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Why I was arrested while asking Sen. Portman to vote against TrumpCare

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Why I was arrested while asking Sen. Portman to vote against TrumpCare

By Roona Ray, M.D., M.P.H.
Cleveland Plain-Dealer, July 6, 2017

On Wednesday, June 28, I was one of dozens of doctors, nurses, patients with chronic illness, and voters who visited six senators on Capitol Hill to tell them to vote “no” on TrumpCare.

My group visited the office of Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio.

After hearing about the catastrophic $800 billion cuts to Medicaid proposed by Senate Republicans, we had come to Washington, D.C., from around the country to object. We came on just a few days’ notice in order to defend the public’s right to health care and to oppose tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires.

In response, we were arrested.

The senator was not available, so I sat down alongside other health workers and patients on the couches and floor in Sen. Portman’s office to tell his staff and closed doors our stories; we wondered if the senator was sitting inside.

Chuckie, a Lake Milton, Ohio, voter and disabled General Motors auto worker from Mahoning County, told how health insurance helped him get treatment after being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.

Jenn spoke about her mother, who had survived illness because of Medicaid and went on to become an Emergency Room nurse.

Ali, a medical student, described how Medicare had helped her 78-year-old father survive heart disease.

Michaela, a community health center nurse and mother of three, anguished that she would be forced to turn patients away from care if the bill passed.

A mother and her two children with a congenital condition called Noonan’s syndrome relayed how health insurance saved her family from bankruptcy.

Vinay said that health insurance gave him mental health services that made the difference between his best and worst days. He worried that decimating Medicaid would rob millions of Americans of their best days.

I trained for nine years after college to become a family doctor and public health specialist. After I started working, I realized that I couldn’t always give patients the care they needed. It wasn’t because I hadn’t learned enough. It was for these reasons: My patients were sometimes uninsured, or they had been kicked off their insurance plans, or they didn’t qualify for the right kind of insurance, or they couldn’t afford their co-pays, deductibles, medical bills, or donut holes, or their insurance didn’t cover the treatments and tests they needed.

As a doctor, it’s frustrating and horrific to watch patients get sick and die from preventable disease simply because they don’t have the right plastic insurance card. There is no biology that explains this mechanism of disease. As a citizen, it’s unacceptable to see fellow humans needlessly suffer.

We moved into the hallway, where our stories echoed down stately marble corridors into other senators’ offices. While we were sharing our stories about why health care matters to us, the Capitol police swarmed around us, shackled our wrists behind our backs with plastic zip ties, and dragged us off.

Nearly 40 of us went to the D.C. jail for crowding passage through a public building.

If the Senate passes this cruel bill, they will shackle the entire health system. They will tie the hands of health care workers and prevent them from delivering medical care, and they will doom patients to suffering from preventable disease.

The Republican death care bill proposes to kick 22 million people off the health insurance they have now.

It will cause millions to get sick, and it will cause an estimated 29,000 Americans to die each year. Thousands of doctors, nurses, and other health professionals will be forced to watch as millions of our patients are unable to access the care they need. This would be a tragic violation of our professional ethics and an insult to our years of training, hard work, and goodwill.

It is no surprise that nearly every major association of health professionals opposes this bill. It is surprising, however, that this opposition is not being heard. Doctors and nurses do not typically sit-in and risk arrest. But traditional means of communication are not registering with Congress.

Health care workers will support our patients. We reject a bill that promotes death and disease. We reject a bill that hands out unnecessary tax cuts to the few uber-wealthy at the expense of the health of millions.

I would rather go to jail than see patients needlessly suffer and die. The minor discomfort of being handcuffed, detained for eight hours, and slapped with a $50 fine pales in comparison to the years of death, despair, and pain millions of Americans will experience if our lawmakers pass this deadly bill.

Even if it requires more arrests, we will continue to confront Sen. Portman and his colleagues — who are shielded from the impact of this vote by their own taxpayer-funded premium health plans — with the reality that this bill is literally a matter of life or death.

Dr. Roona Ray is a board-certified family physician and HIV and public health specialist, and serves on the board of Physicians for a National Health Plan, Metro New York Chapter.

http://www.cleveland.com…

Why I was arrested while asking Sen. Portman to vote against TrumpCare

By Roona Ray, M.D., M.P.H.
Cleveland Plain-Dealer, July 6, 2017

On Wednesday, June 28, I was one of dozens of doctors, nurses, patients with chronic illness, and voters who visited six senators on Capitol Hill to tell them to vote “no” on TrumpCare.

My group visited the office of Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio.

After hearing about the catastrophic $800 billion cuts to Medicaid proposed by Senate Republicans, we had come to Washington, D.C., from around the country to object. We came on just a few days’ notice in order to defend the public’s right to health care and to oppose tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires.

In response, we were arrested.

The senator was not available, so I sat down alongside other health workers and patients on the couches and floor in Sen. Portman’s office to tell his staff and closed doors our stories; we wondered if the senator was sitting inside.

Chuckie, a Lake Milton, Ohio, voter and disabled General Motors auto worker from Mahoning County, told how health insurance helped him get treatment after being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.

Jenn spoke about her mother, who had survived illness because of Medicaid and went on to become an Emergency Room nurse.

Ali, a medical student, described how Medicare had helped her 78-year-old father survive heart disease.

Michaela, a community health center nurse and mother of three, anguished that she would be forced to turn patients away from care if the bill passed.

A mother and her two children with a congenital condition called Noonan’s syndrome relayed how health insurance saved her family from bankruptcy.

Vinay said that health insurance gave him mental health services that made the difference between his best and worst days. He worried that decimating Medicaid would rob millions of Americans of their best days.

I trained for nine years after college to become a family doctor and public health specialist. After I started working, I realized that I couldn’t always give patients the care they needed. It wasn’t because I hadn’t learned enough. It was for these reasons: My patients were sometimes uninsured, or they had been kicked off their insurance plans, or they didn’t qualify for the right kind of insurance, or they couldn’t afford their co-pays, deductibles, medical bills, or donut holes, or their insurance didn’t cover the treatments and tests they needed.

As a doctor, it’s frustrating and horrific to watch patients get sick and die from preventable disease simply because they don’t have the right plastic insurance card. There is no biology that explains this mechanism of disease. As a citizen, it’s unacceptable to see fellow humans needlessly suffer.

