Snuff Politics

By CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER

The Corporate Democratic Party is into snuff politics.

The target this month–single payer, Medicare for all.

The motive–protect the corporate health insurance industry.

Democratic snuff politics was on display yesterday on Capitol Hill.

Senator Ron Wyden was on the Hill surrounded by his corporate supporters–Steve Burd, CEO, Safeway Inc., Art Collins, CEO of Medtronic, Inc, H. Edward Hanaway, CEO, CIGNA, Steve Sanger, CEO, General Mills, and Ronald Williams, CEO, Aetna, Inc.

Wyden has introduced legislation that is similar to that introduced by Republican Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

All claim to create universal health care.

None can, do or will.

What’s the common denominator between Wyden-care, and Romney-care and Schwarzenegger-care?

Individual mandates.

The individual must get insured or the individual is violating the law.

As opposed to single payer.

Which says to the health insurance companies–get out.

We will take care of our people.

If you sell basic health insurance, you are violating the law.

Everyone is in one insurance pool.

Nobody is out.

All are covered.

No bills, no co-pays, no deductibles.

No losing your health insurance when you change jobs.

No escalating premiums when you get sick.

Cheaper than the current system.

With better outcomes.

One approach sets up a system that outlaws individual wrongdoing.

The other sets up a system that outlaws corporate wrongdoing.

The corporate executives were at the press conference to support Wyden’s plan and to push their own newly created Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform.

The key element focused on by the CEOs–market-based healthcare system.

The goal–derail publically funded single payer legislation that will cut administrative waste.

The single payer bill has 70 sponsors in the House of Representatives and is supported by 52 percent of the American people.

When asked why he doesn’t support single payer when 52 percent of the American people do, Wyden didn’t blush.

“The people of my state, not a poll, but at the ballot box in 2002, they voted by about 3-1 against a single payer proposal,” Wyden said.

Well yeah, after the insurance industry dumped millions to scare people into believing the government was going to take over their lives.

“If you go to a community meeting and take a poll in my state, what people want is coverage like their member of Congress gets,” Wyden said. “They want benefits like their members of Congress. They want the quality of care that their members of Congress get.”

But can’t single payer deliver exactly that?

Mildly irritated by this question, Wyden reminds reporters in the room that single payer is not the topic of this press conference.

(No, the topic is snuffing out single payer.)

“My guess is that single payer is more government than Americans want, number one,” he says. (The CEOs nod their
heads in approval.)

“And number two–how do you get there from here?” he asks.

How do you get there from here?

Pass single payer.

Wyden actually means–how do you get there from here if you anger the CEOs of Aetna and CIGNA and all of the other CEOs standing behind him at the press conference by supporting single payer?

Well, one way you get there from here is by building political support for single payer.

Hold a press conference with ordinary Americans and announce an attack on the corporate health care system that results in 31 percent of healthcare spending on administrative costs, that triggers half of all personal bankruptcies, that leaves 45 million uninsured and 16 million underinsured.

None of this by the way was a surprise to long-time Wyden watchers.

Greg Kafoury is a public interest lawyer based in Portland.

“That Wyden would host a health care news conference surrounded by corporate CEOs is typical of his career in politics,” Kafoury told Corporate Crime Reporter. “Most of his public life has been dedicated to serving big money. With his constituency in Oregon, he could be a hero of the people and support single payer. The tragedy is that there is no need for him to serve power rather than confront it.”

So that’s one tragedy–the corporate Democrats.

The other tragedy is the so-called progressive Democrats.

They held a one day conference in Washington, D.C. last week–titled–The Big Con–The Failure of American Conservatism.

It was sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future–the outfit directed by Robert Borosage and Roger Hickey–and The American Prospect magazine.

The day-long event featured a debate between American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner and neocon William Kristol.

The title–Can Conservatives be Trusted to Govern?

Everyone in the room understood the answer to be no.

The unanswered question, only touched on by Kuttner, was whether Democrats could be trusted to govern.

Kuttner grazed by it when he said the $64,000 question was whether the Democratic Party could throw off its corporate funders.

“As the income distribution becomes more concentrated, so does the distribution of political power,” Kuttner said. “For the Republicans, that’s not a contradiction. Wealthy Republicans pay Republicans to be Republicans and to carry out conservative ideology. Wealthy Democrats for the most part, except on social issues, pay Democrats to be less like Democrats. So, one party starts out with one hand tied behind its back. The cure for that is leadership.”

