PNHP

Would Heritage Foundation support an equitable individual mandate?

Would Heritage Foundation support an equitable individual mandate?

Would Heritage Foundation support an equitable individual mandate?

Los Angeles Times
September 4, 2004
Editorial
‘Ownership’ Isn’t the Cure

Welcome to President Bush’s ideal of “added choice” in healthcare. Buzzwords like “flexibility” and “ownership” might sound empowering when read off a teleprompter, as they were frequently during this week’s Republican convention. When discussed behind the scenes by health insurers, however, they are read as code words for giving insurers more leeway to “cherry-pick” – offering bargain-rate coverage to those who need it the least (such as healthy children) while pricing care beyond the reach of many who need it the most.

Bush’s “ownership society” ideal for healthcare is embodied in the health savings account. These let a family of four put aside up to $5,150 in tax-free savings that can be used to purchase health insurance on the open market. That will be small comfort to low- and middle-income families because the premiums for such family policies ran more than $9,000 in the group market last year, and would be even pricier if purchased by an individual family.

Another danger is that many healthy and wealthy people will flee group plans
in favor of health savings accounts, leaving the older, more comprehensive
health insurers stuck with a growing proportion of poor and sick members.
Insurers that aren’t driven out of business would be forced to raise costs.

Not all “ownership society” healthcare ideas are bad. One of the most radical – requiring all U.S. residents, some with government help, to buy health insurance, much as drivers are required to buy auto insurance now – has gained converts not only from the predictable places like the conservative Heritage Foundation but from centrist think tanks like the New America Foundation. The proposal deserves to be at least discussed by both presidential candidates.

Most of the healthcare ownership ideas the president has proposed so far, however, are fundamentally unfair. It’s an issue both parties will have to
address more seriously before the country’s near-terminal healthcare system
goes flat-line.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-health4sep04,1,992590.story

Comment: The editors of the Los Angeles Times obviously recognize that
retaining personal ownership of the risk of financial loss due to adverse
medical events is flawed policy. Exposing the medically unfortunate to greater financial risk defeats the purpose of insurance.

On the other hand, the editors believe that the Heritage Foundation’s proposal to require everyone to purchase health insurance (individual mandate) is not a bad idea. Is it?

Many Americans would rather keep their employer sponsored health care coverage rather than accept the perceived risk, though unsubstantiated, of a
universal program that has a greater government role. Because of perceptions
of greater political feasibility, many continue to advocate for employment linked coverage. Actually conservative and liberal policy analysts agree that there are problems with such coverage. Particularly, lack of portability threatening continuity of care and continuation of coverage are of concern. Also, employer sponsored plans are inequitably funded through regressive tax policies. Administrative waste and lack of effective mechanisms to contain costs are also issues. So is individual coverage a better option?

Mandating individual coverage will not be effective if the premium costs encroach on the ability for individuals to meet other expenses. And if individual premiums are tax deductible, funding would be unfair because of this regressive policy. But if the tax system were used to fund individual coverage, then a properly designed tax could make the funding equitable, and automatically include everyone since there would be no option to not pay.

Individual plans are usually subject to underwriting standards and individuals can be required to pay excessive premiums or be denied coverage altogether. Insurers could be required to accept anyone regardless of risk and set the premium to reflect all costs in the community (community rating). Individual plans cost about 30% more than group plans with the same level of coverage since there are proportionately higher marketing, underwriting and other administrative costs in selling insurance one policy at a time rather than selling a single policy to a large group of individuals. Insurers could be required by regulation to greatly reduce costs that are not related to providing actual health care benefits.

Various public and private payers continually manipulate the system by shifting costs of their own beneficiaries to other payers. Regulations could be established which would require all insurers to pay the same rates for their beneficiaries (risk adjusted), thereby ending cost shifting.

In fact, once you have established a rigid regulatory environment that addresses the problems of cost shifting, adverse selection, inequitable funding, lack of portability, excessive financial barriers to care, and, above all, the lack of universal coverage, then that regulatory environment would have created a de facto single payer system using the private health plans.

