PNHP

Blue Cross commences health reform war

Blue Cross commences health reform war

Blue Cross funding campaign against governor's health reform

By Laura Kurtzman
The Mercury News
May 24, 2007

California’s largest health insurer has set aside $2 million for what is likely to be a deep-pocketed campaign to undermine the health care reforms being pushed by Democratic lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The first shot in that campaign came Thursday when Blue Cross ran a three-quarter-page ad in The Sacramento Bee warning that the proposed insurance reforms could have unintended consequences like the energy deregulation that ushered in California’s electricity crisis.

A doctors’ group, the California Medical Association, called the Blue Cross ad “an abomination” and accused Blue Cross of a cynical attempt to maintain high profits. Health Access, a union-backed group that advocates for the poor, said that if the health care debate is like energy deregulation, then Blue Cross is playing the role of Enron.

While it is still early in the health reform debate — the Democratic bills have just been finalized — the company’s action shows that some businesses are moving to protect their interests as the governor and the Legislature ponder sweeping reforms.

Blue Cross — which has 8.6 million California customers, far more than any other health insurer — is adamantly opposed to a variety of proposed insurance market reforms, especially a requirement that they sell policies to everyone, regardless of their medical history.

Blue Cross says the reforms, which are part of the governor’s and the Democrats’ plans, will drive up insurance premiums.

(Ann-Louise Kuhns, a vice president with Blue Cross of California) said the company supports greater health coverage, for example by expanding public programs, but not insurance market reforms that could hurt its business.

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_5980474?nclick_check=1

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

Blue Cross of California, a subsidiary of WellPoint, has been one of the nation’s leading innovators in modifying insurance products to protect and expand their market by keeping premiums affordable.

Blue Cross has led the way in excluding from coverage individuals with potential health risks, in rescissions for those who do submit claims, in shifting more costs to patients through aggressive marketing of high-deductible plans, in marketing stripped-down coverage such as the TONIK plans for the young invincibles, and in marketing strategies that avoid high-cost employer-sponsored groups.

These have been very effective business strategies for Blue Cross, making it the largest insurer in California. But they have been terrible strategies that have compounded our health care crisis by preventing affordable health care access to precisely those individuals with greater health care needs. Their successful business strategies have taken us in exactly the opposite direction from the reform that we need. Worse, in order to compete, the other private insurers have adopted similar, highly perverse strategies to keep their premiums affordable.

What does that tell us? Blue Cross is right! If private insurers are required to provide the insurance function of pooling risk by including those who actually use health care services, then their premiums would be unaffordable for the majority of us. Either Blue Cross must abandon their current business plan and accept a program of massive government premium subsidies (in a new, much more rigid regulatory environment), or they must convince our policymakers that their model should prevail, which is possible only by shifting actual patients (i.e., individuals with health care needs) to government programs.

Blue Cross has chosen the latter strategy, recognizing that it will require all-out warfare. But this is a battle that we need not fight. Since the government is going to be paying for health care anyway, we no longer need Blue Cross and its wasteful, expensive administrative services that are limited to the healthy.

We should declare victory now and move on with establishing our own publicly-administered and publicly-funded universal health insurance program. For those who believe that we should consider a truce with them, keep in mind that it is our money and our health care. Why would we ever consider rewarding the enemies of reform?

Towers Perrin update on HSAs

New Study Shows That Employees Lack Competency, Comfort, Understanding and Satisfaction With Account-Based Health Plans

Towers Perrin
May 22, 2007

Despite the short-term financial savings achieved by some employers, new Towers Perrin research shows that the long-term effectiveness of account-based health plans (ABHPs), or “consumer-driven health plans,” may be in question.

According to the newly released 2007 Towers Perrin Study on Account-Based Health Plans, employers and employees are not reaping ABHPs’ full rewards. Employees currently enrolled in ABHPs are significantly less satisfied with many elements of the health benefit plan compared to those enrolled in traditional health benefit plans. And efforts by employers and health plans to date have not strengthened employees’ confidence and competence as health care consumers.

According to the Towers Perrin survey, while 29% try to reserve account money for future financial protection, and 16% use the ABHP to save for health care expenses in retirement, the majority of participants have yet to fully-appreciate the value of this opportunity.

“Contrary to the designed purpose of ABHPs, employees do not appreciate the long-term potential these savings accounts hold and remain mired in the old ‘use it or lose i” mentality of flexible spending accounts,” commented (Dave Guilmette, Managing Director of Towers Perrin’s Health and Welfare practice). “If this perception is not changed quickly, employees will be missing out on a critical benefit, and the intended financial incentives will not work correctly.”

http://www.towersperrin.com/tp/jsp/masterbrand_webcache_html.jsp?webc=HR_Services/United_States/Press_Releases/2007/20070522/2007_05_22.htm&selected=press

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

Who’s confused here?

Health savings accounts or HSAs (which Towers Perrin refers to as account-based health plans or ABHPs) have been promoted as a substitute for first dollar insurance coverage, theoretically reducing health care spending by requiring patients to use their own funds more wisely for up-front costs.

Although Towers Perrin notes “short-term financial savings achieved by some employers,” other studies indicate that the savings are not due to careful health care shopping by informed consumers, but are rather due to the employers’ shift to lower-premium high-deductible plans. In many instances the employees’ HSAs are not even funded.