We moved into the hallway, where our stories echoed down stately marble corridors into other senators’ offices. While we were sharing our stories about why health care matters to us, the Capitol police swarmed around us, shackled our wrists behind our backs with plastic zip ties, and dragged us off.

Nearly 40 of us went to the D.C. jail for crowding passage through a public building.

If the Senate passes this cruel bill, they will shackle the entire health system. They will tie the hands of health care workers and prevent them from delivering medical care, and they will doom patients to suffering from preventable disease.

The Republican death care bill proposes to kick 22 million people off the health insurance they have now.

It will cause millions to get sick, and it will cause an estimated 29,000 Americans to die each year. Thousands of doctors, nurses, and other health professionals will be forced to watch as millions of our patients are unable to access the care they need. This would be a tragic violation of our professional ethics and an insult to our years of training, hard work, and goodwill.

It is no surprise that nearly every major association of health professionals opposes this bill. It is surprising, however, that this opposition is not being heard. Doctors and nurses do not typically sit-in and risk arrest. But traditional means of communication are not registering with Congress.

Health care workers will support our patients. We reject a bill that promotes death and disease. We reject a bill that hands out unnecessary tax cuts to the few uber-wealthy at the expense of the health of millions.

I would rather go to jail than see patients needlessly suffer and die. The minor discomfort of being handcuffed, detained for eight hours, and slapped with a $50 fine pales in comparison to the years of death, despair, and pain millions of Americans will experience if our lawmakers pass this deadly bill.

Even if it requires more arrests, we will continue to confront Sen. Portman and his colleagues — who are shielded from the impact of this vote by their own taxpayer-funded premium health plans — with the reality that this bill is literally a matter of life or death.

Dr. Roona Ray is a board-certified family physician and HIV and public health specialist, and serves on the board of Physicians for a National Health Plan, Metro New York Chapter.

http://www.cleveland.com…

CMS halts release of Medicare Advantage data

Medicare Halts Release of Much-Anticipated Data

By Charles Ornstein
ProPublica, June 29, 2017

In the past few years, many seniors and disabled people have eschewed traditional Medicare coverage to enroll in privately run health plans paid for by Medicare, which often come with lower out-of-pocket costs and some enhanced benefits.

These so-called Medicare Advantage plans now enroll more than a third of the 58 million beneficiaries in the Medicare program, a share that grows by the month.

But little is known about the care delivered to these people, from how many services they get to which doctors treat them to whether taxpayer money is being well-spent or misused.

The government has collected data on patients’ diagnoses and the services they receive since 2012 and began using it last year to help calculate payments to private insurers, which run the Medicare Advantage plans. But it has never made that data public.

Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have been validating the accuracy of the data and, in recent months, were preparing to release it to researchers. Medicare already shares data on the 38 million patients in the traditional Medicare program, which the government runs.

The grand unveiling of the new data was scheduled to take place at the annual research meeting of AcademyHealth, a festival of health wonkery, which just concluded in New Orleans.

But at the last minute, the session was canceled.

In a statement, CMS said there were enough questions about the data’s accuracy that it should not be released for research use. CMS said it will examine the data for 2015 “to determine if it is robust enough to support research use.”

(Health economist Austin) Frakt notes that researchers know “vastly more” about traditional Medicare because the data has been available for decades. “The claim is that private insurers are innovating in ways that traditional program is not. We need to validate that. We need to know what they’re doing for the benefit of everyone. We can’t do that without the data.”

In recent years, private insurers that run Medicare Advantage plans have been under fire for allegedly overcharging Medicare. The Center for Public Integrity reported last year that more than three dozen audits had found that plans overstated the severity of enrollees’ medical conditions to garner more money. (The Center had to file a Freedom of Information lawsuit to access the audits.) In 2014, the Center’s reporting suggested that insurers had collected $70 billion in improper payments from 2008 to 2013.

The Department of Justice recently intervened in two federal lawsuits in Los Angeles (here and here) accusing UnitedHealth Group of providing “untruthful and inaccurate information about the health status of beneficiaries” to boost its revenues.

“The system used to capture encounter data has numerous unresolved operational and technical issues and fails to capture a reliable, comprehensive picture of beneficiaries’ diagnoses,” a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans said in an email. “This could put payments at risk, which could also increase premiums and decrease benefits. We look forward to working with Administrator Verma and CMS to improve the encounter data and address these issues.”

https://www.propublica.org…

***

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

We have access to the data for the traditional Medicare program, but the same data have not been available for the private Medicare Advantage plans. We do know that the private plans have been cheating the taxpayers, initially by selectively marketing their products to less expensive, healthier populations while receiving full payments based on average needs, and then, later, by upcoding the diagnoses in order to receive unwarranted higher risk adjusted payments as if the beneficiaries were sicker than they actually are.

Now that CMS is headed by a pro-market ideologue – Seema Verma – the promised release of the data was reversed with the explanation that “there were enough questions about the data’s accuracy that it should not be released for research use.” Yet it is being used to overpay the private plans. Verma has stated repeatedly that the private plans produce higher quality at lower costs, yet she refuses to let us see the data. What data we do have suggest the opposite.

With the overpayments, the Medicare Advantage plans are able to offer their products with lower premiums and cost sharing, obviating the need for patients to purchase Medigap plans. With this perception of a better deal, enrollment in the private plans continues to increase, helping to fulfill the goal of privatizing Medicare. Once the private plans have supplanted much of the traditional Medicare program, the public privatizers plan to decrease the government contribution to the plans (decrease premium support – vouchers) leaving Medicare beneficiaries to pick up more and more of the costs.

Look, it’s our government, our taxes, our Medicare. Keeping us in the dark allows them to surreptitiously inflict their ideology upon us – an ideology that is shifting wealth upwards, away from workers. After listening to the Fourth of July speeches celebrating America, it does not seem that privatizing Medicare is the way we make America great again.

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Let’s talk about single-payer health care

By James Whalen, M.D.
Chicago Tribune, July 4, 2017

As the Republicans’ attempt to radically reduce health care benefits for the economic disadvantaged and simultaneously provide huge tax cuts for the rich, the current legislation to repeal Obamacare is on life support.

In light of the gridlock it is easy to speculate that the country is heading toward single-payer health care.

What “single payer” means deserves clarification, as opponents of this so-called Medicare for all equate it with socialized medicine. This is pure demagoguery.