There is still one more problem. Although the regulator can demand administrative standardization, thereby reducing the administrative burden on the providers, the insurers will continue to make every effort to expand and sell their primary product: administrative services. On the other hand, a publicly administered insurance program remains sensitive to taxpayers’ needs and makes efforts to streamline government administration. Observations of our Medicare and of the Canadian single payer system confirm this.

Do you believe that Heritage would support a rigid regulatory environment for private plans that would create a de facto single payer system? If so, then maybe that really isn’t such a bad idea in that it would be a good starting point to begin negotiations.

(Please keep in mind that PNHP does not “negotiate” sound health policy science. Our mission at PNHP is to rigidly advocate for health policy that is strictly in the best interests of patients.)

The privatisation of our health care

NHS plc
THE PRIVATISATION OF OUR HEALTH CARE

ALLYSON M POLLOCK

Whether or not the public has a ‘right to choose’, it seems likely that the basic right to free care that the creation of the NHS sought to enshrine will continue to suffer at the hands of a succession of politicians more interested in media presence than in the realities of public health policy. Now, more than ever, it is vital to understand what has happened to our health service, and to ask whether it is in the public interest for matters to continue in this way.

NHS plc tells the story of how the ideal of universal, comprehensive health care, equally available to all and disconnected from income and the ability to pay, has been progressively eroded, and how the clock is being turned back to pre-NHS days. Now even the shrinking core of free NHS hospital services is being handed over to private providers at the taxpayers’ expense. Allyson Pollock deconstructs slogans like ‘care in the community’, ‘diversity’ and ‘local ownership’, to present a clear and powerful analysis of the transition from a comprehensive and universal service to New Labour’s ‘mixed economy of health care’.

“This is a shocking story, brilliantly told, by one of the leading thinkers in the field of public health policy. Here you will learn how Labour politicians, with their cronies from the private sector, are turning this magnificent institution into one of the greatest pork barrels of all time. No one who cares about the health of the nation should ignore NHS plc.”Prof Raymond Tallis, author of Hippocratic Oaths. Medicine and its Discontents

Allyson M Pollock. NHS plc: the privatisation of our health care. London: Verso 2004
Hardback: £15
ISBN: 1 84467 011 2

To order your copy for £12 (plus postage) please contact direct sales at:

Marston Book Services
Unit 160
Milton Park
Abingdon
Oxon OX14 4SD

Tel +44 (0)1235 465 500
Fax +44(0)1235 465 555
direct.orders@marston.co.uk

Please quote the reference PPPOL in order to receive the discounted price.Payment is accepted by credit card, switch, international money order or cheque drawn on a UK bank account.
Please note payment must be in pounds sterling.

Dirigo Health: Don't compound the illness

Dirigo Health: Don’t compound the illness
By Kent Price

WALDO COUNTY (Aug 29, 2004): Last week’s Citizen reported that as many as 3,500 of Maine’s hospital jobs may be at risk under cost-cutting ideas being considered by the Commission to Study Maine Hospitals, part of the Dirigo Health plan soon to be under way. Asked to comment on this prospect, Mark Biscone is not at a loss for words: “Devastating, outrageous and horrible,” are just a few.

Biscone, CEO of Waldo County General Hospital, is not crying wolf. The hospital has cut services, reduced positions, and is among the state’s most-efficient facilities. Yet, if the proposed reductions are approved, the hospital may have to trim an additional 40 to 50 positions, directly affecting patient care services.

Are across-the-board cuts appropriate for all Maine hospitals? Does one size fit all? Does community need diminish along with position cuts, or is the opposite more likely? The very fact that such a high degree of controversy exists suggests that, as the movie line has it, we have here a failure to communicate. State health policymakers need to collaborate closely with those most directly affected by their decisions.

Still, few would deny that a health care crisis exists and that Dirigo Health is a bold and positive bid to insure the uninsured, reduce costs for both individuals and small businesses and boost preventative programs. It is a Maine original — unique in the nation — and other states are looking at us closely. Dirigo means “I lead” and we are doing just that.

