Oct. 20, 2010
Dear PNHP colleagues and friends,
Momentum is building for PNHP’s Annual Meeting, which is only a couple of weeks away – Saturday, Nov. 6 – in Denver, but it’s still not too late to register. We also have a few spots open for our highly acclaimed Leadership Training Institute the day before (Nov. 5). Please register for one or both today.
You won’t want to miss distinguished speakers like Democracy Now host Amy Goodman, PNHP co-founders Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, pharmaceutical industry critics Donald Light (editor of the new book “The Risks of Prescription Drugs”) and Joel Lexchin, American pediatric surgeon practicing in Canada Dr. Sherif Emil, labor activist Rose Roach and journalist T.R. Reid (author of “The Healing of America”), among others.
And you won’t want to miss the chance to compare notes with PNHP activists from all over the country who are continuing the drive for single-payer health reform on the state and national levels.
All events will be held at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel at 1550 Court Place, Denver. To book your room, call 800-325-3535. If you have questions, call the PNHP office at (312) 782-6006. If you are unable to attend, please consider making a donation to help pay for scholarships for medical students to participate.
Meanwhile, PNHP leaders and activists have been active on multiple fronts in recent weeks.
-
Thirty-nine physicians joined or renewed their membership in PNHP at the recent meetings of the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American Academy of Pediatrics, where we had exhibit booths. Our membership continues to grow – we’re now over 18,000!
-
Dr. Margaret Flowers and PNHP staffer Ali Thebert just completed a successful chapter visit to North Carolina, where area members arranged for Dr. Flowers give grand rounds, radio interviews and presentations in churches and community halls in Charlotte, Greensboro and Durham-Chapel Hill. In the weeks ahead, similar visits are planned for New Jersey, Wisconsin and Colorado. To arrange a chapter visit, contact Ali Thebert at ali@pnhp.org.
-
PNHP’s banner at the Oct. 2 “One Nation Working Together” march in Washington calling for “Single payer – improved Medicare for all” was very well received. An estimated 175,000 people attended the event, which is described by Drs. Flowers and Andy Coates here. You can see a picture of our banner here.
-
Our Washington staff, notably PNHP congressional fellow Dr. Flowers and Ron Hikel, have been meeting with the health legislative assistants of several U.S. senators, aiming to line up more support for single-payer legislation in that chamber. On the House side, the main points of our successful congressional briefing on Sept. 23 are summarized here. The briefing, which focused on the Deficit Commission’s threats to Medicare, drew several dozen health LAs and the participation of Rep. Lynn Woolsey, honorary co-host of the event, and Rep. John Conyers. Rep. Raul Grijalva also co-hosted.
-
The Nov. 2 midterm elections are just around the corner, and single payer is an issue in many campaigns. You can read the comments of PNHP’s national coordinator, Dr. Quentin Young, on this fall’s political scene at The Huffington Post.
-
Our physicians continue to engage in a lively debate about health reform on the opinion pages of their regional newspapers. See, for example, the recent op-eds of Dr. Wally Retan in the Birmingham News and Dr. James Mitchiner in the Ann Arbor News. A great resource for evaluating the new health law and making a compelling case for single payer is Dr. John Geyman’s new book, “Hijacked: The Road to Single Payer in the Aftermath of Stolen Health Reform.” You can order it easily through PNHP’s store.
Thanks for your continued support and especially your priceless efforts for reform!
Cordially,
Quentin Young, M.D.
National Coordinator
Mark Almberg
Communications Director
P.S. If you’re a member of CREDO’s phone services or CREDO Action, you can help PNHP by voting on how CREDO distributes its 2010 donations funding. This year PNHP is on the ballot and we need your votes! The more votes we get, the more funding we’ll receive from CREDO. Two years ago we received nearly $65,000 in this way. Voting is easy. Go to http://www.credomobile.com/ballot and vote for us. It’s a quick and effective way to support PNHP — at no extra cost to you. Of course, you can always make a direct, tax-deductible contribution to PNHP online or by mail, too!
State needs single-payer health system
By WALLY RETAN
Birmingham News, Oct. 10, 2010
The cost of health care is out of control. We have to do something about it. Now.
As a nation, we spent about $8,000 per person on health care last year. Tha
t includes premiums, co-payments, deductibles and out-of-pocket payments for what insurance didn’t cover. That’s also the money employers didn’t put into paychecks because they sent it to an insurance company.
It’s also taxes. Medicaid is bankrupting many state governments, including ours, but health care costs also include taxes for the veterans medical system, military medicine and Medicare.
In 1970, health care costs were only $350 per person. Government experts expect the spending to rise to $13,000 per person by 2018, the year the major cost-controlling measures of the new health care law finally become fully effective. That would be more than $30,000 a year for an average family.
We can’t afford to wait for the law to do whatever it’s going to do to control costs.