According to Towers Perrin, the “designed purpose of ABHPs” is “to reserve account money for future financial protection” and “to save for health care expenses in retirement.” Towers Perrin contends that employees should no longer be “mired” in the “old mentality” of using designated health care accounts for current health care needs. It is understandable how this can be confusing to some.

Towers Perrin states that the future of ABHPs may be in question if employers do not clear up this alleged confusion on the part of their employees. It is much more likely that Towers Perrin is confused if they really believe that gaining support for ABHPs is merely a matter of employee education. In reality, the employees are not confused. They understand the effort to con them through this ABHP snow job, and they don’t like it.

Of employees who are not comfortable with their ABHPs, only 28% have a positive overall view of the company; only 24% intend to stay at the organization; only 21% have a personal commitment and motivation to do a good job for the organization; and only 20% have trust in the management. There’s not much confusion here.

On Health Care, a Can-Do Attitude

New York Times
Letter to the Editor

Confronted too often with the sentiment so succinctly expressed by Nicholas D. Kristof when he writes that “even if a single-payer system isn’t politically possible right now” (“A Short American Life,” column, May 21), I can’t help but wonder what makes us different from the other developed nations that made the successful transition to national universal health care systems.

I’m tempted to blame the usual cast of special interests: enormously profitable commercial insurance and pharmaceutical companies; and providers who maximize revenues by promoting costly tests and procedures that deliver high margins but dubious outcomes.

But I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t our own repetition of the defeatist notion that a national health care solution isn’t politically feasible that contributes to our inability to ultimately realize substantive health care reform.

The public needs to be disabused of the myths that portray the national health systems of other nations as inferior to ours when the reverse is demonstrably evident by measure of their health outcomes and per capita expenditures compared with ours.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again — and recognize that the special interests are hoping that we’ll grow weary and settle for less when we deserve better.

Ted Herman
Vice President, Communications
Hudson Health Plan
Tarrytown, N.Y., May 21, 2007

To the Editor:

Of course, it is pleasant to receive the recognition from Nicholas D. Kristof: “So bravo to the Physicians for a National Health Program,” which favors a single-payer system.

Let me return the accolade by informing him that Massachusetts’ recent legislation, which he found promising, is certainly not “feasible” and is already dysfunctional. This is important because a bevy of states are responding to private health insurance pressures with Massachusetts-like panaceas.

It is increasingly important for the morale of the American public that we move as promptly as possible to a Medicare-for-all solution. Time is running out.

Quentin D. Young, M.D.
National Coordinator, Physicians for a National Health Program
Chicago, May 22, 2007

The AMA on Medicare Advantage

AMA calls for financial neutrality in Medicare Advantage

American Medical Association
May 22, 2007

A new American Medical Association (AMA) survey, released today, paints a bleak picture of physicians’ experiences with Medicare Advantage plans. In a statement provided today to the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, the AMA highlighted physicians’ concerns with Medicare Advantage, based on the survey findings.

“The results of our new survey of physician experience with Medicare Advantage plans are troubling,” said AMA Board Chair Cecil Wilson, M.D. “More than half of the physicians report that their patients in a Medicare Advantage HMO or PPO plan were denied coverage of services typically covered in the traditional Medicare plan, and 84 percent reported patients have had difficulty understanding how the plan works.”

Also, 51 percent of physicians report that Medicare Advantage payments are below the traditional Medicare rate. Of the physicians with patients in a Medicare Advantage private fee-for-service plan, 45 percent have experienced denial of services typically covered in traditional Medicare and 80 percent report patient members have had difficulty understanding how the private fee-for-service plan works.

“The private health plans were supposed to inject competition into the Medicare program, but instead we’ve ended up with a federal handout to the insurance industry,” said Dr. Wilson. “Eliminating the overpayments to the insurance companies will save Medicare $65 billion over five years, according to the government’s own estimate.”

In a written statement to the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health today, the AMA expressed its “staunch support of fiscal neutrality between the regular Medicare program and the Medicare Advantage program.”

The government now pays Medicare Advantage managed care plans on average 12 percent more than it spends on patients enrolled in traditional Medicare. The overpayments jump to 19 percent on average for Medicare private fee-for-service programs, the subject of today’s congressional hearing.

“It’s shameful that under current law Medicare will slash payments to doctors well below the cost of caring for seniors, while increasing payments to highly profitable managed care companies. Congress has to make a choice — preserve access to care for all seniors by stopping next year’s Medicare cut to doctors, or continue to help insurance companies line investors’ pockets.”

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/17602.html

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

So the AMA supports adequate funding of the traditional Medicare program and opposes “a federal handout to the insurance industry,” especially when the experience of physicians is failing to match the pro-market rhetoric of the private insurance industry.

It doesn’t seem to be that much of a stretch for the AMA to extrapolate that concept to the entire private insurance industry. A handout is a handout, whether publicly or privately funded. Why would the AMA continue to support handouts to private insurers when that money could be better spent on patient care through a more efficient public insurance program?

All children, or everyone?

Next Steps For Tennessee: A Conversation With Gov. Phil Bredesen

By Alan Weil
Health Affairs
May 22, 2007

Gov. Bredeson: One major frustration for me… was people who were working on their own, or for some company that didn’t offer insurance, and were getting their insurance from TennCare but were perfectly capable of working someplace that does offer health insurance. This world is full of people who make choices about where they’re working based on things like availability of pension plans and health insurance. I don’t see why people in Tennessee should be immune from those same choices.