But if Dirigo is pioneering, it also may be only a step in the right direction. In what might be called consumer-owned medicine, national health insurance would take high-profit insurance companies out of the health-care equation while extending coverage to the tens of millions of Americans who lack it.

A year ago, in August 2003, nearly 8,000 physicians, including two former U.S. Surgeons General and hundreds of medical school deans and professors, proposed a plan for national health insurance. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, they said a national single-payer plan not only is the best way to deal with our mounting health-care crisis, it is the only way.

National health insurance is not pie in the sky. Every other industrialized nation in the world takes care of its people in this way. Only in the U.S., and only because of an accident of history, are employers the primary providers of health insurance. It makes little sense, and the whole system now is breaking down under soaring costs and lack of coverage. Neither our health nor our wallets can afford it anymore.

It may well be years before the U.S. joins the rest of the world in guaranteeing basic health care to all our citizens. In the meantime, let’s be sure not to make a bad problem worse by cutting needed community services. After all, the Hippocratic oath taken by physicians provides that, “First, do no harm.”

Kent Price is a Democratic candidate for Maine House District 41, which includes Searsport, Frankfort, Stockton Springs, Prospect, Verona Island and Orland.

Dirigo Health: Don’t compound the illness

Dirigo Health: Don’t compound the illness
By Kent Price

WALDO COUNTY (Aug 29, 2004): Last week’s Citizen reported that as many as 3,500 of Maine’s hospital jobs may be at risk under cost-cutting ideas being considered by the Commission to Study Maine Hospitals, part of the Dirigo Health plan soon to be under way. Asked to comment on this prospect, Mark Biscone is not at a loss for words: “Devastating, outrageous and horrible,” are just a few.

Biscone, CEO of Waldo County General Hospital, is not crying wolf. The hospital has cut services, reduced positions, and is among the state’s most-efficient facilities. Yet, if the proposed reductions are approved, the hospital may have to trim an additional 40 to 50 positions, directly affecting patient care services.

Are across-the-board cuts appropriate for all Maine hospitals? Does one size fit all? Does community need diminish along with position cuts, or is the opposite more likely? The very fact that such a high degree of controversy exists suggests that, as the movie line has it, we have here a failure to communicate. State health policymakers need to collaborate closely with those most directly affected by their decisions.

Still, few would deny that a health care crisis exists and that Dirigo Health is a bold and positive bid to insure the uninsured, reduce costs for both individuals and small businesses and boost preventative programs. It is a Maine original — unique in the nation — and other states are looking at us closely. Dirigo means “I lead” and we are doing just that.

But if Dirigo is pioneering, it also may be only a step in the right direction. In what might be called consumer-owned medicine, national health insurance would take high-profit insurance companies out of the health-care equation while extending coverage to the tens of millions of Americans who lack it.

A year ago, in August 2003, nearly 8,000 physicians, including two former U.S. Surgeons General and hundreds of medical school deans and professors, proposed a plan for national health insurance. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, they said a national single-payer plan not only is the best way to deal with our mounting health-care crisis, it is the only way.

National health insurance is not pie in the sky. Every other industrialized nation in the world takes care of its people in this way. Only in the U.S., and only because of an accident of history, are employers the primary providers of health insurance. It makes little sense, and the whole system now is breaking down under soaring costs and lack of coverage. Neither our health nor our wallets can afford it anymore.

It may well be years before the U.S. joins the rest of the world in guaranteeing basic health care to all our citizens. In the meantime, let’s be sure not to make a bad problem worse by cutting needed community services. After all, the Hippocratic oath taken by physicians provides that, “First, do no harm.”

Kent Price is a Democratic candidate for Maine House District 41, which includes Searsport, Frankfort, Stockton Springs, Prospect, Verona Island and Orland.