Socialized medicine is a system of health care in which the government owns all medical facilities in the system and employs all health care personnel, including professionals. Health care administered by the Veterans Administration is an example of this.

“Single payer” simply means that there is one insurer, the federal government. Medical providers will continue as they are now: independent agents who bill insurers (i.e., the government) for services rendered.

Hospitals that successfully attract patients will have more revenue than unsuccessful hospitals, and physicians will enjoy more reimbursement for services the more they work. Competition will still thrive.

In addition to its simplicity, Medicare for everyone will be much more efficient.

With this system, there will be no exorbitant salaries for health care executives (nor multimillion-dollar severance packages), no advertising costs that raise insurance premiums, and no need to service stockholders.

America has tried competition in the health care marketplace, and that left about 40 million people without medical insurance.

Obamacare clearly has its warts and the Trump administration’s efforts to sabotage it have put it in an ever more precarious position.

It is time to move to a single-payer system.

http://www.chicagotribune.com…

AHCA or BCRA: “Murder for hire”

A Health Care War On The Poor

By Kathleen Sebelius and Ron Pollack
Health Affairs Blog, June 27, 2017

Many criticisms have been leveled against the House-passed American Health Care Act (AHCA) and the Better Care Reconciliation Act- the new Senate health bill offered by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The unmistakable hallmark of these bills, however, is that they constitute a very cruel war on the poor. By far, no demographic group would be hurt more by these legislative proposals than low-income people. They are the bulls-eye!

As the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found, over the next decade the largest cutback in the Senate and House bills are reductions to the safety-net Medicaid program (a $772 billion cut in the Senate bill, and an $834 billion cut in the House bill).

Additionally, there are significant cuts to the subsidies that were designed to make private insurance premiums and cost-sharing affordable for low- and moderate-income families, with $424 billion cut in the Senate bill and $276 billion cut in the House bill.

These decreases, which would cause enormous harm to low-income families, are obviously not part of an overall scheme to promote fiscal prudence since both the Senate and House bills lavish huge tax benefits to the rich and special interest groups. The Senate provides $541 billion in such tax benefits, and the House provides $664 billion.

According to CBO, the proposals in both the Senate and House bills would cause huge numbers of people to become uninsured within a decade. The Senate bill would cause 22 million to lose coverage, and the House bill would force 23 million into the ranks of the uninsured. In total, at least 49 million would be uninsured – more than the aggregate population of almost half (24) the states in our nation.

The bottom line is clear: While both the House and Senate bills provide unneeded tax help for wealthier people, the Republicans’ war on the poor would cause many and very severe casualties on people with greatest needs. Hopefully senators of good will call for an immediate and complete cease fire.

***

Health Affairs Reader Response:

By Robert Stone, M.D.

“War on the Poor” is strong language, and sometimes strong language is appropriate to a discussion, even in as sober a journal as Health Affairs. I would use even stronger language. The 6/27/17 Annals of Internal Medicine article “The Relationship of Health Insurance and Mortality: Is Lack of Insurance Deadly” is the most definitive peer-reviewed publication yet showing that removing healthcare coverage for millions of Americans will lead to thousands of preventable deaths per year. What do we stand for as a nation? This is a murderous bill. The bill, either House or Senate version is a huge tax cut for the wealthy, paid for by the middle class and the poor. Why is there such a rush to pass it without discussion and debate? It appears to me the reason for that is because Senators’ wealthy donors want to see the tax cuts. Therefore, you could call this bill not only murderous, but “Murder for hire.”

http://healthaffairs.org…

***

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Rob Stone is one of us. He has been a very active participant and a thought leader in PNHP for a couple of decades. His message for us today is that we have to start saying it like it is. The fact that so many Senators are on record as being willing to enact legislation that will kill thousands of Americans in exchange for payments from wealthy donors who want the associated tax cuts, that does constitute “Murder for hire.”

The politicians are not alone in this conspiracy. We can no longer accept an “arm’s length” excuse to allow these wealthy donors to escape blame. The work of Gilens and Page has shown that it is these very individuals who drive the process (link below). They are the ones who are hiring the murderers (though Gilens and Page would confine their rhetoric to benign academic language). And, yes, the members of Congress are murderers when they enact policies that they know will kill people.

At PNHP we have been gentlepersons as we advocate for policies that will enhance health, reduce physical suffering, and prevent financial hardship for all residents of America (and next, the world). Yet we see policies perpetuated that inflict so much harm (and, by no coincidence, at a great financial cost), and we complain that their policies are wrong and that we have better policies. Is arguing policy enough when it is devoid of warranted intense emotional expression?

But something has been happening. Americans now understand that the improvements of Obamacare are grossly deficient since too many people are unable to receive or afford the medical care that they need. Bernie Sanders came along and told us that expanding Medicare to include everyone through a single payer system would make health care affordable and accessible to all. Those of us who have long supported those views have joined him a clarion call for health care justice for all.

Although single payer sounded like a pretty good idea to those who hadn’t given it much thought, many were still hoping Trump and the Republicans could bring us health care nirvana through repeal and replace. But now Americans have had a rude awakening in discovering that the repeal and replace movement of the past six years has been a fraud. The Republicans finally had to bring their proposal out from the closet for what they hoped would be quick action before rushing home to pick up their checks from their wealthy donors. But we peeked! The American people have now found out that the replacement would make access and affordability much worse – not at all what they were asking for when they supported the campaign to repeal Obamacare.

Of course we do not want to change our policy positions on single payer. We have what America needs. But it may help to deliver the message if we turn up the volume on our rhetoric, just like Rob Stone has done in today’s message. However, a crucial caveat is that it is absolutely imperative that we be extremely meticulous in the accuracy of our rhetoric in order to maintain the credibility that we have established. This is not a name calling contest. But when policies kill, we need to say so. If in doubt, don’t, but when there is absolutely no doubt, say it.

Many positive terms have been used in the labeling of legislation in order to hide the negative impact: “affordable” when health care remains unaffordable, “better care” when more people lose their care, “access” when increased financial barriers impair access, and even “American” when the policies supported are un-American. Although the words themselves are not bad words, they are tarnished when used in dishonest rhetoric (although “American” still seems to hold its own in spite of current day challenges).

That said, we cannot let negativity drown out our very positive message of  guaranteed, affordable health care for all – the single payer message. That needs to be front and center, but how do we do that? Well, we are already doing it by having been meticulous with the truth. When we say “an improved Medicare for all” people understand that we are referring to a revered program that will be further improved and made available to all. Even the term “single payer” – a neutral technical policy term – has been used extensively as part of the positive message of health care for all.