I believe that children ought to have really broad access to care. There shouldn’t ever be any limitations on their getting care because of the unwillingness of a parent to pay a copay or something like that. When you get to adults, I don’t feel nearly so strongly. This is a free country, and adults make decisions about what’s important to them.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.26.4.w456

And…

Letters
The New York Times
May 22, 2007

The difference between universal coverage and universal health care is not semantic; it is real and fundamental. If we truly want all children to get the health care they need, then we must simply give all children the health care they need, not require parents to repeatedly prove that their children are worthy of publicly financed services.

When a child needs health care, he must be presumed eligible, not the opposite. That’s how every other civilized country in the world does it, and they do it for a fraction of the cost we spend per capita in the United States.

Georganne Chapin
President and Chief Executive, Hudson Health Plan

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/opinion/l22herbert.html

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

The SCHIP enrollment lessons are quite clear. If we really do want to have all children insured, enrollment must be completely automatic for every child. That will never happen with a fragmented system of multiple public and private plans with varying thresholds of eligibility and changes in eligibility status.

And adults? Is it rational public policy that we continue to protect the right of a person to choose a job that does not provide health insurance, as if that is the price of freedom? Or would it be more rational to automatically enroll every adult in a universal health insurance program regardless of employment status?

We can also learn from the various current state efforts at reform. These universal programs would cover everyone, except for those who do not meet eligibility requirements, or do not have the required funds, or who are lost in the administrative maze of public and private plans. Wait. That’s not reform. That’s what we have now.

Insurance Blob Wastes One-Third of Care Dollars

Deborah Burger, R.N.
President, California Nurses Association
National Nurses Organizing Committee
Oakland, Calif.
Wall Street Journal
Letter to the Editor
May 21, 2007; Page A15

Your May 14 editorial “Illinois Tax Implosion” was right about one thing: Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s backward health-care reform plan deserved to be voted down. But his plan was hardly “Canadian health care,” as you label it. Instead it was much more of the same: Using public dollars to subsidize private, for-profit health insurance corporations so they can turn a buck by denying care to our patients.

The simple fact is we could learn a thing or two about health care from Canada, France, Taiwan and every other developed nation in the world. They all manage to provide better health care at about half the cost. The difference? They don’t have a bloated insurance bureaucracy wasting one-third of care dollars and propelling medical inflation. Instead they guarantee care through versions of the “single-payer” model, where patients pick a doctor or hospital who is paid directly from a national, nonprofit fund. Workers are taken care of and employers aren’t distracted by the health-care mess.

The good news is that we have the chance to enact such a system with Rep. John Conyers’s (D., Mich.) bill, which already has 69 co-sponsors and the support of hundreds of labor, religious and community organizations. Americans are eager for solutions to the health-care tragedy; it’s time for Washington to get the message.

We're Number Two: Canada Has as Good or Better Health Care than the U.S.

Despite spending half what the U.S. does on health care, Canada doesn’t appear to be any worse at looking after the health of its citizens

By Christopher Mims
Scientific American
May 03, 2007

Whether it is American senior citizens driving into Canada in order to buy cheap prescription drugs or Canadians coming to the U.S. for surgery in order to avoid long wait times, the relative merits of these two nations’ health care systems are often cast in terms of anecdotes. Both systems are beset by ballooning costs and, especially with a presidential election on the horizon, calls for reform, but a recent study could put ammunition in the hands of people who believe it is time the U.S. ceased to be the only developed nation without universal health coverage.

Gordon H. Guyatt, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who coined the term “evidence-based medicine,” collaborated with 16 of his colleagues in an exhaustive survey of existing studies on the outcomes of various medical procedures in both the U.S. and Canada. Their work appears in the inaugural issue of the new Canadian journal Open Medicine, and comes at a time when many in Canada are debating whether or not to move that country’s single-payer system toward for-profit delivery of care. The ultimate conclusion of the study is that the Canadian medical system is as good as the U.S. version, at least when measured by a single metric–the rate at which patients in either system died.

“Other people knew that Canadians live two to two and a half years longer than Americans,” says Steffie Woolhandler, an author on the paper and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, citing a phenomenon that many attribute to differences in lifestyle between the two countries. “But what was not known was once you got sick, was the quality of care equivalent in the two countries.”

Americans Less Likely to Survive Treatment

According to Woolhandler, by looking at already ill patients, the researchers eliminated any Canadian lifestyle advantage and just examined the degree to which the two systems affected patient deaths. (Mortality was the one kind of data they could extract from a disparate pool of 38 papers examining everything from kidney failure to rheumatoid arthritis.)

Overall, the results favored Canadians, who were 5 percent less likely than Americans to die in the course of treatment. Some disorders, such as kidney failure, favored Canadians more strongly than Americans, whereas others, such as hip fracture, had slightly better outcomes in the U.S. than in Canada. Of the 38 studies the authors surveyed, which were winnowed down from a pool of thousands, 14 favored Canada, five the U.S., and 19 yielded mixed results.

Mortality Isn’t the Only Measure That Matters

Not all experts agree with the implication that the Canadian system is better than the U.S. system, however, or with the researchers’ methodology. Vivian Ho, who is the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy chair in health economics at Rice University in Houston and has spent time living and conducting research in both the U.S. and Canada, argues that the study’s focus on mortality could be misleading.

“When we look at health systems we look at other things than death,” Ho explains. In her own research on hip fracture, which was cited in Guyatt’s study, she found that the time a patient had to wait before surgery–which was significantly longer in Canada than the U.S. because of a shortage of operating rooms–made only a 1 percent difference in terms of mortality.