Universal health insurance and socioeconomic disparities in health

National Bureau of Economic Research
August 2004
How Much Might Universal Health Insurance Reduce Socioeconomic Disparities
in Health? A Comparison of the US and Canada
By Sandra L. Decker and Dahlia K. Remler

Abstract

A strong association between lower socioeconomic status (SES) and worse health– the SES-health gradient– has been documented in many countries, but little work has compared the size of the gradient across countries. We compare the size of the income gradient in self-reported health in the US and Canada. We find that being below median income raises the likelihood that a middle aged person is in poor or fair health by about 15 percentage points in the U.S., compared to less than 8 percentage points in Canada. We also find that the 7 percentage point gradient difference between the two countries is reduced by about 4 percentage points after age 65, the age at which the virtually all U.S. citizens receive basic health insurance through Medicare. Income disparities in the probability that an individual lacks a usual source of care are also significantly larger in the US than in Canada before the age of 65, but about the same after 65. Our results are therefore consistent with the availability of universal health insurance in the U.S, or at least some other difference that occurs around the age of 65 in one country but not the other, narrowing SES differences in health between the US and Canada.

From the Conclusions and Discussion

While we cannot definitively say that universal health insurance causes all of the 4 percentage point gap shrinkage at age 65, our results, particularly our access results, are consistent with such a causal role. More work comparing adients and their variation with age across countries whose institutions differ can further help disentangle the causes of the gradient. Once the causes of the gradient are understood, policies can be more effectively targeted. In particular, we could learn just how much inequality reduction universal health insurance would buy us in the US. Although far from definitive, our present results suggest that it might buy us quite a bit.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/W10715 (copyright by the authors)

Comment: This important paper confirms the correlation between universal health insurance and lower socioeconomic disparities in health, even though
a causal relationship has not been irrefutably established. But what else might explain why, in the United States, at age 65 when Medicare coverage begins, there is a dramatic reduction in socioeconomic health disparities? Might it be because our fragmented system of funding care eliminates some of the infirm by age 65?

I’m betting on the fact that national health insurance does, in fact, actually reduce socioeconomic disparities in health. Regardless, because of the positive correlation we don’t need to wait for more studies. The cumulative body of health policy literature confirms that the benefits of universal health insurance vastly outweigh the negligible disadvantages. Failure to proceed with reform now would constitute an egregious ethical lapse on the part of our policymakers.

Leadership of the right sort

David Broder of the Washington Post has been observing and reporting on the
political process for a very long time. During a live, online discussion held on September 2, 2004, David Broder responded to my question as follows:

San Juan Capistrano, Calif.: Is there any hope at all that, after the election, the strong partisan divide can be tempered and we can move forward with addressing the real issues such as the tragedy of the uninsured?

David S. Broder: There is some hope, but as long as the parties remain almost even in strength, the temptation will continue to ask, about every issue, “Does it help us or them?” Leadership of the right sort can set a tone and make a difference, but it is the severe competitiveness of the current situation that inflames the animosity.

http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/04/broder090204.htm

The New York Times
September 2, 2004
Full Text of President Bush’s Remarks

“Many of our most fundamental systems – the tax code, health coverage, pension plans, worker training – were created for the world of yesterday, not tomorrow. We will transform these systems so that all citizens are equipped, prepared and thus truly free to make your own choices and pursue your own dreams.”

Comment: Apparently President Bush wants to sever the umbilical cord of solidarity. Is that the “leadership of the right sort” that we are seeking?

Prof. Kahn on cost estimates of HSAs

Prof. Kahn on cost estimates of HSAs

Response to yesterday’s message that included calculations of a hypothetical
example of how Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) might impact health care spending:

James G. Kahn, M.D., M.P.H., Professor of Health Policy & Epidemiology, Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California San Francisco:

I really like the approach to estimating the ridiculous cost of the health savings accounts . Really drives home how it’s actually a mechanism to force costs onto sick people who don’t have the money to afford it. A few from-the-hip technical comments:

— The scale of these effects may be much smaller — if people currently in public programs largely stay in public programs and thus are unaffected by this restructuring of private insurance markets, and their costs don’t need to be covered by the catastrophic plans.