With our continued efforts to deliver this very positive message, “single payer” and “improved Medicare for all” are rightfully taking their place on the top shelf in the rhetoric library, alongside “Mom” and “apple pie” – a nice thought as we celebrate our nation’s birthday.

Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”:
https://www.cambridge.org…

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Polling: How you discuss single payer matters

The Economist/YouGov Poll
April 2-4, 2017

81. Do you favor or oppose expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American?

60% – Favor strongly or favor somewhat

23% – Oppose strongly or oppose somewhat

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net…

***

The Economist/YouGov Poll
June 25-27, 2017

61. Do you favor or oppose creating a single-payer health care system, in which all Americans would get their health insurance from one government plan that is financed by taxes?

44% – Favor strongly or favor somewhat

31% – Oppose strongly or oppose somewhat

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net…

***

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

During a time when there is a crescendo of support for single payer/Medicare for All, the Economist/YouGov polls suggest that support declined during the past couple of months. There is a lesson here, but it is not that single payer support is fading.

The single payer policy community would recognize these two questions as being essentially the same from a policy perspective. But the layman hears the first question as being the expansion of Medicare to cover everyone (Medicare for All), whereas the second question is about single payer, government, and taxes (single payer). The first is about a popular insurance program which we have all earned and eventually participate in, and would it be that everyone could be included. The second is about government taking over health care and us being taxed for it when the insurance benefit at work seems to be working just fine, and the boss is already paying for most of it anyway. At least that’s often the perception.

We already knew this. “Medicare for all” polls better than does “single payer.” What is reassuring is that people are beginning to understand the single payer concept well enough such that there is more support than opposition, even if it is a government program for which we will be taxed. The term “single payer” is out there and will be used by friend and foe alike, so people have to understand that it refers to an improved version of Medicare in which everyone gets to participate.

The lesson? We should not only continue with but we should expand our education and advocacy activities through coalitions and grassroots efforts. The people are getting the word. Support is burgeoning. Soon the public will be immunized against the soundbites of the opponents.

Do members of Congress deserve government subsidized health insurance?

Tie Congress’s Paychecks to Our Good Health

By Nicholas Kristof
The New York Times, June 29, 2017

Members of Congress are paid $174,000 a year, while members of Poland’s lower house of Parliament are paid $32,300 a year.

Hmm. It looks as if we’re getting ripped off. Members of Congress seem to underperform compared to members of Parliament in Poland and across the democratic world.

Conservatives are right to worry that feeding at the government trough breeds dependency and laziness. So I suggest we introduce pay for performance, using metrics like, say, health.

I cite Poland because so many Poles (including the Krzysztofowicz family, later renamed Kristof) came to America for a better life, yet today American babies are one-third more likely to die in their first year of life than Polish children are (and twice as likely as Italian, Portuguese and Czech babies!).

Meanwhile, the U.S. spends far more on health care — an average of nearly $10,000 per person — than other countries do. Poland spends just $1,680 per person.

This is a stain on America. Choose almost any modern country, and its people pay less for health care and its children are more likely to survive.

In short, we as taxpayers are getting cheated.

But ultimately the United States should follow the example of every other advanced country and ensure health coverage for all. “We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” President Trump promised a week before taking office. Now he backs plans that would lead to 22 million fewer people having coverage. But if Taiwan, Slovenia, Spain, Japan and just about every other modern country can have coverage for everyone, so can we.

And, members of Congress, here’s the deal: If you ever adopt Medicare for all, I’ll endorse a pay-for-performance pay raise for all of you along with guaranteed, subsidized health insurance.

Oh, never mind. That, you already have.

https://www.nytimes.com…

***

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Right now many members of Congress are fighting the concept that health care should be an entitlement (some would say a right). Not only do they offer no realistic assistance for the 28 million who remain uninsured, some members are supporting policies that would cause another 22 million to lose their insurance. If they really believe that not everyone is entitled to have insurance then why do most of us believe that these well paid members of Congress are somehow entitled to generous health care plans, largely funded by us taxpayers?

I could write much more about this, but isn’t that observation enough? Some deserve health care at our expense and others don’t?

A benefit for the privileged? An entitlement? A right? For a few? For everyone?

Do we really have to play rhetorical games to come to the conclusion that everyone should have health care? If we believe that, and most Americans do, then we need to hire members of Congress who agree with us and get rid of those members who think that they are more entitled to health care than the rest of us.

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The real debate: Single payer vs. ACA/AHCA/BCRA

The Senate’s Secretly Bipartisan Health Bill

By Avik Roy
The New York Times, June 26, 2017

In 2010, when Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act, Republicans complained that they did so with no Republican support. Democrats responded by pointing out that the centerpiece of their plan — tax credits to buy private insurance — came from a Republican governor, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.

Something similar is happening today. Democrats are denouncing the partisan nature of the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. They’re right to note that if the new bill passes the Senate, it will do so along party lines.

But the core planks of the Senate Republicans’ health bill — the Better Care Reconciliation Act — borrow just as much from Democratic ideas as Obamacare borrowed from Republican ones.

The bipartisan heritage of the bill does not eliminate areas of philosophical disagreement between conservatives and progressives. It increases the role of private insurers, and decreases the role of state-run Medicaid programs in covering the uninsured. It reduces federal spending on health care, whereas Obamacare increased it. The Senate bill repeals or rolls back all of the A.C.A.’s tax increases.

But think about it this way. Imagine an alternate universe in which, in 2009, Democrats and Republicans passed a bipartisan health bill. That bipartisan bill — let’s call it the Baucus-Collins Act — expanded coverage to tens of millions of Americans through a system of means-tested, age-adjusted tax credits in a voluntary-but-regulated individual insurance market where insurers were required to charge the same premiums to the sick and the healthy and guarantee coverage for those with pre-existing conditions.

In the Baucus-Collins Act, this increased spending on the uninsured was paid for through reforms of the Medicare program. In addition, the alternate-universe bill enacted a near-replica of Mr. Clinton’s proposal for Medicaid reform in order to make the program fiscally sustainable over the long term. The act also capped the previously unlimited tax break for employer-sponsored health insurance, albeit at a high threshold.

