Rose Ann DeMoro
TomPaine.com
January 16, 2007

Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of the California Nurses Association.

Sparked by the embarrassment of nearly 47 million uninsured Americans and, more notably, the growing agony of even large business that are staggering under intolerable premium costs, our long national health care scandal is finally beginning to prod our political leaders into action.

Unfortunately, many of the proposals being promoted with such fanfare may well exacerbate the crisis and simply prolong the disgrace.

The latest example comes from California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has pledged to achieve “universal” coverage for all the state’s residents with a smorgasbord of every scheme floating around the national policy debate–with the exception of the only one that would actually work: some form of a national health care program or single-payer system, the course taken by every other industrialized country.

Like the Massachusetts law before it, on which it is largely modeled, the Schwarzenegger plan has produced fawning editorials across the country and calls from some politicians in state capitals and on Capitol Hill to use it as a blueprint for other states and Washington.

It has as its centerpiece a mandate forcing every individual buy health insurance or face penalties, along with state subsidies for the low income to buy insurance, a limited tax on businesses who fail to provide health benefits and promotion of health savings accounts.

All the components have a common theme: reinforcement and expansion of the role of the market in health care, the very same market that created the current mess by placing the pursuit of increased revenues and profits ahead of increased access, affordable care and enhanced quality.

Nothing better symbolizes the ascendancy of the market than the mandate on individuals to buy insurance. It stands the central premise of health care on its head–to help people, not to criminalize them. And the Schwarzenegger plan goes beyond Massachusetts, which simply sets tax penalties, by proposing that health insurance become a pre-requisite to getting a job or enrolling your children in school.

Individual mandates shift all the risk from insurers or government onto the back of individuals. Neither the Massachusetts nor the California plan includes limits on premiums or standards to assure the plans have comprehensive or uniform benefits.

With ever-escalating premiums, it’s a safe bet that the average family not eligible for the low-income subsidies will opt for the bare bones plan which, Schwarzenegger has recommended, would specify deductibles of up to $10,000.

Most would thus end up paying for most, if not all, of the health care services they actually use, in addition to the premiums the law would force them to buy. Further, many would simply gamble with their health by limiting medical visits and the prevention that is critical to reducing greater pain and suffering and higher overall healthcare costs down the road.

Someone is making a killing here, and you probably guessed who: California insurers would reap hundreds of millions in profits from the 6.5 million new customers marched into their offices at gunpoint by the state. No wonder Blue Shield of California CEO Bruce Bodaken says of the plan, “There’s a lot to like.”

It reflects a neoconservative political ideology that individuals are solely responsible for their health status, ignoring corporate and commercial factors, from cancer-causing pollution to contaminated agriculture to fast food.

California’s model also undermines the social structure of pooled insurance–that healthier and younger individuals help pay the health costs for the less healthy through collective insurance pools. These would ultimately help everyone who will eventually need coverage, while reducing overall health care costs that mount when large numbers don’t have or don’t use health services.

Another stellar example of that free market fundamentalist philosophy is health savings accounts, a side product of the Bush administration’s 2003 Medicare drug benefit fiasco.

HSAs are tax-free savings accounts to be used solely for out-of-pocket medical expenses, typically used in combination with a low-cost, high deductible catastrophic health insurance plan, in most cases offered by an employer as a cheaper alternative to the health benefits they currently provide. Like the Bush tax cuts, they ultimately look like another tax break for the wealthy.

HSAs bear strong similarities to individual mandates in encouraging the user to play Russian roulette with their health and discouraging the use of preventive care–hence the euphemism “consumer-driven care,” which could also be termed “lack of meaningful insurance” or “no care.”

And, like individual mandates, HSAs do nothing to control rising costs or to reduce administrative waste. In fact, HSAs add a new layer of bureaucracy and profit to yet another well-heeled industry that will of course operate and manage the accounts–the financiers. The banks are scrambling to get into this booming new market and expecting $20 billion in HSA accounts by 2010.