“But certainly if you ask people waiting in the hospital,” Ho notes, “They’re going to say I’d rather have the U.S. system…. Waiting means there’s a significant amount of distress for an elderly patient, and also higher complications for pneumonia because you have the patient immobile for so long.”

Patti Groome, an epidemiologist at Queens University Cancer Research Institute in Kingston, Ontario, said she believes that overall the paper was balanced. “But when you get into [the] meat of [the] paper they can’t sort out what’s going on…. There’s way too much heterogeneity in these studies to come to a conclusion about these systems.” In meta-analyses such as this one, “heterogeneity” in results corresponds to variations in the size of an effect across the studies being reviewed.

In other words, of the studies surveyed, some showed slightly better outcomes for the Canadian system and some showed slightly better outcomes for the U.S. approach, making it hard to draw any conclusion other than that, on balance, the two systems seem to yield only slightly different outcomes.

Money Doesn’t Necessarily Buy Health

The study’s authors highlight the fact that per capita spending on health care is 89 percent higher in the U.S. than in Canada. “One thing that people generally know is that the administration costs are much higher in the U.S.,” Groome notes. Indeed, one study by Woolhandler published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2003 found that 31 percent of spending on health care in the U.S. went to administrative costs, whereas Canada spent only 17 percent on the same functions.

Ho believes, however, that there are also inefficiencies in the Canadian system. In her own work on hip fracture, she found that Canadian hospitals held patients for longer periods because there was no incentive to discharge them. “These patients are easier to take care of,” she explains, “and that helps [hospital administrators] justify their budget…. I think there is room for economic incentives [in the Canadian system].”

“Personally,” Ho adds, “my view is that the Canadian system is good for Canada and the American system is good for America. Neither side should switch, because the systems are a function of the population–the Canadian population believes much more in maintaining social safety nets.”

This research may already be having an impact on policy debate: According to Woolhandler, Ohio democratic congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has plans to circulate the results of this study to Congress. Woolhandler herself would like to see this study play a part in a slightly different debate–one over whether it it is better to be sick and insured in the U.S. or in Canada. “I’d like to see politicians giving up on this mythology that the quality of care for sick people in the U.S. is unique.”

Young, Ill and Uninsured

By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Op-Ed
May 19, 2007

Fourteen-year-old Devante Johnson deserved better. He was a sweet kid, an honor student and athlete who should be enjoying music and sports and skylarking with his friends at school. Instead he’s buried in Houston’s Paradise North Cemetery.

Devante died of kidney cancer in March. His mother, Tamika Scott, believes he would still be alive if bureaucrats in Texas hadn’t fouled up so badly that his health coverage was allowed to lapse and his cancer treatment had to be interrupted.

Ms. Scott, who has multiple sclerosis, understood the grave danger her son would be in if he were somehow to be left without the Medicaid coverage that paid for his chemotherapy, radiation and other treatment. She submitted the required paperwork to renew the coverage two months before the deadline.

“I was so anxious to get it processed,” she said, “so we wouldn’t have a lapse of coverage.”

In Texas, as in many other states, there is a concerted effort to undermine programs that bring government-sponsored health care to poor and working-class children. It is not an environment in which bureaucrats are encouraged to be helpful, not even when lives are at stake.

“They kept losing the paperwork,” Ms. Scott told me, her voice quivering with grief. She submitted new applications, made dozens of phone calls and sent off a blizzard of faxes. Despite her frantic efforts, the coverage was dropped.

When the coverage lapsed, the treatment Devante had been receiving ceased. “They put us on clinical trials,” Ms. Scott said. “They changed his medicine, and he started getting sicker and sicker. After awhile it was like his body was so frail and he was so weak he could barely walk on his own.”

Four months after the Medicaid coverage lapsed, the mistakes were finally corrected and the coverage was reinstated. By then, there was no chance to save Devante.

“I believe he would be with me now if they hadn’t let his insurance lapse,” said Ms. Scott.

Across America children by the millions are being denied the health care they need and deserve — and some are dying — because the U.S. has no coherent system of health coverage for children.

Stories like Devante Johnson’s are not unusual. Three months ago a homeless seventh grader in Prince George’s County, Maryland, died because his mother could not find a dentist who would do an $80 tooth extraction. Deamonte Driver, 12, eventually was given medicine at a hospital emergency room for headaches, sinusitis and a dental abscess.

The child was sent home, but his distress only grew. It turned out that bacteria from the abscessed tooth had spread to his brain. A pair of operations and eight subsequent weeks of treatment, which cost more than a quarter of a million dollars, could not save him. He died on Feb. 25.

There’s a presidential election under way and one of the key issues should be how to provide comprehensive health coverage for all of the nation’s children, which would be the logical next step on the road to coverage for everyone.

That an American child could die because his mother couldn’t afford to have a diseased tooth extracted sounds like a horror story from some rural outpost in the Great Depression. It’s the kind of gruesomely tragic absurdity you’d expect from Faulkner. But these things are happening now.

“People don’t understand the amount of time and stress parents are going through as they try to get their children the coverage they need, in many cases just to stay alive,” said Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund and a tireless advocate of expanding health coverage to the millions of American children who are uninsured or underinsured.

Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program provide crucially important coverage, but the eligibility requirements can be daunting, budget constraints in many jurisdictions have led to tragic reductions in coverage, and millions of youngsters simply fall through the cracks in the system, receiving no coverage at all.

It is time for all that to end. American children should be guaranteed nothing less than comprehensive health coverage from birth through age 18. This can be achieved if an effort is mounted that is comparable to that which led to the first moon shot, or the Marshall Plan, or the postwar G.I. bill.

Keeping American children alive and healthy should be at least as important as any of those worthy projects.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Oh yes, he's got an agenda

Michael Moore’s new film about the US healthcare system must be seen in Europe as well as the US

Agnès Poirier
The Guardian
Monday May 21, 2007

In four tidy acts, Michael Moore spells out the facts. Act one: 50 million Americans have no health cover, and 250 million who think they do, through costly health insurance schemes ($2,000 per person a year), are often denied treatment when they need it. A guy without cover who chopped off two of his fingers in a bout of DIY was presented with an invoice for $12,000 to reattach his ring-finger and $60,000 for his forefinger. Being a romantic, and skint, he chose to get his ring-finger back.

Act two: when did it all start going wrong, asks Moore. The answer: in August 1971. President Richard Nixon and his adviser Edgar Kaiser plot to break the system. “The less care they give, the more money they make,” says Nixon, caught on tape. They? Their friends, the health industry moguls, the same ones who fund the political campaigns of US congressmen. Moore shows us the price tag on every single one of them. One in particular, Billy Tauzin, leaves Congress to become CEO of the drug industry’s top lobbying group, PhRMA, with a $2m a year salary.

Meanwhile astute national publicity campaigns have demonised the concept of universal healthcare by associating it with “socialised medicine”, which in American English translates as “Soviet medicine” – the kind such oppressive regimes as Canada, Britain and France have adopted for their citizens.

Act three: Moore pays these regimes a visit. Britain’s NHS is paid a well deserved tribute, with Tony Benn appearing as the country’s conscience. Then off to France. A mother of three explains that her state nanny does the family’s laundry while the creche down the street, with professionally trained staff, costs her 50p per hour. Moore concludes his French tour by asking: “Is there a reason why they want to make us hate the French? Are they afraid we might want to live like them?”

Act four, the most powerful: Moore decides to test the US administration’s claim that Guantanamo Bay prisoners get the best free healthcare in the world. He takes 9/11 volunteer rescue workers, whose health problems were not covered by the state because they weren’t on its payroll when they ran to help, to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. At least he tries to. Arriving at the gates, Moore shouts through a loudspeaker: “I have 9/11 sick rescue workers, can you please open the gates?” A siren begins to wail. Moore and his troops make off as fast as they can – to Havana. Where they are treated immediately.

I know what you’re thinking, I know what you’re going to say. And so what? Yes, Michael Moore has an agenda. No, he isn’t among the giants of documentary film-making. No, he isn’t an ordinary journalist. He is, as he says, the op-ed variety, the kind who is constantly angry. He has issues with the way of the world and wants to set records straight. His goal is simply to put universal healthcare back at the centre of the American debate. And while Moore’s main objective is to reach his fellow Americans, his film should also make Europeans ponder on the system they too often take for granted. George Orwell would hate it. But forget about him for a minute. There may sometimes be such a thing as good propaganda.

Agnès Poirier, a journalist and film critic, is an independent adviser on British films for the Cannes film festival

agnescatherinepoirier@hotmail.com

"Sicko"

Michael Moore’s scathing, important look at the U.S. healthcare system has plenty to rile the far right — and a lot more to enrage the larger American public.

By Andrew O’Hehir
Salon.com

May. 20, 2007 | “I know the storm awaits me back in the United States,” Michael Moore told a wall-to-wall throng of reporters here after the Saturday morning press premiere of his new film, “Sicko.” Then he heaved a deep breath and added, “But this is just so pleasant.”

It was indeed another gorgeous, summery morning on the French Riviera, but the real heat was indoors. There wasn’t a single empty seat inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière — which holds more than 2,000 people — for “Sicko,” and dozens of stragglers were locked out on the sidewalk. Moore’s screed against the outrageous state of American healthcare was received with uproarious affection, but one might argue that Cannes provided the softest possible crowd. An American left-wing populist, attacking America’s profit-motive, private-sector ideology before a roomful of international intellectuals, at least half of them Europeans. May I introduce a new phrase into the Franglais dictionary? C’était un slam-dunk.

“Sicko” does not display Moore at his most cinematically inventive or imaginative. It presents a TV-documentary-style parade of episodes, characters and settings, bouncing from various American cities to Canada, Britain, France and Cuba (and yes, don’t worry, we’ll get to that). Moore plays a far smaller personal role in this film, appearing only occasionally in his comic-relief role as the clueless buffoon who can’t seem to grasp that healthcare in all those other countries is free, or virtually so. When he’s eating dinner with a group of Americans living in Paris who begin to list all the things they can have as free or nearly free entitlements — not just healthcare but an emergency doctor who makes house calls; not just childcare but a part-time in-home nanny — Moore puts his hands over his ears and begins singing “La la la la la.” (If you have kids or any kind of chronic family health problems, your reactions might include weeping in despair, slitting your wrists or booking a one-way ticket.)