Democrats and Republicans would be celebrating historic reforms that expanded coverage in a fiscally responsible way. Both blue states like California and red states like Texas would see substantial coverage gains. And we might be talking about further bipartisan efforts to strengthen the Baucus-Collins Act.

What I’ve just described as a bipartisan achievement is, in effect, the synthesis of Obamacare and the Senate Republican health care bill.

***

NYT Reader Comments

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Avik Roy’s framing is that there are two polarized partisan views of reform and that somewhere in the middle is the compromise on which we can all agree. Nonsense.

If we are to use linear polarization to frame the debate, then the two sides are health care policies that benefit the patients – all patients – versus health care policies that cater to special interests, whether they be the medical-industrial complex or the political ideologues.

The similarities noted by Roy are due to the fact that the neoliberal views of the Democrats are not that far from the conservative views of the Republicans, in spite of all the noise generated by this debate. Trying to establish policies that benefit the various special interests results in the profoundly expensive, highly wasteful, inequitable, fragmented, dysfunctional system that we have.

A well designed single payer system takes care of patients first, with much greater efficiency, effectiveness, and equity. The special interests that might otherwise appropriately benefit would do well in such a system though they would have to set aside personal greed and vacuous ideology.

https://www.nytimes.com…

***

The other reform model: Single payer

“If the GOP does not disengage the country’s health-care system from the disaster of Obamacare, we are headed for the misery of single-payer.”
Hugh Hewitt, The Washington Post, June 27, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com…

“Senator Elizabeth Warren now says Democrats should endorse a government-run, single-payer health insurance system for the upcoming 2018 midterm elections and beyond.”
Boston Globe, June 27, 2017
https://www.bostonglobe.com…

“Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said, ‘If we don’t get this done and we end up with Democratic majorities in ‘18, we’ll have single payer. That’s what we’ll be dealing with.’ Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) added that Congress has to pass an unpopular far-right bill, no matter what, because the alternative is single payer, ‘and that’s socialized medicine.’”
MSNBC, June 27, 2017
http://www.msnbc.com…

“Republicans have opened up the space for Democrats to go much further than they’ve been willing to before. It’s not impossible to foresee Democrats winning the House in 2018, then taking the presidency and the Senate in 2020 — and then taking the first steps toward making single-payer health care in America a reality.”
Paul Waldman, The Washington Post, June 27, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com…

“It wasn’t long ago that the mere mention of single-payer inspired gasps of horror among centrists and conservatives. Now, not so much.”
Caroline Baum, MarketWatch, June 28, 2017
http://www.marketwatch.com…

“Tom (Sullivan) warned that, if the GOP fails to pass a sufficient healthcare plan in the near future, a single-payer healthcare system in the United States could be inevitable.”
Tom Sullivan Show, Fox News Radio, June 27, 2017
https://radio.foxnews.com…

“Plans that are not single-payer, quite simply, are motivated by greed and fueled by ignorance. And they are cruel.”
Joshua Gear, Press Herald, June 26, 2017
http://www.pressherald.com…

“Anyone who argues in 2017 that single-payer health care is unfeasible is either ignorant, malignant, depraved enough to rationalize profit from human suffering, or absent of the basic moral imagination to aspire to something better.”
Timothy Faust, Jacobin, June 26, 2017
https://www.jacobinmag.com…

“With my limited knowledge, I think (single payer) probably is the best system.”
Warren Buffett, PBS NEWSHOUR, June 26, 2017
http://www.pbs.org…

***

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

The issue is simple. The nation is dissatisfied with the deficiencies of the Affordable Care Act, and now they realize that the repeal and replace movement was never founded on sound health policies and would leave us mired in the same old system. The Democratic and Republican politicians are quibbling over details of a dysfunctional, fragmented, inequitable health care financing system that costs too much and delivers too little. Now, more than ever before, the nation is realizing that the other real option is, instead, a single payer national health program – an improved Medicare for all.

Again, the real debate is not between the twins of ACA vs. AHCA/BCRA, but rather it is between our terribly mediocre health care financing system vs. single payer – improved Medicare for all.

The momentum for single payer is greatly intensifying. Next week members of Congress are returning to their districts as they try to reorganize their concepts and strategy on health care reform. They need to hear loudly and clearly our voice on health care justice for all – single payer!

Stay informed! Visit www.pnhp.org/qotd to sign up for daily email updates.

The real debate: Single payer vs. ACA/AHCA/BCRA

The Senate’s Secretly Bipartisan Health Bill

By Avik Roy
The New York Times, June 26, 2017

In 2010, when Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act, Republicans complained that they did so with no Republican support. Democrats responded by pointing out that the centerpiece of their plan — tax credits to buy private insurance — came from a Republican governor, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.

Something similar is happening today. Democrats are denouncing the partisan nature of the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. They’re right to note that if the new bill passes the Senate, it will do so along party lines.

But the core planks of the Senate Republicans’ health bill — the Better Care Reconciliation Act — borrow just as much from Democratic ideas as Obamacare borrowed from Republican ones.

The bipartisan heritage of the bill does not eliminate areas of philosophical disagreement between conservatives and progressives. It increases the role of private insurers, and decreases the role of state-run Medicaid programs in covering the uninsured. It reduces federal spending on health care, whereas Obamacare increased it. The Senate bill repeals or rolls back all of the A.C.A.’s tax increases.

But think about it this way. Imagine an alternate universe in which, in 2009, Democrats and Republicans passed a bipartisan health bill. That bipartisan bill — let’s call it the Baucus-Collins Act — expanded coverage to tens of millions of Americans through a system of means-tested, age-adjusted tax credits in a voluntary-but-regulated individual insurance market where insurers were required to charge the same premiums to the sick and the healthy and guarantee coverage for those with pre-existing conditions.

In the Baucus-Collins Act, this increased spending on the uninsured was paid for through reforms of the Medicare program. In addition, the alternate-universe bill enacted a near-replica of Mr. Clinton’s proposal for Medicaid reform in order to make the program fiscally sustainable over the long term. The act also capped the previously unlimited tax break for employer-sponsored health insurance, albeit at a high threshold.

Democrats and Republicans would be celebrating historic reforms that expanded coverage in a fiscally responsible way. Both blue states like California and red states like Texas would see substantial coverage gains. And we might be talking about further bipartisan efforts to strengthen the Baucus-Collins Act.

