Pennsylvania’s Governor Ed Rendell would not enjoy any different results.

Dawn Ali, RN, of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professions, told the crowd about how many nurses she knows who just cannot stand the physical and emotional strain of being nurses at the bedside under current conditions. She talked about the medical errors that follow — like night follows day — the pressures placed on nurses to handle unworkable patient loads and work mandatory overtime shifts. All this, she said, the result of a system gone mad on profit.

From one speaker to the next, the case for single payer grew ever sharper and more contrasted with the status quo. Audience questions revealed strong support for making the right sorts of political pressures heard in the right places. And this is one lobby with motivations so focused and strong that it was energizing just to be in the room.

Single payer history tonight. Onward.

William Brody on risk pooling

Health care reform must art with a plan to simplify

By William R. Brody, MD, PhD, president of the Johns Hopkins University
San Francisco Chronicle
September 18, 2008
I favor community-rated health insurance – that is, one big pool to spread and share risk with no cherry picking allowed.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/17/EDA112VONV.DTL

There could not be a more explicit endorsement of social insurance, especially significant since it comes from one of the nation’s more important health care leaders. Once we all agree that we need one big risk pool to spread and share risk, the remaining efforts in health care reform would be limited to working out the details of the mechanics of funding and administering that pool.
That is not to say that it will be easy. We will still be debating whether or not we will dismiss the private insurance industry and replace it with a single payer universal health program. If we continue to use the private insurance industry, it will require massive transformation into a model similar to the European plans using non-profit private insurers, a change that investor-owned insurers surely will resist to the death of their corporations (what a pleasant fantasy). Instead of trying to totally change the mission and structure of U.S.-style insurers, it would be easier to replace them with our own public Medicare-like model.
Once we accept the concept of a single, equitable risk pool for everyone, then we can all move forward with the comparatively simple task of crafting the mechanics of the financing system. We really can do it.

William Brody on risk pooling

Health care reform must art with a plan to simplify

By William R. Brody, MD, PhD, president of the Johns Hopkins University
San Francisco Chronicle
September 18, 2008

I favor community-rated health insurance – that is, one big pool to spread and share risk with no cherry picking allowed.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/17/EDA112VONV.DTL

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

There could not be a more explicit endorsement of social insurance, especially significant since it comes from one of the nation’s more important health care leaders. Once we all agree that we need one big risk pool to spread and share risk, the remaining efforts in health care reform would be limited to working out the details of the mechanics of funding and administering that pool.

That is not to say that it will be easy. We will still be debating whether or not we will dismiss the private insurance industry and replace it with a single payer universal health program. If we continue to use the private insurance industry, it will require massive transformation into a model similar to the European plans using non-profit private insurers, a change that investor-owned insurers surely will resist to the death of their corporations (what a pleasant fantasy). Instead of trying to totally change the mission and structure of U.S.-style insurers, it would be easier to replace them with our own public Medicare-like model.

Once we accept the concept of a single, equitable risk pool for everyone, then we can all move forward with the comparatively simple task of crafting the mechanics of the financing system. We really can do it.