There’s a better way. The opportunity has never been greater to mount a national campaign for real reform for a single payer system, as is embodied in H.R. 676 in Congress or S.B. 840 in California.

Single-payer plans, like Medicare, have everything the market-based plans lack:

Americans will be covered with one high standard of benefits and care–as opposed to good care for the wealthy only–and portable. They assure choice of physician and other providers. By removing financial roadblocks to care, they emphasize prevention.

Single-payer plans reduce administrative waste (about three percent in Medicare, vs. over 30 percent with most private insurance), thus producing cost savings. They allow for common sense budgeting in which care, not profit is the primary focus, and they end the disgraceful insurance industry interference with care. And, they are accountable through public oversight.

H.R. 676, introduced by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., now has 78 congressional co-sponsors, and should get a hearing in the new Congress. California’s SB 840 was vetoed by Schwarzenegger last fall but will be re-introduced.

It’s time we joined the rest of the world in achieving this basic humanitarian right.

By Joe Conason
Salon.com
Jan. 12, 2007

Sometime during the hours before the advent of the new year, alone in a modest apartment in Arlington, Va., a woman named Maria Leavey died of heart failure. Had she lived until the morning of Jan. 1, 2007, she would have been able to celebrate her 53rd birthday.

Though very few of those now reading this column have ever heard of her, Maria was a highly effective advocate of progressive causes, a consultant and confidant to important Democratic political leaders, and an encouraging mentor to many young activists and writers on the left. Over the past two weeks, on the Huffington Post and many other sites small and large in the progressive blogosphere, as well as on private e-mail lists, her mourning admirers and acquaintances have poured out memories of an extraordinary person who really cared more about social progress than personal ambition.

An old joke about left-wingers is that they love humankind with all their hearts but just don’t like people all that much. Maria confounded that stereotype with startling acts of kindness to people she had never even met. Born in Pisa, Italy, where her father was then stationed in the U.S. Army, and raised in an Irish Catholic clan in Queens, N.Y., she was old-fashioned in the best sense. She baked cookies, worried a lot about other people, and was appalled by the crass and the selfish.

In those ways, she certainly stood out from the pack of Beltway consultants and other hustlers who make a very good living in the orbit of the Democratic Party. Whip-smart but polite and soft-spoken, she didn’t fit in among the self-important loudmouths who have banked millions of dollars while losing for their clients one election after another.

She would never consider selling her talents to lobby for a tobacco company, a software monopoly, a foreign despot or an insurance corporation, as so many of her “progressive” peers have done to supplement their enormous incomes. (Those tend to be the famous Democratic “strategists” who appear on cable TV.) She preferred to work on her own rather than in a firm or a partnership. She could be quirky and difficult, but she also had enormous integrity.

I know all this because for the past nine years, she was also a good friend of mine.

While Maria led an exemplary life in many respects, however, there is also something to be learned from her early death. As the Washington Post noted in a sensitive obituary on Jan. 6, she managed to connect with important figures on Capitol Hill, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in addition to her media contacts, despite the fact that she “had no money to spread around.” And as the Post obit also mentioned, as someone who worked independently, “she had no health insurance.”

She had no health insurance — which meant that the hereditary heart condition that killed her probably went undiagnosed and untreated. That almost certainly killed her, as the lack of regular care prematurely kills thousands of other Americans every year. And while she was acutely aware of how that problem affected her fellow citizens, and worked hard every day to change that injustice, she was unable, like so many who work freelance and in small business, to help herself.

If her many friends among the great and the good in Congress need any further motivation to fight for universal healthcare, then Maria’s untimely and perhaps unnecessary death should be enough. She had no illusions about the Democrats, but she toiled for years to return them to power in the hope that they would fulfill such promises.

Meanwhile, what happened to her ought to chasten the progressive community, such as it is. She often worked for free — or got stiffed on her very reasonable bills — while the nonprofit executives and politicos who exploited her talents took down big salaries. Laboring behind the scenes, frazzled and distracted by her many commitments, and too proud to complain publicly, she wasn’t very good at fighting on her own behalf.