What I’ve just described as a bipartisan achievement is, in effect, the synthesis of Obamacare and the Senate Republican health care bill.

***

NYT Reader Comments

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Avik Roy’s framing is that there are two polarized partisan views of reform and that somewhere in the middle is the compromise on which we can all agree. Nonsense.

If we are to use linear polarization to frame the debate, then the two sides are health care policies that benefit the patients – all patients – versus health care policies that cater to special interests, whether they be the medical-industrial complex or the political ideologues.

The similarities noted by Roy are due to the fact that the neoliberal views of the Democrats are not that far from the conservative views of the Republicans, in spite of all the noise generated by this debate. Trying to establish policies that benefit the various special interests results in the profoundly expensive, highly wasteful, inequitable, fragmented, dysfunctional system that we have.

A well designed single payer system takes care of patients first, with much greater efficiency, effectiveness, and equity. The special interests that might otherwise appropriately benefit would do well in such a system though they would have to set aside personal greed and vacuous ideology.

https://www.nytimes.com…

***

The other reform model: Single payer

“If the GOP does not disengage the country’s health-care system from the disaster of Obamacare, we are headed for the misery of single-payer.”
Hugh Hewitt, The Washington Post, June 27, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com…

“Senator Elizabeth Warren now says Democrats should endorse a government-run, single-payer health insurance system for the upcoming 2018 midterm elections and beyond.”
Boston Globe, June 27, 2017
https://www.bostonglobe.com…

“Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said, ‘If we don’t get this done and we end up with Democratic majorities in ‘18, we’ll have single payer. That’s what we’ll be dealing with.’ Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) added that Congress has to pass an unpopular far-right bill, no matter what, because the alternative is single payer, ‘and that’s socialized medicine.’”
MSNBC, June 27, 2017
http://www.msnbc.com…

“Republicans have opened up the space for Democrats to go much further than they’ve been willing to before. It’s not impossible to foresee Democrats winning the House in 2018, then taking the presidency and the Senate in 2020 — and then taking the first steps toward making single-payer health care in America a reality.”
Paul Waldman, The Washington Post, June 27, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com…

“It wasn’t long ago that the mere mention of single-payer inspired gasps of horror among centrists and conservatives. Now, not so much.”
Caroline Baum, MarketWatch, June 28, 2017
http://www.marketwatch.com…

“Tom (Sullivan) warned that, if the GOP fails to pass a sufficient healthcare plan in the near future, a single-payer healthcare system in the United States could be inevitable.”
Tom Sullivan Show, Fox News Radio, June 27, 2017
https://radio.foxnews.com…

“Plans that are not single-payer, quite simply, are motivated by greed and fueled by ignorance. And they are cruel.”
Joshua Gear, Press Herald, June 26, 2017
http://www.pressherald.com…

“Anyone who argues in 2017 that single-payer health care is unfeasible is either ignorant, malignant, depraved enough to rationalize profit from human suffering, or absent of the basic moral imagination to aspire to something better.”
Timothy Faust, Jacobin, June 26, 2017
https://www.jacobinmag.com…

“With my limited knowledge, I think (single payer) probably is the best system.”
Warren Buffett, PBS NEWSHOUR, June 26, 2017
http://www.pbs.org…

***

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

The issue is simple. The nation is dissatisfied with the deficiencies of the Affordable Care Act, and now they realize that the repeal and replace movement was never founded on sound health policies and would leave us mired in the same old system. The Democratic and Republican politicians are quibbling over details of a dysfunctional, fragmented, inequitable health care financing system that costs too much and delivers too little. Now, more than ever before, the nation is realizing that the other real option is, instead, a single payer national health program – an improved Medicare for all.

Again, the real debate is not between the twins of ACA vs. AHCA/BCRA, but rather it is between our terribly mediocre health care financing system vs. single payer – improved Medicare for all.

The momentum for single payer is greatly intensifying. Next week members of Congress are returning to their districts as they try to reorganize their concepts and strategy on health care reform. They need to hear loudly and clearly our voice on health care justice for all – single payer!

Stay informed! Visit www.pnhp.org/qotd to sign up for daily email updates.

Lack of health insurance and U.S. mortality

PNHP co-founders Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H., and David Himmelstein, M.D., have published a landmark review of studies in the Annals of Internal Medicine that points to a link between lack of health insurance and preventable deaths. Their review, “The Relationship of Health Insurance and Mortality: Is Lack of Insurance Deadly?” was published June 26, 2017, as the U.S. Senate considered a major health overhaul.

Although estimates range, there is a strong scientific consensus that uninsurance leads to tens of thousands of deaths annually. If any of the various GOP health bills become law, millions of Americans would lose coverage and the number of preventable deaths would increase dramatically. The “Better Care Reconciliation Act,” for example, would result in 22 million people losing coverage and an additional 29,000 deaths per year.

PNHP press release:
https://pnhp.org/news…

full review of studies:
http://annals.org…

***

Sen. Sanders cites study findings on the floor of the Senate

In arguing against the “Better Care Reconciliation Act” on June 26, 2017, Sen. Sanders said, “The horrible and unspeakable truth is, that if this legislation were to pass, many thousands of our fellow Americans, every single year, will die, and many more will suffer and become much sicker than they should.” He submitted the Annals of Internal Medicine review, published earlier that day, to the Congressional Record.

***

Media coverage

Health insurance can make a life or death difference, study says
By Shanika Gunaratna
CBS News, June 26, 2017
In the midst of the complex, politically-charged health care debate unfolding in Washington, medical researchers say the science is clear: being uninsured increases one’s risk of dying. That’s the headline out of a new big-picture analysis of existing research that explores the relationship between insurance coverage and mortality. Continue reading…

As lawmakers debate GOP healthcare bill, new study finds stripping people of insurance can be deadly
By Melissa Healy
Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2017
The number of Americans who die prematurely would rise by about 29,000 each year if the health reform plan put forth by Senate Republicans were to go into full effect, a new report suggests. Continue reading…

When Cutting Access to Health Care, There’s a Price to Pay
By Eduardo Porter
The New York Times, June 27, 2017
It doesn’t require an advanced degree to figure out what limited access to a doctor can do to people’s health. A review of studies published this week in Annals of Internal Medicine reported that health insurance substantially raises people’s chances of survival. Continue reading…