Which was severely lacking at the conference.

Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg told the conference that one recent poll of likely voters showed that 52 percent want a Canadian-style single payer system. And fully 70 percent of Democratic primary voters want such a system.

If that’s true, how come even the progressive leaders at the conference who work on health care, like Hickey and Yale University Professor Jacob Hacker, don’t support single payer?

“The problem is that you can’t just tell people–you are going to have to change all of your arrangements overnight,” Hickey told Corporate Crime Reporter. “The problem is telling people that have good health insurance–you have to shift to something else.”

The other problem with single payer, Hickey says, is that the insurance companies would fight it tooth and nail.

Hickey says that if you take a pro-single payer stance, “you will be relegated to the sidelines and you won’t have any leverage over the political debate that goes on this year.”

“The question people have to ask is–are we going to get the political debate heading in a single payer direction, or do we abdicate the field and let Hillary and Edwards and the best of them end up with something like Schwarzenegger’s plan, which is all private insurance, or Romney’s plan.”

But if Edwards had come out for single payer, he would have energized the 70 percent of Democratic Party primary voters who want it, right?

“And if elephants could fly, you would have a flying circus,” Hickey says dismissively.

Hacker is the progressive Dems academic guru on health care.

At the conference, we asked him–why not single payer?

“I am someone who is quite appreciative of single payer,” Hacker said. “But countervailing that political story, which is certainly a true story, are the political risks of displacing the private insurance of highly paid workers and the fiscal costs of creating the system in one fell swoop.”

“The seventy House Democrats who support single payer are a powerful force for major reform,” Hacker says. “They should keep pressing for bold action. They only should be willing to talk about compromise at a point in which they think something could really happen and be valuable. My role as a policy analyst is to try and craft something that could be that compromise, something that could be Medicare for many. Keep in mind, nearly 60 percent of all Americans would be in this Health Care for America plan. And projections show at least ten more percent within a decade. So, we are talking about 70 percent of Americans.”

Hacker says that insurers and employers will initially resist anything that reduces their role entirely.

“But once you get the system in place, both actors will see incentives to work with it instead of against it,” Hacker said.

“With insurers, it’s a little more iffy.”

So, the political reality of health care in America can be summed up as a tale of Two Big Cons.

Big Con One–the conservatives offering prosperity for all and delivering cronyism and favoritism for the rich.

And Big Con Two–the progressive Democrats, promising universal health care, and then joining with corporate Democrats and corporate America to snuff out single payer.

Corporate Crime Reporter is located in Washington, DC. They can be reached through their website.

By DR. JOHN DALEY
Union Leader
Commentary
May 2, 2007

THE APRIL 25 editorial “Rationing health care: Some want that for NH” represents another attempt by members of the health insurance industry, or someone with very good insurance, to torpedo the best choice for health care reform — a single payer system, or Medicare for all — by using scare words like rationing or socialized medicine.

As a family physician on the front lines of medicine I daily see the difficulties patients face due to lack of insurance or under-insurance. Generally these patients ration their own care, disappearing for a year or two when they lose their job and insurance, only to return with sky-high blood pressures or out- of-control diabetes, effectively taking years off their lives.

In New Hampshire, approximately 135,000 citizens lack health insurance, and for those who have it many can’t get all they need. The MRI wait may not be long, but many people can’t see their doctor, much less get an MRI. Now with health savings accounts and high deductible plans I have insured patients refusing their MRIs due to the cost.

It is estimated that 18,000 Americans die annually due to lack of insurance — which is a rather harsh effect of our present method of rationing. Shouldn’t the elimination of these deaths be a national priority?

The editorial mentions Canadians coming to the United States for surgery because of better and more readily available care. These numbers are rather small and the editorial fails to mention Americans going to Canada to get affordable drugs or the ever-increasing phenomenon of medical tourism where Americans travel abroad to get surgeries that are more affordable.

The bottom line is that Canadians enjoy longer, healthier lives than Americans, despite spending far less than we do, while covering every citizen. In a recent survey, only 3.5 percent of Canadians reported feeling that they waited too long for care, which is a much smaller number than our 15 percent uninsured who wait quite a bit. Long waits are a misleading myth.