The larger issue is an enduring mind-set on the left that values programs over people and expects everyone (except the donors and those at the top of the career ladder) to live like monks. This is stupid as well as mean. The irony is that conservative groups, whose leaders are often stereotyped as stingy and heartless, tend to provide far better conditions for their troops than progressive organizations do. The right may or may not have more money, but it has used what it has to provide a living for the people who build its institutions, which have thrived as a result.

Maria deserved much better — and so do the many like her who accept low wages to uphold their ideals. Being able to pay the rent, get health insurance and even take a vacation would not corrupt them.

By TERRY HAVENER
The Tribune-Democrat
January 16, 2007

As a citizen of this great nation, my health care should not be a privilege. It should be a right — not a handout but a true entitlement.

And not something I either pay for or beg for, but a given, no-questions-asked guarantee.

The time for national health care is now.

The United States is the only developed, industrialized country that does not provide national health care to its citizens.

Employment-related health care, where a person’s well-being is negotiated along with his or her wages, is becoming a casualty of a global market system that pits American workers against workers in third-world countries.

The current high cost of health care, when linked to global competitiveness, can be a deciding factor in the winning or losing of business opportunities.

More and more, companies are forcing employees to assume the cost of health care. Insurance co-pays and deductibles diminish the worth of workers’ paychecks, and are growing faster than most salaries or cost-of-living increases.

Many union-run health plans are being bankrupted or are being forced to restrict or eliminate coverage.

Meanwhile, the business of health care has become just that — big business. The cost of an individual’s health is based on profit margins, country-club memberships and the price of the most recent trendy luxury car.

Dr. Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer with the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, said, “The underlying problem is that we treat health care like a market commodity instead of a social service.

“Health care is targeted not to medical need, but to the ability to pay. Markets are good for many things, but they are not a good way to distribute health care.”

Legislation proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives, HR 676, would establish a national health plan for all Americans — a Medicare- for-all type plan. Sponsored by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), it now has 77 co-sponsors.

According to the All Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care, based in Louisville, Ky., HR 676 has been endorsed by 192 union organizations, including 44 central labor councils and area labor federations, and 12 state AFL-CIOs , including Pennsylvania.

HR 676 is also endorsed by Physicians for a National Health Program. PNHP is a single-issue organization with more than 14,000 members. It advocates a universal, comprehensive, single-payer national health program.

So unless you are completely satisfied with your health-care plan and its delivery system, get involved.

Voice your concerns to your legislator and urge him or her to sign on to HR 676.

The health of our nation is too important for anyone to stand on the sidelines.

By Joe Conason
Salon.com
Jan. 12, 2007

Sometime during the hours before the advent of the new year, alone in a modest apartment in Arlington, Va., a woman named Maria Leavey died of heart failure. Had she lived until the morning of Jan. 1, 2007, she would have been able to celebrate her 53rd birthday.

Though very few of those now reading this column have ever heard of her, Maria was a highly effective advocate of progressive causes, a consultant and confidant to important Democratic political leaders, and an encouraging mentor to many young activists and writers on the left. Over the past two weeks, on the Huffington Post and many other sites small and large in the progressive blogosphere, as well as on private e-mail lists, her mourning admirers and acquaintances have poured out memories of an extraordinary person who really cared more about social progress than personal ambition.

An old joke about left-wingers is that they love humankind with all their hearts but just don’t like people all that much. Maria confounded that stereotype with startling acts of kindness to people she had never even met. Born in Pisa, Italy, where her father was then stationed in the U.S. Army, and raised in an Irish Catholic clan in Queens, N.Y., she was old-fashioned in the best sense. She baked cookies, worried a lot about other people, and was appalled by the crass and the selfish.