— The low medical cost load on HSAs may be somewhat mitigated: If individuals in public programs constitute the sickest / most expensive individuals (certainly true for Medicare), then the skew that drives your analysis may be much less for the population that remains and would be affected by SAs.

These two points emphasize the importance to us of keeping people in public programs, where they’re not subject to the problems you so aptly describe, and are supported relatively efficiently via tax revenues (which remain ever so lightly progressive at least for Medicaid).

— Finally, arguably, money placed in HSAs and not used for medical care shouldn’t count in the health care spending total. It’ll be spent on a broad mix of consumption and savings (for the rich healthy people who get it). — The incentives to get care will drive down utilization and costs (for those who are poorest and sickest).

So, if I’m right on these points, HSAs may waste only billions or tens of billions, not hundreds of billions. They would represent, essentially, an odious transformation — from health from the poor and sick, into wealth for the rich and healthy. Stunningly cynical and extortionate. Compassionate conservatism indeed.

Don McCanne’s response:

Jim is absolutely correct on all of his points. In fact, as I composed the Quote of the Day message, I thought that we really need a full paper on this concept. But I wanted to keep the message relatively brief. Some of the conservatives have suggested that the poor would benefit by HSAs and perhaps we could get rid of Medicaid. And then the supporters of Medicare privatization have suggested that high deductible coverage (with HSAs) would be the preferred substitution for the government-run Medicare program. So I lumped everyone in together for the analysis to demonstrate how flawed the general concept is. Excluding groups such as those in Medicaid and in the traditional Medicare program changes the numbers, but it does not change the principle that this is clearly a flawed concept.

There are other issues that I didn’t cover. HSA advocates contend that health costs would be reduced because people would not want to spend their own money on “unnecessary” care. But I decided that this would be roughly offset by the increased use by those currently uninsured who would then gain access to care.

I didn’t mention the fact that the $5000 accounts may not be actual accounts
but might be only accounting entities. Perhaps $3000 would be the limit permitted to fund the accounts and then a $5000 deductible required to be sure that the patient remained sensitive to costs. For others there may be no account but rather only a $5000 deductible that must be met out-of-pocket. But whether it’s money in an HSA account or money that the patient is responsible for but was never spent because of lack of need, from a policy perspective it’s still $5000 that each person is responsible for up front until insurance becomes available. On the health care balance sheet, the $5000 per person would appear as a liability and it would be only partially offset with the unspent mount appearing as an asset.

Also, in making the point that, for the healthy, HSAs are savings accounts that can be used in retirement, I did not emphasize that these are retirement funds that are at risk in the event of unanticipated major medical expenses. It is terrible policy to require the 30% or so with major medical needs to pay for their health care out of what they thought would be their retirement funds.

The first lesson, as I see it, is that would should recognize the flawed policies of the HSA model. HSAs attempt to address two issues, paying for health care and funding retirement, and yet they threaten affordability for care for those with greater needs, and they increase uncertainty in retirement planning. The second and perhaps more crucial point that Jim emphasizes is that we must make every effort to protect Medicare and Medicaid until they can be replaced with an even better program that includes all of us.

Graham Walker's animated message on single payer

Graham Walker’s animated message on single payer

Single payer advocates sometimes have difficulty understanding why there
isn’t a groundswell of support for the single payer model of reform since its superiority as a method of funding health care is so clear (to us). But actually the model is fairly complex and not well understood by the majority of citizens. A brief explanation tends to be dismissed with the meme by which we have been thoroughly indoctrinated that “the government can’t do anything right.”

Graham Walker is a medical student at Stanford University and a former staff member of Physicians for a National Health Program. To no surprise, he found
that it was difficult to deliver a simple message on single payer that would
stimulate an inquisitive mind to investigate the model further. He then went
to work on creating a message that would be directed to a broad spectrum of
relatively uninformed individuals. He was especially interested in creating rhetoric that would connect with young adults who have been saturated with
the message that Social Security and Medicare will not be there when you need it (essentially the same message that is being presented this week by President Bush when he discusses the “ownership society”). Graham uses the analogy of funding “Prom Night” as an example that might resonate with a younger audience.