Furthermore, a recent Harris Interactive poll of patients in the leading industrial societies found that Canada ranked first and the United States last in patient satisfaction with health care. You can’t just poll those with good insurance, after all!

Remember the term “single payer” as the best solution to our health care system’s problems. If one believes that health care is a human right and not a privilege, and if one wants to avoid having a health insurance company — which profits by denying care — choosing which tests you can have and which drugs you can take, it is the best answer.

The government pays for more than 50 percent of health care costs already through Medicare, Medicaid, federal employees, the military and the Veterans Administration, so it is not a radical stretch to extend Medicare to all Americans to cover the uninsured.

HR 676 has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by (along with others) Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich. The New Hampshire House has shown great wisdom in introducing a resolution to study single-payer care for New Hampshire.

When discussing health care reform, don’t be scared by words like “rationed” or “socialized.” Be informed, be wise and be empathic — choose what’s best for America and all its citizens, not just those with good insurance.

If we took the money, structure and ingenuity in the current health care arena and applied it to the whole population via a single-payer system that eliminated the unfairness, complexities and waste, we truly would have the world’s best health care for our citizens.

Dr. John Daley of Londonderry is a physician in Derry and a member of Physicians for a National Health Program.

By Dr. Richard G. Younge
The Journal News
Sunday, March 18, 2007

I am a family physician, and I work in the Fordham neighborhood of The Bronx.

One day last week as I drove to work I heard a news report about a medical study that had just been published. The study showed that people who come to the emergency room with a heart attack on the weekend do much worse than those patients who develop chest pain during regular business hours. When someone has a heart attack during the week he or she has a better chance of going quickly right from the emergency department to the cardiac care department for an emergency procedure, balloon angioplasty. This treatment can restore blood flow the heart muscle before extensive damage is done. You get better care depending on when you get sick.

The story concluded with the observation that these differences in treatment results could be reduced by assuring that more hospitals have emergency angioplasty available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I agree that the health-care system needs to move us toward eliminating the differences in treatment that result from when a person happens to have a heart attack. But this news item got me thinking more broadly about many of the ways that health-care services differ depending on the circumstances under which people get sick – where they live, their income, their age, race or ethnicity and, very importantly, their insurance coverage.

How could the health-care system change to improve care? For a start, we could make the treatment and preventive services of modern health care available to everyone. A national health insurance program that replaced our current system based on private insurers would improve access to care for the 47 million uninsured people in the United States.

Many of the uninsured are children. Providing coverage for all kids would not even be prohibitively expensive, because most children do not get that sick or need expensive services such as angioplasty. Adults – whether they are parents or not – also require comprehensive health insurance, and national health insurance would cover them too. Some people imagine that a national program that covers everyone would be too big and bureaucratic and inefficient. It surprises them to learn that the government insurance program, Medicare that covers the elderly and disabled, spends about 2 percent of its budget on administrative costs. This compares very favorably to private insurers who spend 15 percent or more of the premiums they collect on administration and marketing.

By going to a national health insurance, essentially an improved and expanded Medicare for All system, we could cover all U.S. residents – literally everyone in this country – without spending any more than we already do. We could save the dollars insurance companies spend expensively marketing and advertising their services. We could also save the enormous resources we providers spend trying to sort out who is eligible for which of the existing patch-work system of employment based, government and individual coverage programs. And of course a health-care system that automatically covered everyone would be much simpler, fairer and less nerve-wracking for patients.

In my daily practice, having one insurer working under a national health plan would reduce many of my headaches and frustrations. I would not have to waste precious time and energy figuring out which referral form to use, which specialist takes my patient’s insurance, or which 800 number to call or which rules to follow to try to get approval for services that my patients need. I would not have to rewrite scores of prescriptions because my patients’ employer changed plans. I could focus on patient care. And people would not drop in and out of care or skip important preventive care services because of insurance coverage changes. Nor would they have to worry if they would lose their health insurance if they are so unfortunate as to lose their job.

The neighborhood where I practice has one of the highest rates of uninsured adults in New York City according to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s neighborhood health profile reports. Almost every day I see someone who tells me that they have not seen a doctor in a while because they lost their insurance coverage. Some of them have not had treatment for diabetes, high cholesterol or blood pressure. These health problems put them at increased risk for having a heart attack. Hopefully, if that unfortunate event happens, it will not be over the weekend.