In those ways, she certainly stood out from the pack of Beltway consultants and other hustlers who make a very good living in the orbit of the Democratic Party. Whip-smart but polite and soft-spoken, she didn’t fit in among the self-important loudmouths who have banked millions of dollars while losing for their clients one election after another.

She would never consider selling her talents to lobby for a tobacco company, a software monopoly, a foreign despot or an insurance corporation, as so many of her “progressive” peers have done to supplement their enormous incomes. (Those tend to be the famous Democratic “strategists” who appear on cable TV.) She preferred to work on her own rather than in a firm or a partnership. She could be quirky and difficult, but she also had enormous integrity.

I know all this because for the past nine years, she was also a good friend of mine.

While Maria led an exemplary life in many respects, however, there is also something to be learned from her early death. As the Washington Post noted in a sensitive obituary on Jan. 6, she managed to connect with important figures on Capitol Hill, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in addition to her media contacts, despite the fact that she “had no money to spread around.” And as the Post obit also mentioned, as someone who worked independently, “she had no health insurance.”

She had no health insurance — which meant that the hereditary heart condition that killed her probably went undiagnosed and untreated. That almost certainly killed her, as the lack of regular care prematurely kills thousands of other Americans every year. And while she was acutely aware of how that problem affected her fellow citizens, and worked hard every day to change that injustice, she was unable, like so many who work freelance and in small business, to help herself.

If her many friends among the great and the good in Congress need any further motivation to fight for universal healthcare, then Maria’s untimely and perhaps unnecessary death should be enough. She had no illusions about the Democrats, but she toiled for years to return them to power in the hope that they would fulfill such promises.

Meanwhile, what happened to her ought to chasten the progressive community, such as it is. She often worked for free — or got stiffed on her very reasonable bills — while the nonprofit executives and politicos who exploited her talents took down big salaries. Laboring behind the scenes, frazzled and distracted by her many commitments, and too proud to complain publicly, she wasn’t very good at fighting on her own behalf.

The larger issue is an enduring mind-set on the left that values programs over people and expects everyone (except the donors and those at the top of the career ladder) to live like monks. This is stupid as well as mean. The irony is that conservative groups, whose leaders are often stereotyped as stingy and heartless, tend to provide far better conditions for their troops than progressive organizations do. The right may or may not have more money, but it has used what it has to provide a living for the people who build its institutions, which have thrived as a result.

Maria deserved much better — and so do the many like her who accept low wages to uphold their ideals. Being able to pay the rent, get health insurance and even take a vacation would not corrupt them.

AFL-CIO Touts Single-Payer System

By JANICE PODSADA
Hartford Courant Staff Writer
January 13, 2007

The Connecticut AFL-CIO launched its lobbying effort Friday for a single-payer system for universal health care, which the labor group said would provide affordable health care to the 300,000 to 400,000 state residents currently without health coverage.

The AFL-CIO touted its plan as an enlightened alternative to the business-backed plan put forward by the Connecticut Health Insurance Policy Council earlier this week. Gov. M. Jodi Rell has also proposed a plan.

The single-payer system, the centerpiece of the AFL-CIO’s 2007 state legislative agenda, bucks a trend in Connecticut and other states in which business groups and advocates for broader health coverage have hammered out proposals that would use the state’s collective buying power, often subsidized by taxpayers, to buy health plans from private insurers.

The AFL-CIO plans to release a more detailed version of its single-payer health care plan in a few weeks, said the group’s secretary-treasurer, Lori Pelletier.

Under the AFL-CIO’s universal health care proposal, everyone would pay into a single health care fund – whether it’s a government agency or a trust – that would then pay private doctors and providers. The simple, streamlined system would eliminate the middlemen – insurance companies and their handsomely compensated CEOs – and thereby drastically reduce costs, AFL-CIO said.

“When Aetna and U.S. Healthcare merged several years ago, the CEO received $967 million and a corporate jet – how many MRIs is that?” Pelletier said. She was referring to U.S. Healthcare Inc.’s 1996 merger with Aetna Life & Casualty Co., in which Leonard Abramson, chief executive and founder of Pennsylvania-based U.S. Healthcare, a health maintenance organization company, received more than $967 million in cash, stock and the jet as a result of the $9 billion deal.