Still, there is no mistaking the passion and political intelligence at work in “Sicko.” It’s both a more finely calibrated film and one with more far-reaching consequences than any he’s made before. Moore is trying to rouse Americans to action on an issue most of us agree about, at least superficially. You may know people who will still defend the Iraq war (although they’re less and less eager to talk about it). But who do you know who will defend the current method of healthcare delivery, administered by insurance companies whose central task is to minimize cost and maximize shareholder return? Americans of many different political stripes would probably share Moore’s conclusions at the press conference: “It’s wrong and it’s immoral. We have to take the profit motive out of healthcare. It’s as simple as that.”

“Sicko” purposefully does not focus on the 50 million or so Americans who don’t have health insurance, as scandalous as that is, but on the horror stories of middle-class working folks who believed they were adequately covered. There are so many of these they begin to blur into each other: the woman in Los Angeles whose baby was denied treatment at an emergency room outside her HMO network, and died as it was being transferred hours later; the woman in Kansas City whose husband was repeatedly denied various drugs his physician prescribed for kidney cancer, and who in the last stage of life was denied a bone-marrow transplant that could have saved his life; the woman who was told her brain tumor was not a life-threatening illness, and died; the woman who was told her cancer must have been a preexisting condition, and died.

One might respond that anecdotes like these have tremendous emotional power but little analytical rigor, but in this case I think we all know (and fear) that these worst-case outcomes exemplify the system perfectly. Moore interviews two healthcare whistle-blowers, both now plagued with guilt, who explain what should be obvious: The point of the system is to treat as few people as possible as cheaply as possible, and those who get ahead in the healthcare industry are those who find ever more devious ways to deny coverage. (For example, you can now be denied for certain preexisting conditions you didn’t know about, on the premise that you should have known about them.)

OK, let’s get to the headlines: Yes, in the film Moore travels with a group of ill and injured 9/11 rescue workers (along with several other of his film’s protagonists) to Cuba, where they receive free and apparently excellent medical treatment. It’s unquestionably another button-pushing Michael Moore stunt, designed to provoke controversy. It’s cheap but funny, dubious as evidence but affecting anyway. Moore does not even seem aware of the possibility that the Cubans were shrewd enough to see the propaganda value in this exercise, and put on a dog-and-pony show for his and our benefit. (For that matter, we don’t know how much of the visit was planned in advance with Cuban authorities.) All that aside, within the context of the film and the argument Moore is building, Cuba makes as much sense as anywhere else.

Moore begins his foreign odyssey in the film after meeting a 22-year-old Michigan woman who has moved across the Ontario border (not entirely on the up-and-up) because she’s been denied treatment for cervical cancer. He wanders around emergency rooms in London, Ontario, and London, England (where he discovers that the cashier’s window is for paying patients their travel expenses, not for settling the bill). He zips from one Parisian arrondissement to another with an on-call physician on the night shift. He dines with the aforementioned Americans abroad, who seem dazed and a little guilty about their escape from healthcare hell.

Much of this is played as comedy; Moore corners a young Afro-British couple with a wiggling bundle in the hallway of a London hospital and says cheerfully, “So — how much they charge you for that baby?” But Moore is trying to push us beyond the universally shared idea that something must be done to the slightly more controversial idea that something has been done, and that all we have to do is appropriate it. Americans have of course been conditioned for generations to believe that socialized medicine is first of all a disaster in its own terms, and secondly, the pathway to totalitarianism.

His portrayal of the Canadian, British and French systems is undoubtedly simplistic , and several Canadian reporters took that up with him at the press conference — although all of them admitted they wouldn’t trade their system for ours. But Moore’s overall point is, I think, inarguable: Flawed as they may be, those systems are a hell of a lot more humane and civilized than anything we’ve got. (Life expectancy is significantly higher, and infant mortality lower, in all of those countries than the United States. Whatever outdated stereotypes you may hold, these days poor people in Britain are statistically healthier than rich people in America.)

Addressing a series of questions from foreign reporters at the press conference, Moore said: “We should do what we always do as Americans, steal the best things you’re doing and make them our own. The Canadians do certain things very well. The Brits do certain things very well. The French have the best system in the world, and that’s not my opinion. That’s how the World Health Organization rates them. None of them is perfect, but it’s not my role to make criticisms. It’s my role as an American to say, why don’t we take the best elements you’re doing and blend them together, and call it the American system?”

Moore decided to go to Cuba, as he explains in the film, after learning the peculiar irony that detainees at Guantánamo Bay are entitled to something American citizens are not: free healthcare. In a brief and awkward scene, he tries to bring a fishing boat with his 9/11 refugees aboard into U.S. waters just off the naval base. They are refused entry (Moore is evasive about the details) and then seek treatment at the best hospital in Havana.

“The point of this was not to go to Cuba,” Moore said at the press conference. “The point was to go to Guantánamo Bay, to get the 9/11 workers the same medical care we’re giving to members of al-Qaida.” If the detainees had been at a U.S. base in Spain or Italy or Australia — all countries with universal healthcare — he’d have taken his 9/11 workers there instead. In fact, when Moore drops the jokes and political attitudinizing during the Cuba sequence, the pathos of the story makes his point for him: A poor Caribbean island, whatever its ideology, can afford healthcare for everyone while we do not. The only possible conclusion is that our society has chosen not to.

When asked about his potential prosecution for violating U.S. Treasury sanctions against trade with or travel to Cuba, Moore was uncharacteristically sober. “I know a lot of you have written things like, ‘How dumb are they?'” he said, “but I don’t take this lightly. The Bush administration may try to claim that my footage was obtained illegally. We haven’t discussed this possibility yet, but actions could be taken to prevent this film from opening on June 29. I know that sounds crazy to the Americans in the room. I guess it is crazy.”