Graham has created an animated explanation of single payer targeted to the
larger audience that does not have a sophisticated understanding of health policy. You should view this five minute animation since you will probably find it very useful in your advocacy work. It is particularly suited to distribution over the Internet through an e-mail link that Graham has provided.

For the animation:
http://www.grahamazon.com/sp/whatissinglepayer.php

For a written explanation of single payer (The animation can be accessed on
this page by clicking “”animated version” near the top.): http://www.grahamazon.com/sp/

If you don’t have five minutes now, retain this message so that you can
view the animation during a break. I suspect that you’ll agree that we should
share this with as many people as possible (but avoid spamming those who
wouldn’t be interested).

Time to Level the Playing Field for American Business: The One-Payer Advantage

By Ron Cohen, special to Workday Minnesota – September 1, 2004

ST. PAUL – Employers will reduce or eliminate drug coverage for 3.8 million retirees when the new Medicare prescription drug benefit starts in 2006, according to one U.S. government estimate. This will happen despite the fact companies – and supposedly even unions which offer prescription drug coverage – are eligible for $71 billion in federal subsidies between 2006 to 2012. But payment requires they offer substantially the same inadequate drug benefits specified in the new Medicare law.

However, it is a mistake to blame the new law for the continuing sharp decline in retiree health coverage. Employers already are slashing retiree health benefits. Goaded by rapid increases in medical costs, employers also shift premium hikes to their current workforce, increase their co-payments and drop some benefits.

Between 1993 and 2001, firms with 500 or more workers reduced health coverage for early retirees from 46% to 29% and for Medicare eligible retirees from 40% to 23%, the Washington Post reported. The AFL-CIO stresses that employers with 200 or more workers who offer retiree health care fell from 66% in 1988 to 38% in 2003.

The extra pressure on private business came in 1990 when a law was changed to include immediate accounting of future health care costs in publicly held corporate balance sheets.

This year that accounting standard was extended to state and local governments who now will be required to estimate the full cost of health benefits promised to future retirees. This will generate intense pressure to reduce liabilities by scaling back or eliminating future retiree benefits or shifting costs to public employees, including teachers.

Handwriting On The Wall

Look at the cold hard facts. Larger established firms, both union and non-union, have so-called “legacy costs”, long established pensions and retiree health benefits. Estimates are that the price of every truck and car built by General Motors last year included $1,900 in pension and retiree health benefits, up from $1,300 the previous year. The newer auto transplant companies in the U.S. have no such comparable costs.

Major airlines, like Northwest, with long-standing pensions and health benefits are reeling under price wars with low-fare start up airlines without these costs. Steelworkers found how hollow claims are for pensions and retiree health benefits promised by firms that no longer exist or file for bankruptcy to shed a union contract.

The Foreign Competitive Advantage

Worse yet is the situation regarding competition from foreign firms! Canadian, Japanese and European companies have the competitive advantage of government-paid health and/or pension systems. Even China provides manufacturing workers with health care and lodging, a holdover from pure communism.

When the nation’s governors met this spring, they heard testimony that U.S. workers had average benefit costs amounting to $5.50 an hour—before wage rates are even considered. How can American companies compete? Governors asked. Apparently, the corporate answer is to outsource white-collar jobs along with blue-collar work.

A recent article in the New York Times warns the Chinese have excess capacity in nine key manufacturing categories. Since President Bush took office in 2001, America has lost 2.6 million manufacturing jobs. The U.S. trade deficit runs a staggering $600 billion a year, Bush’s new record.

Against this background, it makes no economic sense for the United States to fragment health care among a hodgepodge of systems with separate administrative structures and regulations: Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, the Defense Department, the Federal Employees Plan, Federal-State programs to cover children, a flock of state and local government employee plans and finally private insurance plans often top-heavy with administrative costs. Add to this 44 million persons without health insurance who seek treatment at expensive hospital emergency rooms often with costs left for hospitals and local governments to pay. What a tangled mess! Clearly we lack a rational, cost effective health care system.