With just one organization handling the fund, administrative costs could be kept to about 3 percent, a reasonable goal because Medicare currently operates at 3 percent, she said.

Compare that with the current system, in which 30 percent of health care dollars go for paperwork, profits and other unrelated medical costs, Pelletier said. The insurance industry disputes that figure, putting their administrative costs at about 15 percent.

AFL-CIO leaders, including President John W. Olsen, blasted the business council’s recommendations, describing it as the same old clunker, shored up with a dash of window dressing.

“The business community’s plan is not much more than putting a new set of rims on a 1968 Corolla,” Pelletier said.

Earlier this week, the six-month old council, a coalition of health insurers, business groups and large employers, including United Technologies Corp., rolled out its plan.

Under the council’s plan, the uninsured would be allowed to purchase low-cost policies that would omit some state-mandated insurance benefits, employers would be encouraged to pay at least part of the premiums for part-time and temporary workers, and a new state agency dedicated to improving residents’ health would be established, among other features.

With those radically different plans now on the table, in addition to Rell’s plan, which also relies on private insurance, the legislative debate about health care should grow.

A single-payer system would save everyone money, from government to businesses to workers, Pelletier said.

“The employers’ piece would be half of what it is now,” she said – substantial savings for some small businesses, where as much as 25 percent of the payroll is health care costs. “They could save half,” Pelletier said.

Workers would also have their costs reduced. “An estimated $400 to $800 per year, per insured person, goes toward covering the costs of the uninsured,” Pelletier said.

Patients would be free to decide which doctor or hospital they want to visit. And doctors and medical providers would benefit. Often they can’t afford to hire additional clinical staff because they must first hire the necessary staff to process mountains of insurance forms.

“There are 1,500 national health care plans. Each has a CEO and a vice president. That’s a lot of redundancy,” Pelletier said.

AFL-CIO leaders said the council’s plan wags an accusatory finger at state residents for being “too fat and too lazy” and is a diversionary tactic aimed at glossing over the problems and keeping money flowing into the insurance carriers’ coffers.

A key component of the council’s plan is the creation of a new state agency whose mission would be to improve the health of the state’s residents, reducing health care costs. Employers would be asked to voluntarily weigh in with financial incentives for workers to lose weight, stop smoking and improve their general health.

The AFL-CIO’s 2007 legislative agenda, “A Blueprint for the Future,” focuses on safety, taxes, job creation and retention and the right to organize, Olsen said. Other proposals include a Worker Freedom Act, which would prohibit employers from firing or disciplining workers who don’t attend meetings that have no bearing on work, but are used to promote political or anti-union agendas; a proposal to limit outsourcing, which would require the state to purchase goods and services from Connecticut or American companies; and a tax reform plan to decrease the state’s dependence on the property tax.

Contact Janice Podsada at jpodsada@courant.com.

Malcolm Berko
Copley News Service

Dear Mr. Berko: When you spoke at the fundraiser for our church about the future of our country, you pointedly said that we must have a single-payer health care system. You noted that there are 41 million uninsured in the country who can’t afford health care. You said they must have medical access but (and the following are your words) “the health insurance industry’s intentional high costs exclude them from participation.”

Are you nuts or something? How can you preach such socialistic ideas in a capitalistic society? They would be able to afford health care if they were worth more to their employers so they would be paid better. Do you know how much our leftist government has screwed up our country? And it would do the same without a private health care system if we allowed it to happen.

You have no idea of the wonderful things that health insurance companies like Aetna have done to help Americans. Their contributions to health care are unequaled in any other country in the world. You shouldn’t preach left-wing, pinko communist ideas to people who invite you to their homes. Shame on you.

C.S.
Elkhart, Ind.

