June 11, 2010
Dear PNHP colleagues,
We have much to report – a dramatic campaign around a shareholder resolution against WellPoint (reminiscent of the campaign against Dow over napalm), pro-single-payer op-eds and news coverage, Dr. Margaret Flowers’ receipt of an Our Bodies Ourselves “Woman Health Hero of the Year” award, and the availability of new PNHP slides on the federal health bill and the case for single-payer national health insurance.
We hope you’ll find much of interest in this online newsletter. You’ll also be receiving a 72-page print PNHP newsletter in the mail soon. We hope you’ll take a moment now or when it arrives to renew your membership or to make a donation.
If you subscribe to CREDO phone services, you can also vote for PNHP to receive one of the company’s annual grants to nonprofit organizations “working for a better world.” We’re within striking range of receiving a substantial award; please take a moment and vote here.
Thanks for your continued support and especially your priceless efforts for reform!
Cordially,
Ida Hellander, MD
Executive Director
Mark Almberg
Communications Director
1. WellPoint shareholder resolution gets over 30 million votes
Dr. Rob Stone led a group of shareholders at WellPoint’s annual meeting in Indianapolis on May 18 who presented a resolution calling on the company to return to its nonprofit roots. Citing some of the giant insurer’s most egregious practices, he and others in Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan received extensive media coverage and, they later learned, over 30 million share votes (9.4 percent) in support of their proposal, advancing it to the next phase. A spirited and well-attended rally took place the same day with Dr. Quentin Young (who writes in The Huffington Post about his participation here) and Wendell Potter, among others, followed by an impressive strategy meeting of some 50 regional activists. If you’d like to stay in the loop about shareholder resolutions, possible divestment campaigns and related issues, you can join a Google Group for this purpose here.
2. Single payer in the news
Dr. Johnathon Ross’ op-ed on why health reform needs to be built on a new foundation of public financing appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (reprinted below).
PNHP President Dr. Oliver Fein received excellent press coverage for his visit to New Hampshire this week. He presented grand rounds to over 70 physicians, spoke to 120 small-business owners at a Rotary Club, and addressed a public forum that drew over 100 people, all in one day.
An editorial listing the many virtues of an improved Medicare for All (“It’s still the best idea”) appeared in the The Cap Times (Madison, WI) newspaper.
Finally, Dr. Margaret Flowers received the “Audience Choice Award” for “Woman Health Hero of the Year” in a national contest sponsored by Our Bodies, Ourselves. Congratulations, Dr. Flowers!
3. New slides and resources for single-payer activists, including activists working on state single-payer bills
Dr. Steffie Woolhandler presented new slides to the PNHP Board on May 22. Those slides are available to PNHP members for use in grand rounds and other talks now at www.pnhp.org/slideshows.
Catch up on all the state level efforts for single payer with an overview article by PNHP journalism intern Chris Gray, “States seek to lead the way on single payer.“
Interesting in learning more about the Canadian health system and how to debate the case for single payer? Dr. Howard Dean, former head of the Democratic National Committee, recently participated in a debate in Canada on the merits of U.S. versus Canadian health care: “I’ve spent a lot of time in both countries and there is no doubt that you’re better off getting sick in Canada.” He cited the higher efficiency and effectiveness of Canada’s single-payer system and its ability to provide quality care to everybody. PNHP Senior Health Policy Fellow Dr. Don McCanne recommends watching the full two hours of this very informative debate (click on “Watch the video”).
4. Vote for PNHP to receive grant funds from CREDO
If you belong to CREDO’s phone network, you can cast a vote for PNHP in its annual contest among worthy nonprofits deserving of its financial support here.
5. What else PNHP members can do:
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Give a grand rounds or a talk to a local civic, faith or community group. PNHP has new slides for this purpose on our web site at www.pnhp.org/slideshows.
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Write a letter to the editor or an opinion piece to your local newspaper. Dr. Johnathan Ross’ op-ed (below) is an excellent model.
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Educate your elected officials (and candidates for the 2010 elections) about the merits of single-payer Medicare for All. (Rep. John Conyers has pledged to reintroduce H.R. 676 in the next legislative session.) Drop a note to PHNP organizer Ali Thebert at ali@pnhp.org if you’d like assistance, or to let us know about your efforts to track our progress.