The hard-to-answer question at the core of the health-care fight: How many more people might die?
By Philip Bump
Washington Post, June 27, 2017
There’s no real question that if the Affordable Care Act is repealed the number of Americans without insurance coverage will increase. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the percentage of those under age 65 who can’t afford or opt out of coverage would jump to 18 percent by 2026. Continue reading…

28,600 Lives Per Year
By James Hamblin
The Atlantic, June 30, 2017
Like everything undertaken in pursuit of health, returns vary person to person and case to case. But when constructing a health-care system for an entire nation, there is reason to know the stakes at a broad level. And despite [a variety of] factors, health insurance time and again proves to be a life-saving proposition. Continue reading…

Stripping Americans of health insurance could be deadly: study
By Ronnie Cohen
Reuters, June 26, 2017
Health insurance saves lives – that’s the conclusion of a report released on Monday, just in time to weigh into the debate among Senate Republicans considering a bill that could strip millions of Americans of coverage. Continue reading…

Health Care Cuts Will Increase Odds Of Dying For The Uninsured, Medical Review Predicts
By Dan Vergano
BuzzFeed News, June 26, 2017
About 28,600 more people could die every year in the US if a proposed Senate health care bill becomes law, suggests a review of medical studies released on Monday. “Being uninsured can be lethal,” review author Steffie Woolhandler of City University of New York told BuzzFeed News. Continue reading…

Does Health Insurance Save Lives?
By F. Perry Wilson, M.D.
MedPage Today, June 26, 2017
You may have noticed that there’s a bit of a debate going on about health insurance in this country. Reflecting the great diversity of American political life, we have those calling for a universal, single-payer healthcare system and those who feel, well, that the government should take a more limited role. Continue reading…

Lack of insurance is tied to higher death rates, new study shows
By Maria Castellucci
Modern Healthcare, June 26, 2017
As the Senate debates and amends its Obamacare replacement bill projected to leave 22 million without insurance, a new report found that those with insurance live longer than the uninsured. The report, published Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, highlights the influence insurance can have on mortality. Continue reading…

Lack of Health Insurance Can Shorten Lives: Study
By Alan Mozes
HealthDay, June 29, 2017
In the midst of another struggle over U.S. health care coverage, a new study finds that Americans who don’t have health insurance face a significantly higher risk for premature death. Continue reading…

No Hea
lth Insurance? Higher Risk for Death, Review Shows
Troy Brown, R.N.
MedScape, Login Required, June 27, 2017
Health insurance saves lives, boosts self-rated health and financial protection, and lowers the likelihood of depression, a new evidence review has found. The risk for death among the insured, compared with the uninsured, is 0.71 to 0.97, the researchers say. Continue reading…

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler on ‘Democracy Now!’

PNHP co-founder Dr. Steffie Woolhandler appeared on “Democracy Now!” on June 27, 2017, to discuss the deadly impact of being uninsured. She pointed to a review of studies, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, that confirmed thousands of Americans die each year because they lack health insurance.

Senate GOP health care bill estimated to kill 28,600 more in U.S. each year & drop 22M from insurance

Interview With Dr. Steffie Woolhandler

By Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!, June 27, 2017

PNHP Note: To view video of this interview, click here.

Twenty-two million Americans would lose their health insurance under the Senate Republicans’ healthcare bill over the next decade. That’s according to the Congressional Budget Office, which released its assessment on Monday. Following the report, Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky joined Senator Dean Heller of Nevada in pledging to vote against even debating their party’s healthcare bill this week. Republican leaders had been pushing for a vote as early as today, ahead of the July 4 recess. On Monday, the American Medical Association came out against the Senate bill, writing in a letter to Senate leaders, “Medicine has long operated under the precept of Primum non nocere, or ‘first, do no harm.’ The draft legislation violates that standard on many levels.” For more, we speak with Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor at CUNY-Hunter College and a primary care physician. She is a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and the co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program.

TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Twenty-two million Americans would lose their insurance under the Senate Republicans’ healthcare bill just over the next decade. In addition, Medicaid would see a $772 billion cut over the next decade, while wealthy Americans would receive $541 billion in tax cuts. This is according to the Congressional Budget Office, which released its assessment of the Republican healthcare bill in the Senate Monday.

Following the release of the CBO report, Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky joined Senator Dean Heller of Nevada in pledging to vote against even debating their party’s healthcare bill this week. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has suggested he, too, would oppose voting on the bill. Republican leaders had been pushing for a vote this week, ahead of the July 4th recess.

The Republican bill also faces major opposition from all Senate Democrats, a slew of governors from both parties, the majority of the healthcare industry, hospitals, doctors, nurses, patient advocacy groups, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and even members of the far-right Koch brothers’ political network, who claim the legislation is not sufficiently conservative.

This is Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders speaking Monday on the Senate floor.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Mr. President, today’s Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Trump-McConnell healthcare bill gives us 22 million reasons why this legislation should not see the light of day. What CBO tells us, in truth, is that this bill really has nothing to do with healthcare. Rather, it is an enormous transfer of wealth from the sick, the elderly, the children, the disabled and the poor into the pockets of the wealthiest people in this country. Mr. President, according to CBO—and that report just came out a few hours ago—this bill would throw 22 million Americans off of health insurance, cut Medicaid by over $770 billion, defund Planned Parenthood and substantially increase premiums for older Americans. … Mr. President, this, in fact, is a barbaric and immoral piece of legislation.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, the American Medical Association came out against the Senate bill. In a letter to Senate leaders, the AMA wrote, quote, “Medicine has long operated under the precept of Primum non nocere, or ‘first, do no harm.’ The draft legislation violates that standard on many levels,” unquote.

Meanwhile, a stunning new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine is estimating some 28,600 people could die early deaths if they lose health insurance.

We’re joined now by the author of the study, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, professor at CUNY-Hunter College, primary care physician, lecturer at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: My pleasure.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us what you found.

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: We reviewed the world’s scientific literature on the relationship between health insurance and mortality. And there is really now a scientific consensus that being uninsured raises the death rates. It raises your death rates by between 3 and 29 percent. And the math on that is that if you take health insurance away from 22 million people, about 29,000 of them will die every year, annually, as a result. That’s what we found by reviewing the literature. There was a similar review in New England Journal of Medicine. We punished our own study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which is the official organ of the American College of Physicians, the nation’s largest medical specialty society. So, being uninsured raises your death rate. That is established scientific consensus. And many of the Republicans have been trying to say, “Oh, you can take away health insurance from 22 million people, and nothing will happen.” That’s simply contradicted by the scientific consensus.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain how people die as a result.