Medical expenditures in Great Britain, Sweden and Spain are about $3,000 per person each year. The quality of health care in those countries scores very high in international comparisons; in some cases, higher than ours. People who live there are generally well-satisfied with the care they have.
America can follow their example and provide high-quality health care for everyone for about half of what we’re spending now. What it would take is a publicly financed, national health insurance program like those in European countries — a single-payer health care system.
Today, of every U.S. dollar spent for health care, 30 cents or more go to administration, most of it wasted on the paperwork and bureaucracy imposed by private health insurance companies. By comparison, the administrative overhead in the Medicare system is less than 4 cents per dollar.
We need the efficiency of a single, publicly financed health care system, like an improved form of Medicare, providing affordable, high-quality care for everyone. Medicare preserves the right to choose and change one’s physician, fundamental to patient autonomy. Patients would be free to seek care from any licensed health care professional.
Our health facilities should be geared toward optimal patient care, not for optimal return to shareholders. Hospitals should operate as public service organizations, with regional planning agencies setting their global budgets, including their capital expenditures. This would eliminate most of today’s irrational waste.
So, is this the way our country should go?
Doctors would like it. Physicians in single-payer countries live comfortably, much like physicians here. They have much less medical school debt, much lower malpractice insurance and wonderful freedom from hassles with insurance companies.
Patients would like it. We’d all pay a little more Medicare tax, but we’d be free of those sky-high premiums, co-payments and deductibles, and free of wrongful claim denials. We’d know that every one of us could get all of the care we really need, without favoritism and with no one left out.
Businesses would like it. No more double-digit premium increases each year to struggle with. No more worrying about the cost of health care for employees. Employers could get out of the health insurance business and back to doing what they know best.
A single-payer program would also give us powerful tools like the ability to negotiate fees and pharmaceutical prices, thus giving us long-term cost control.
States all across the country are looking hard at what the new health care reform law requires of them. Many states are also looking hard to see if a state single-payer option would make sense for them.
Alabama should be looking at a state single-payer option, too.
Wally Retan, M.D., of Mountain Brook is state coordinator for the Alabama chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program (www.PNHP.org) and Health Care for Everyone — Alabama (www.HealthCareFor-Everyone-Alabama.org). E-mail: info@healthcareforeveryone-Alabama.org.
http://blog.al.com/birmingham-news-commentary/2010/10/my_view_state_needs_single-pay.html
Model exists to provide health insurance for all – it’s called Medicare
By Dr. James C. Mitchiner
Ann Arbor News, Oct. 3, 2010
The announcement last month by the Census Bureau that the number of uninsured increased last year to a record 50.7 million individuals should come as no surprise to those who understand the uniquely American tradition of linking health insurance to employment.
Combined with the corresponding finding that the rate of employer-based insurance has decreased, the conclusion is obvious: in a declining economy, as unemployment rates increase and employer payrolls tighten, the number of people lacking health insurance goes up.
Why is this? I have never understood why health insurance must be associated with employment. Historically, I recognize how businesses’ response to FDR’s wartime wage and price controls lead to the situation we have now. But I fail to see how a model first applied in the 1940s should continue to operate in the 21st century. Other forms of insurance – car, home, boat, flood, and universal life insurance – are not linked to a job, so why should health insurance have this unique relationship?
Imagine a world where your health care coverage would not be predicated on what you did or where you worked, where you lived under a system that provided continual access to care as you moved from job to job or state to state, and guaranteed your health security even if you were laid off or terminated. Picture yourself in such a world where “choice” refers not to your choice of health insurer, but instead to the freedom to choose your own doctor and hospital, based on whatever criteria you and you alone deem to be personally relevant. And imagine a world where more than 95 percent of your contribution to health insurance was actually spent on health care, with no substantial contributions to a bloated and mindless bureaucracy.
The good news is that such a model exists. It is called a single-payer, Medicare-for-All program. It is a plan modeled on Medicare, a popular program that is universal, portable, affordable, non-profit, non-discriminatory, and administratively efficient. An expanded Medicare program would sever the link between employment and health insurance for all Americans, and use as its sole entry criteria nothing more than U.S. citizenship. Such a program would drastically reduce the number of uninsured, at a total cost much less than what we are paying now. And, under a single-payer system, private insurance firms would be used for simple administrative functions only, and not for decisions that place greedy corporate profits over an individual’s right to medical care.
And the bad news? The United States remains the only western democracy that does not have universal single-payer health insurance. For illogical reasons, we as a country continue to have blind faith in the ability of the private insurance industry to solve the dual problems of access to care and cost containment. If for-profit insurance has not fixed the problems with health care after over 60 years of existence, why would anyone believe it would happen now under the recently passed health care reform act, where private insurance continues to play a dominant role? Clearly, the only logical solution is to insure everyone, and the most efficient way to do that is through single-payer national health insurance.
Dr. James Mitchiner, an Ann Arbor physician, is the fo
rmer president of the Washtenaw County Medical Society and a member of Physicians for a National Health Program.