Build foundation for health care on Medicare
By Johnathon Ross, M.D.
Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 30, 2010
Mrs. Brown (not her real name) was recently in to check on her blood pressure. She knows I’ve worked decades for a national health plan that would benefit individuals and businesses alike.
“So what do you think of the reform bill, Doc?”
she asked, hoping I’d be pleased.
I replied with a question of my own: “Would you add a third floor to a house that has a crumbling foundation?” Because that is what Congress just did.
The crumbling foundation is our private, for-profit, insurance-based system of financing health care. As nonprofit, community-service organizations, health insurers were once a boon to millions of workers and thousands of companies. Now, they are a very bad bargain, indeed.
Private insurers make money by denying claims. They cause us to waste enormous amounts of money on excess paperwork and bureaucracy — their own paperwork and the paperwork they inflict on hospitals, patients and doctors like me. An estimated 31 cents of every health care dollar goes toward administration in U.S. health care, at least half of it unnecessary.
The problem is getting worse. The number of administrative personnel in health care jumped more than 3,000 percent over the past three decades, while the number of doctors, nurses and other caregivers has grown by less than 200 percent.
In effect, health care has been overtaken by an army of bureaucrats whose “generals” — the CEOs — get astronomical salaries. Money-changers and paper-pushers thrive chasing the money to pay for care — not deliver it. In our complex, multipayer system, chasing money is expensive work.
Does the new law remedy this? No. “Insurance exchanges” will add yet another layer of private bureaucrats and IRS agents to determine eligibility for subsidies and enforce fines for those who fail to purchase insurance.
Private insurers in the new exchanges will continue to advertise and market their products, bill for premiums, determine eligibility for coverage, coordinate benefits, manage a multitude of yearly contracts with brokers, businesses, individuals, doctors, hospitals and other providers and, lastly, pay stockholders a high rate of return.
Each hospital and doctor will continue to track myriad contracts, discount arrangements, benefit packages, drug formularies, limited referral networks and insurance rules designed to reduce utilization of our medical resources and to increase insurance company profits.
The new law perpetuates this wasteful overhead and guarantees insurers more profits as we spend $447 billion over 10 years to subsidize the mandatory purchase of shoddy private insurance by 16 million uninsured Americans.
The exchanges are supposed to bring down prices by promoting “market competition” among various insurers. But Massachusetts and several other states have had plenty of experience with such exchanges, and the verdict is clear: They don’t control costs. In fact, Massachusetts now has the highest health care costs in the world.
As a rule, “market competition” doesn’t work well in health care. Health care is not an ordinary product that people want. Rather, it is a necessity that they must have. The most expensive care is most often not optional, predictable or negotiable.
Businesses are groaning under the burden of the rising costs of employee and retiree health care benefits. They, too, need to get out from under the heel of the private health insurance industry and the skyrocketing, volatile prices that come with it.
So what’s the alternative? It’s building on the solid foundation of our tax-financed, low-overhead Medicare system, and extending it to cover everyone without exception. The administrative savings from such a streamlined system would amount to $400 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive coverage to all with no significant out-of-pocket expenses and with complete choice of doctor and hospital.
A single-payer system would also have the clout to negotiate drug prices and provider fees, and to allocate resources efficiently and wisely. It would possess powerful tools for improving quality and controlling costs.
Conventional wisdom suggests we have to “wait and see” how the administration’s new law plays out. But we can’t afford that: With about 50 million uninsured this year, some 50,000 people will die because they lack coverage, a recent study estimates. By 2019, those figures will only be halved, experts say.
It’s not too late to do the right thing. The sooner we adopt an expanded and improved Medicare-for-all, the better off our patients and our economy will be.
Ross is past president of Physicians for a National Health Program (pnhp.org) and a leader of the Single Payer Action Network in Ohio (spanohio.org).
Health care drama at America’s crossroads
By Dr. Quentin Young
The Huffington Post
June 9, 2010
The movement for single-payer health reform – an improved Medicare for All – is hopping in Indianapolis, “the Crossroads of America.”