The One-Payer Necessity

Health care in the richest nation on earth is broken. It is obvious the United States needs one-payer, national health insurance to level the playing field for all employers and employees!

Bush now offers $9 billion a year in new tax incentives for individuals who set up Health Savings Accounts. This is on top of his enacted tax cuts: 36 percent gone into the pockets of the richest one percent of Americans with average incomes of $1.2 million, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Brace yourselves for what was by far the worst feature of the new Medicare law — a section that doesn’t apply to retirees 65 and older — the creation of tax-free Health Savings Accounts. You qualify for up to a $5,150 a year tax deduction if you’re covered by a catastrophic health plan with at least a $1,000 deductible for an individual, $2,000 for a family. The larger the deductible, the lower the employer’s cost.

Brothers and sisters, this is not the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent. This is the whole animal in your tent chewing its cud. It’s the ultimate conservative fantasy, the richer you are, the bigger the tax break. And naturally employers would love to shuck ever-costlier comprehensive health benefits in favor of cheap catastrophic plans that appeal to the wealthy and the healthy. Non-union employers will flock to this option leaving unionized employers exposed to devastating cost competition!

According to Business Week, May 24, 2004, “Conservatives would require workers to pay taxes on some of the value of employer-provided insurance but give them tax breaks for buying insurance on their own. That’s a far more controversial step than Bush is likely to propose in a tight re-election campaign.” Be warned this is what the President means when he talks about giving workers and their families “ownership” of health care in America: you’re on your own. Also never forget, if re-elected, Bush is on record to compel future retirees to “own” their Social Security Accounts and play the yo-yo stock market.

As President Bush proclaimed on a recent campaign stop, “I need four more years to complete the work.”

This is the reason to vote Nov. 2 for John Kerry, the AFL-CIO’s endorsed candidate for president. It’s up to each of us to mobilize current and retired union members, family and friends to block a second term for Bush and his risky privatization schemes.

This commentary is reprinted from “Gopher Retiree”, the newsletter of the Minnesota State Retiree Council, AFL-CIO. Last month, the Minnesota AFL-CIO convention adopted a resolution sponsored by the Retirees Council, “supporting a not-for-profit, single-payer, national health care plan for all Americans.”

Graham Walker’s animated message on single payer

Graham Walker’s animated message on single payer

Single payer advocates sometimes have difficulty understanding why there
isn’t a groundswell of support for the single payer model of reform since its superiority as a method of funding health care is so clear (to us). But actually the model is fairly complex and not well understood by the majority of citizens. A brief explanation tends to be dismissed with the meme by which we have been thoroughly indoctrinated that “the government can’t do anything right.”

Graham Walker is a medical student at Stanford University and a former staff member of Physicians for a National Health Program. To no surprise, he found
that it was difficult to deliver a simple message on single payer that would
stimulate an inquisitive mind to investigate the model further. He then went
to work on creating a message that would be directed to a broad spectrum of
relatively uninformed individuals. He was especially interested in creating rhetoric that would connect with young adults who have been saturated with
the message that Social Security and Medicare will not be there when you need it (essentially the same message that is being presented this week by President Bush when he discusses the “ownership society”). Graham uses the analogy of funding “Prom Night” as an example that might resonate with a younger audience.

Graham has created an animated explanation of single payer targeted to the
larger audience that does not have a sophisticated understanding of health policy. You should view this five minute animation since you will probably find it very useful in your advocacy work. It is particularly suited to distribution over the Internet through an e-mail link that Graham has provided.

For the animation:
http://www.grahamazon.com/sp/whatissinglepayer.php

For a written explanation of single payer (The animation can be accessed on
this page by clicking “”animated version” near the top.): http://www.grahamazon.com/sp/

If you don’t have five minutes now, retain this message so that you can
view the animation during a break. I suspect that you’ll agree that we should
share this with as many people as possible (but avoid spamming those who
wouldn’t be interested).