When Americans do get to see “Sicko,” Moore says, “They will understand that this was about helping 9/11 rescue workers who’ve been abandoned by the government. They’re not going to focus on Cuba or Fidel Castro or any other nonsense coming out of the Bush White House. They’re going to say: ‘You’re telling me that al-Qaida prisoners get better medical treatment than the people who tried to recover bodies from the wreckage at ground zero?'”

When Moore interviews Tony Benn, a leading figure on the British left, his larger concerns come into focus. Benn argues that for-profit healthcare and the other instruments of the corporate state, like student loans and bottomless credit-card debt, perform a crucial function for that state. They undermine democracy by creating a docile and hardworking population that is addicted to constant debt and an essentially unsustainable lifestyle, that literally cannot afford to quit jobs or take time off, that is more interested in maintaining high incomes than in social or political change. Moore seizes on this insight and makes it a kind of central theme; both in the film and aloud, at the press conference, he wondered whether some essential and unrecognized change has occurred in the American character.

“I hope this film engenders discussion, not just about healthcare, but about why we are the way we are these days,” Moore told us. “Where is our soul? Why would we allow 50 million Americans, 9 million of them children, not to have health insurance? Maybe my role as a filmmaker is to go down a road we might be afraid to go down, because it might lead to a dark place.”

Moore’s last revelation in “Sicko” is sure to be endlessly debated in the right-wing blogosphere that is so obsessed with him (and may be of little interest to ordinary viewers). Some time ago, Jim Kenefick, proprietor of the especially bilious anti-Moore site Moorewatch, almost shut down his site to focus on his wife’s worsening illness and escalating healthcare costs. An anonymous donor then sent him $12,000 to cover his wife’s bills and keep the site running. (She has apparently recovered.) Now that donor has been revealed and, as Kenefick now says he suspected all along, it turns out to be Michael Moore.

“I want him to know that it was done with all the best intentions,” said Moore, adding that he planned to phone Kenefick personally after the press conference. (According to Kenefick’s blog, Moore left him a voice-mail message later on Saturday.) “I went back and forth about whether to use that material,” Moore went on. “I asked myself, would you be doing this if it weren’t in the film? I decided that I would, and I should, and that that’s the way I think we should live.”

Moore says he began exercising and lost 25 pounds while working on his healthcare film; “I’m actually a fairly skinny person for the Midwest,” he quipped. He says he’s tried to maintain a lower public profile since “Fahrenheit 9/11” and would like Kenefick and his many other critics to cut him some slack. “You know, I begin to hope that as I enter the discourse with this film, I might get some kind of a break. As far as the accuracy of my movies goes, I think the record speaks for itself. Maybe people will say: He warned us about General Motors, he warned us about school shootings and he warned us about Bush.”

We’re Number Two: Canada Has as Good or Better Health Care than the U.S.

Despite spending half what the U.S. does on health care, Canada doesn’t appear to be any worse at looking after the health of its citizens

By Christopher Mims
Scientific American
May 03, 2007

Whether it is American senior citizens driving into Canada in order to buy cheap prescription drugs or Canadians coming to the U.S. for surgery in order to avoid long wait times, the relative merits of these two nations’ health care systems are often cast in terms of anecdotes. Both systems are beset by ballooning costs and, especially with a presidential election on the horizon, calls for reform, but a recent study could put ammunition in the hands of people who believe it is time the U.S. ceased to be the only developed nation without universal health coverage.

Gordon H. Guyatt, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who coined the term “evidence-based medicine,” collaborated with 16 of his colleagues in an exhaustive survey of existing studies on the outcomes of various medical procedures in both the U.S. and Canada. Their work appears in the inaugural issue of the new Canadian journal Open Medicine, and comes at a time when many in Canada are debating whether or not to move that country’s single-payer system toward for-profit delivery of care. The ultimate conclusion of the study is that the Canadian medical system is as good as the U.S. version, at least when measured by a single metric–the rate at which patients in either system died.

“Other people knew that Canadians live two to two and a half years longer than Americans,” says Steffie Woolhandler, an author on the paper and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, citing a phenomenon that many attribute to differences in lifestyle between the two countries. “But what was not known was once you got sick, was the quality of care equivalent in the two countries.”

Americans Less Likely to Survive Treatment

According to Woolhandler, by looking at already ill patients, the researchers eliminated any Canadian lifestyle advantage and just examined the degree to which the two systems affected patient deaths. (Mortality was the one kind of data they could extract from a disparate pool of 38 papers examining everything from kidney failure to rheumatoid arthritis.)

Overall, the results favored Canadians, who were 5 percent less likely than Americans to die in the course of treatment. Some disorders, such as kidney failure, favored Canadians more strongly than Americans, whereas others, such as hip fracture, had slightly better outcomes in the U.S. than in Canada. Of the 38 studies the authors surveyed, which were winnowed down from a pool of thousands, 14 favored Canada, five the U.S., and 19 yielded mixed results.

Mortality Isn’t the Only Measure That Matters

Not all experts agree with the implication that the Canadian system is better than the U.S. system, however, or with the researchers’ methodology. Vivian Ho, who is the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy chair in health economics at Rice University in Houston and has spent time living and conducting research in both the U.S. and Canada, argues that the study’s focus on mortality could be misleading.