I can personally vouch for this, having taken part in two events there on May 18 sponsored by Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan and several other groups committed to health care justice.
The occasion? The annual shareholders meeting of WellPoint, the giant for-profit health insurance company.
For the fourth year in a row, a small group of energetic and principled shareholders led by Dr. Rob Stone of Bloomington, Ind., attended the annual meeting with the aim of speaking truth to power. They sought to direct shareholders’ and the media’s attention to some of WellPoint’s most egregious practices, including (as Dr. Stone eloquently describes here) its astronomical premium hikes on individuals and businesses, its notorious algorithm for canceling insurance policies of women predisposed to breast cancer, and – in an evasion of parts of the new health law – its relabeling of administrative expenses as “medical care.”
This year, in their latest bid to move WellPoint away from its corporate-greed and service-denial posture, Dr. Stone and others successfully introduced a shareholder resolution calling upon the company to demutualize – i.e. to return to its original, nonprofit status. (WellPoint was once a nonprofit, charitable Blue Cross company.)
The subtext was clear: WellPoint should concern itself with maximizing health care rather than profits.
It was this shareholder resolution calling on WellPoint to be socially responsible that prompted local organizers to invite me to participate in two related activities in Indianapolis that day – an afternoon health reform rally (“Health reform – we’re still for it!”) and a subsequent strategy session with regional activists – for I had played a modest role in pushing a precedent-setting, similar shareholder resolution some four decades ago.
In 1968, the Medical Committee for Human Rights (where I was then chairman), was given 10 shares of stock in the Dow Chemical Company. Dow was the leading manufacturer of napalm, a jellied gasoline, which was being used widely by the U.S. military in the war in Vietnam, including on its civilian population.
MCHR’s leadership developed a shareholder resolution calling on Dow’s board to stipulate “that napalm shall not be sold to any buyer unless that buyer gives reasonable assurances that the substance will not be used on or against human beings.”
To make a long story short, after being rebuffed by Dow’s board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and various courts, the legitimacy of our resolution was eventually upheld and the measure was ultimately voted upon. While it got less than 3 percent of the shareholders’ votes, the effort helped to pave the way for many other “socially r
esponsible” shareholder resolutions in subsequent years – including this year’s WellPoint resolution.
I must admit that I experienced a certain sense of satisfaction in seeing MCHR’s human concerns of four decades ago finding strong expression in today’s context.
Dr. Stone briefly presented his resolution in the morning and then, a bit later in the meeting, his colleagues (and other shareholders) readied themselves to participate in the question and answer session.
But then an interesting, unanticipated event gave drama and an unexpected twist to the meeting. A member of WellPoint’s board, William “Bucky” Bush (brother of George H.W. and uncle to George W.), fainted. The immediate first aid came from Dr. Stone, a seasoned ER doc, and Mr. Bush proceeded to recover promptly.
Nonetheless, WellPoint CEO Angela Braly (whose annual compensation was recently boosted to $13.1 million), who was chairing the meeting, seized on this incident to abruptly adjourn the session, thereby short-circuiting the discussion period. This was bad, but certainly not the worst conduct of the WellPoint organization.
Even so, consider this: a subsequent tally showed that Dr. Stone’s resolution calling for WellPoint to return to nonprofit status received 9.4 percent of the shareholder votes, representing over 30 million shares!
This extraordinary development, and the well-attended rally and activists’ meeting that followed the shareholders meeting, are symptomatic of persistent national unrest with the present financing of our health care system, based as it is on private health insurers. The passage of the new health law has not addressed that unrest.
Physicians for a National Health Program argues forcefully that the central problem in our current health system is embodied in corporate giants like WellPoint. PNHP, sadly, feels that the new health law on balance actually increases the stranglehold of these corporate interests on our health system, with dire results in cost, quality and access.
For this reason, all of our endeavors seek to establish single-payer national health insurance, an improved Medicare for All: “Everybody in, nobody out.”
The Indianapolis events demonstrate the continuing vigor and commitment of single-payer health advocates nationwide.
We must continue to strive to join the rest of the world’s democratic, industrialized nations in achieving a truly universal, comprehensive health care system. Such an achievement will not only enhance the health status of our people but arguably will rescue our failing economy as well.