Sen. Frist's compassion for empowered patients

The New York Times
August 31, 2004
Full Text of the Remarks of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist

This victory for our Party (2003 Medicare legislation)– and above all for Seniors — is part of a larger battle we’re fighting on behalf of every American. How we do so is crucial. Our opponents have a way of confusing compassion with dependency. We believe true compassion encourages and empowers Americans to be responsible and take control of their own lives.

That’s what President Bush and the Republican Congress did when we made Health Savings Accounts — HSAs — the law of the land. With an HSA you can
invest tax-free in a personal savings account. You can roll it over year to year or withdraw funds if you get sick … without paying a penny of tax. YOU own it. YOU invest it. YOU grow it. YOU control it. It is YOURS.

So here’s the choice: do we grow the bureaucracy and gouge you with higher
taxes, as Mr. Kerry will do? Or, do we let the American people grow their own HSAs and own their health care, as George Bush wants to do? We’ve made
our choice.

Comment: My comments here are about policy. They are partisan only in the
respect that politicians have staked out their policy positions, as they clearly should. The democratic process is at its best when we vote based on an understanding of the policy stances of the candidates.

Tomorrow evening, President Bush will advocate for the “ownership society.” This concept supports individual responsibility and opposes dependency. In his speech, Sen. Frist quite explicitly expresses the view that Americans should take responsibility for their own health care through mechanisms such as Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), while avoiding dependency on others. Quite implicit in this is the fact that funding for health care should come primarily from an individual’s own funds rather than from a pool of funds to which everyone contributes, whether that be private insurance or a public program such as Medicare.

What would happen if each American funded a separate account for his or her
own health care? About 70% of our population uses only about 10% of the health care delivered in this nation. The other 30% utilizes 90% of the care
(5% utilize over half of all care). If you split up the risk pool into individual accounts then 10% of care will be funded by 70% of the population, whereas 90% of health care costs would be funded by the other 30%. For that 30%, that would average over $18,000 per individual per year (90% of the $1.79 trillion 2004 health expenditure divided by 30% of 290 million population). Conversely, for the healthy 70%, their annual contribution would average less than $900. This does not include the consideration that there would be winners and losers within each group, depending on amount of need. Clearly most individuals with significant health care needs could not afford to fund personal accounts that would be adequate for their needs.

To be realistic, the Republican leadership does not entirely dismiss dependency on others in that they recognize the necessity of high deductible (catastrophic) insurance to cover those who do have major losses. But how well would that work? They claim that catastrophic plans are very affordable and they prove this by citing the premium for healthy young individuals with no preexisting disorders which may be about $1000/year. But what would the premium actually be? Let’s say that we ask each individual to place $5000 in an individual account (though a mechanism would need to be in place to fund the accounts of those with no disposable income). You have now pulled $1.45 trillion out of the contribution to the risk pool ($5000 times 290 million population), leaving $340 billion ($1.79 trillion minus 1.45 trillion) to fund the $1.18 trillion worth of care (an amount that we are already spending) that would fall under the catastrophic coverage for the 30% with needs (90% of $1.79 trillion less the $5000 times 30% of the 290 million population that is the patients’ share of the contribution from their own accounts). That “low cost” high deductible plan actually would cost $4000 per each man, woman and child. Add that to the $5000 for each and
suddenly protection from financial loss costs close to $9000 per capita or
$36,000 for a family of four! That $9000 per capita adds up to a national health
care bill of $2.6 trillion ($9000 times 290 million population) rather than the $1.79 trillion we are currently paying. That extra $800 billion exposes the fraud behind the concept of individual accounts. Those extra funds are inequitable, regressively funded personal savings – nothing more, nothing less.

Perhaps high deductible insurance doesn’t really fit in with the ownership society, and we should just allow those with health care needs to do the best that they can. We can provide them with compassion as they struggle with their needs. Or maybe, just maybe, we should accept the concept that we need to take care of those with needs by paying for their care out of a pool that we all fund on an equitable basis.

Naw… those with needs would be abandoning their personal responsibility to
take care of themselves and their loved ones, and really wouldn’t be worthy of our compassion. I’ve “confused compassion with dependency,” and Dr. Frist
understands the difference.