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Well, people might have an acute illness, like major trauma. You get hit by a car, and you have to go to the hospital. If you’re uninsured and you have major trauma, your death rates are higher. You might have an illness like breast cancer. If you’re uninsured and you have breast cancer, your death rates are higher. But mostly this has to do with that routine medical care to treat high blood pressure, to treat diabetes, before they cause complications, and to prevent those serious complications and deaths. Seems like hypertension, high blood pressure, is probably the largest single contributor to deaths among uninsured people. You need to be taking medicines to control high blood pressure to prevent strokes and heart attacks and death.

AMY GOODMAN: So this number, 22 million people will lose their health insurance over the next 10 years, and then it only goes up from there.

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Well, according to the Congressional Budget Office, yes, it goes up from there, because the Medicaid cuts in the Senate bill are delayed, but then they’re very, very deep. They’re even deeper over the long run than what was in the House bill. So, Medicaid is going to be cut not just for poor people, but for people in nursing homes. You know, most people in a nursing home eventually have to rely on Medicaid to pay the bill, because nursing home care takes all your money, and you have to rely on Medicaid. If you have a disabled child, you have to rely on Medicaid. If you have a relative who has serious mental illness or substance abuse, they’re going to be relying on Medicaid. So it takes money from all of these people, not just the folks who are poor now, to give this giant tax cut to the top 1 percent of taxpayers.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a comment made by the Idaho Republican Congressman Raúl Labrador during a town hall meeting last month. He came under fire for his answer to this question from an audience member.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You are mandating people on Medicaid accept dying. You are making a mandate that will kill people.

REP. RAÚL LABRADOR: No, no one wants anybody to die. You know, that line is so indefensible. Nobody dies because they don’t have access to healthcare.

AMY GOODMAN: “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to healthcare.” Dr. Steffie Woolhandler?

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Well, Raúl Labrador said it. Senator Ted Cruz has said that. Marco Rubio has said that. Secretary Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, has implied that, that you can be uninsured and nothing happens. That’s simply not true. The science is showing us that if you lack health insurance, you don’t get the care you need to stay healthy, and that people die earlier as a result. And I think it’s a—the Republicans recognize this is a very dangerous idea for them, that people are going to die because of their behavior. But that’s what the scientific consensus is saying.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what has to happen now?

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Well, right now, the betting markets are saying it’s 50/50 that this Senate bill will pass. So when something’s 50/50, that means now is the time to mobilize. You know, you can call your senator. You can call your congressman. You can demonstrate. There’s demonstrations all over the country about this bill. You can tweet about it. You can tell your friends about it. But now is the time to really get active on this issue.

We also need to be saying, “Let’s move forward to single payer, that covers everyone, not backward through this repeal.” You know, even under the Affordable Care Act, 28 million Americans have no health insurance. Many Americans are underinsured. They have insurance they can’t afford to use because of gaps in their coverage, like copayments, deductibles and uncovered services. So we need to be fighting this Republican step backward, but also saying to our Democratic legislators, “We need to be moving forward to single payer,” that will actually improve care for all Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: You were never an advocate of Obamacare. And now, what will happen? I mean, even if they don’t vote on it, the gutting of the health insurance—of health insurance today is, you know, moving full speed ahead. So what does it look like even if this bill doesn’t move forward?

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Well, there’s more support for the Medicare-for-all, single-payer idea than ever in history. Polls are showing 56 percent of the American people support the idea. The majority of House Democrats have endorsed the Conyers bill, HR 676, a Medicare-for-all bill. More than half of House Democrats have endorsed that bill, about 112. Senator Sanders is putting a bill into the Senate in July. So this is a great time for people to be saying, “We need to move forward from the ACA to single payer.”

AMY GOODMAN: And what would Medicare for all look like?

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: How would that happen?

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: OK, well, it would be expanded and improved Medicare for all. You would get a Medicare card the day you were born, and have it your entire life. All medically necessary care would be covered by a tax-funded Medicare-for-all program, that’s—it would be a lot cheaper over the long run, because you save so much money on administrative costs. All that billing and insurance enrollment is extremely expensive in the United States, consuming 31 percent of total U.S. health spending, according to our research that’s appeared in New England Journal of Medicine. By going to a simple single-payer system, you could save about half of it, about $500 billion a year, which you could use to get to universal healthcare and to remove copayments and deductibles from people who now have them.

So, a single—that’s what’s happened in other countries. Canada has a single-payer system—doesn’t work perfectly, but it does cover everyone. Scotland has a single-payer system. Much of Western Europe has single-payer systems. They cover everyone. They live two years longer. They pay less for healthcare than we do.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, now, this is important, because you talked about mortality, if this bill were to pass and become law, that close to 29,000 people a year could die, more Americans could die. What is our mortality rate with our insurance system compared to others?

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Well, Americans live two to three years shorter than people in Canada, just across the border, with very similar culture, very similar lifestyle, yet we live two years shorter. Similarly, we live about two years shorter than people in many Western European countries. And some of the studies we reviewed in our article actually look at the international evidence, which, again, is totally consistent with the idea that being uninsured is bad for your health, it can cause deaths, and that being fully covered for all medically necessary care, as would happen under Medicare for all, makes people healthier, and it prolongs their life.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to President Trump being interviewed recently by Peter Hegseth of Fox & Friends.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Because I want to see—I want to see—and I speak from the heart—that’s what I want to see. I want to see a bill with heart.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response?

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Well, Trumpcare has no heart whatsoever. The House bill was going to throw 23 million people off insurance. The Senate bill is going to throw 22 million off in 10 years but then keep throwing more off. You know, they’re going to make health insurance worse for people with private coverage by getting rid of the rules about what has to be covered, so your private insurance will no longer have to cover maternity care. They’re actually robbing money from the Medicare trust fund. They’re taking $117 billion out of the Medicare trust fund, which pays for the health insurance when people turn 65. $117 billion is taken out of that trust fund to give tax cuts to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. That is not heart. That’s the opposite of heart.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I thank you very much for being with us, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, professor at CUNY-Hunter College here in New York, primary care physician, lecturer at Harvard Medical School, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. And we’ll link to her report on the mortality that would be related to the Republican healthcare bill becoming law. Roughly 28,600 more Americans could die per year.

https://www.democracynow.org…