“When we look at health systems we look at other things than death,” Ho explains. In her own research on hip fracture, which was cited in Guyatt’s study, she found that the time a patient had to wait before surgery–which was significantly longer in Canada than the U.S. because of a shortage of operating rooms–made only a 1 percent difference in terms of mortality.

“But certainly if you ask people waiting in the hospital,” Ho notes, “They’re going to say I’d rather have the U.S. system…. Waiting means there’s a significant amount of distress for an elderly patient, and also higher complications for pneumonia because you have the patient immobile for so long.”

Patti Groome, an epidemiologist at Queens University Cancer Research Institute in Kingston, Ontario, said she believes that overall the paper was balanced. “But when you get into [the] meat of [the] paper they can’t sort out what’s going on…. There’s way too much heterogeneity in these studies to come to a conclusion about these systems.” In meta-analyses such as this one, “heterogeneity” in results corresponds to variations in the size of an effect across the studies being reviewed.

In other words, of the studies surveyed, some showed slightly better outcomes for the Canadian system and some showed slightly better outcomes for the U.S. approach, making it hard to draw any conclusion other than that, on balance, the two systems seem to yield only slightly different outcomes.

Money Doesn’t Necessarily Buy Health

The study’s authors highlight the fact that per capita spending on health care is 89 percent higher in the U.S. than in Canada. “One thing that people generally know is that the administration costs are much higher in the U.S.,” Groome notes. Indeed, one study by Woolhandler published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2003 found that 31 percent of spending on health care in the U.S. went to administrative costs, whereas Canada spent only 17 percent on the same functions.

Ho believes, however, that there are also inefficiencies in the Canadian system. In her own work on hip fracture, she found that Canadian hospitals held patients for longer periods because there was no incentive to discharge them. “These patients are easier to take care of,” she explains, “and that helps [hospital administrators] justify their budget…. I think there is room for economic incentives [in the Canadian system].”

“Personally,” Ho adds, “my view is that the Canadian system is good for Canada and the American system is good for America. Neither side should switch, because the systems are a function of the population–the Canadian population believes much more in maintaining social safety nets.”

This research may already be having an impact on policy debate: According to Woolhandler, Ohio democratic congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has plans to circulate the results of this study to Congress. Woolhandler herself would like to see this study play a part in a slightly different debate–one over whether it it is better to be sick and insured in the U.S. or in Canada. “I’d like to see politicians giving up on this mythology that the quality of care for sick people in the U.S. is unique.”

Oh yes, he’s got an agenda

Michael Moore’s new film about the US healthcare system must be seen in Europe as well as the US

Agnès Poirier
The Guardian
Monday May 21, 2007

In four tidy acts, Michael Moore spells out the facts. Act one: 50 million Americans have no health cover, and 250 million who think they do, through costly health insurance schemes ($2,000 per person a year), are often denied treatment when they need it. A guy without cover who chopped off two of his fingers in a bout of DIY was presented with an invoice for $12,000 to reattach his ring-finger and $60,000 for his forefinger. Being a romantic, and skint, he chose to get his ring-finger back.

Act two: when did it all start going wrong, asks Moore. The answer: in August 1971. President Richard Nixon and his adviser Edgar Kaiser plot to break the system. “The less care they give, the more money they make,” says Nixon, caught on tape. They? Their friends, the health industry moguls, the same ones who fund the political campaigns of US congressmen. Moore shows us the price tag on every single one of them. One in particular, Billy Tauzin, leaves Congress to become CEO of the drug industry’s top lobbying group, PhRMA, with a $2m a year salary.

Meanwhile astute national publicity campaigns have demonised the concept of universal healthcare by associating it with “socialised medicine”, which in American English translates as “Soviet medicine” – the kind such oppressive regimes as Canada, Britain and France have adopted for their citizens.

Act three: Moore pays these regimes a visit. Britain’s NHS is paid a well deserved tribute, with Tony Benn appearing as the country’s conscience. Then off to France. A mother of three explains that her state nanny does the family’s laundry while the creche down the street, with professionally trained staff, costs her 50p per hour. Moore concludes his French tour by asking: “Is there a reason why they want to make us hate the French? Are they afraid we might want to live like them?”

Act four, the most powerful: Moore decides to test the US administration’s claim that Guantanamo Bay prisoners get the best free healthcare in the world. He takes 9/11 volunteer rescue workers, whose health problems were not covered by the state because they weren’t on its payroll when they ran to help, to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. At least he tries to. Arriving at the gates, Moore shouts through a loudspeaker: “I have 9/11 sick rescue workers, can you please open the gates?” A siren begins to wail. Moore and his troops make off as fast as they can – to Havana. Where they are treated immediately.

I know what you’re thinking, I know what you’re going to say. And so what? Yes, Michael Moore has an agenda. No, he isn’t among the giants of documentary film-making. No, he isn’t an ordinary journalist. He is, as he says, the op-ed variety, the kind who is constantly angry. He has issues with the way of the world and wants to set records straight. His goal is simply to put universal healthcare back at the centre of the American debate. And while Moore’s main objective is to reach his fellow Americans, his film should also make Europeans ponder on the system they too often take for granted. George Orwell would hate it. But forget about him for a minute. There may sometimes be such a thing as good propaganda.

Agnès Poirier, a journalist and film critic, is an independent adviser on British films for the Cannes film festival

agnescatherinepoirier@hotmail.com