Dear C.S.: Why do I suspect that my friend Charming Charlie, the insurance agent from Kokomo asked you to write? And why do I believe that you may be employed by one of the Big Eight (Aetna, Cigna, Coventry, Health Net, Humana, WellPoint, the Blues or United) health companies?

I’m not going to touch your comment about the federal government except to say that the voters are as much to blame as those they elect. My dad, who voted in 19 presidential elections, said, “We get what we pay for.” And your comments about the health care industry’s “wonderful things” are true because no other country in the world allows private industry to make tens of billions of dollars a year from the suffering of its citizens.

I’d like to know why you don’t “gritch” about a $30,444 hospital bill plus $3,882 in medical supplies for an appendectomy patient who had a five-day stay. And how fair is a $7,809 emergency room charge to X-ray and cast a fractured fibula? But I’d really like to know why Aetna and Blue Cross paid those outlandish charges without a peep (but nickel and dime every doctor) using our premium dollars.

There’s the problem: It’s not the doctors nor the government but rather the insurers themselves. Their pockets are so heavily lined with our premium dollars that paying a huge hospital bill is no more meaningful to them than would be the advent of another fly to a slaughterhouse.

Now would you please tell Charming Charlie that last year the Big Eight reported net profits of $19 billion plus free cash flow of $22 billion? Holy moly! That’s $41 billion – easily enough to pay the health care costs for all of those 41 million uninsured. And I think you ought to tell Charming Charlie that the top five officers at each of the Big Eight health insurance companies received $237 million in compensation last year. That’s a shameful use of our premium dollars. Those Big Eight health insurers employ more than 300,000 people, each of whom is paid a salary with benefits averaging $40,000. Well, that number computes to $12 billion and not a penny of that is used for health care. Certainly a shameful use of our premium dollars.

And then there are billions of dollars spent each year for desks, computers, rent, utilities, thousands of tons of paper and millions of paper clips. Those billions are not spent on health care but they are paid with your premium dollars. Can you imagine how many hundreds of thousands of telephones are owned by Aetna, Cigna, United, Health Net, Coventry, WellPoint, Humana and the Blues? Then count the myriad thousands of copy machines, computers, cubicles, pencils, legal pads and so on, all of which are shamefully paid with premium dollars that could be used for medical costs.

Finally, one must count the commissions paid to people like you who sell health insurance policies. It’s estimated that last year the Big Eight paid close to $12 billion in commissions, shamefully using premium dollars that could be used to pay doctors, hospitals, drug companies and other health care providers.

And that’s just the Big Eight. There are countless smaller companies selling health care policies, shamefully skimming billions from your premium dollars. Tell this to Charming Charlie.

So, like it or not, those tens of billions of wasted premium dollars persuasively argue for a single-payer government-controlled health care system. It’s obvious from those wasted billions that health care premiums would be less by half with a single-payer system.

Please address your financial questions to Malcolm Berko, P.O. Box 1416, Boca Raton, FL 33429 or e-mail him at malber@adelphia.net.

Copyright 2007 Copley News Service

Visit Copley News Service at www.copleynews.com.

By Rose Ann DeMoro
Sacramento Bee
Published Saturday, December 30, 2006

As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recovers from his fractured leg, he has access to the finest medical care California has to offer, as he should. But don’t all Californians deserve the same degree of medical attention and health care security?

In a few days, the governor is expected to unveil a sweeping health care proposal, following the leaders of the Senate and Assembly, who already have proposed changes to the state’s dysfunctional system.

Yet for all the talk of a “bipartisan” consensus for reform — following years of inaction despite a worsening crisis — it appears most options being suggested will exacerbate the problem, retard efforts to achieve genuine reform and further enrich the corporate elite in the health care industry who produced the present shambles.

If your head is spinning from reading all the various ideas being thrown around, here’s a CliffsNotes version. Essentially, all the choices can be distilled into two general areas — patient-based reform with public accountability, or market-based approaches.

In the market category fall most of the alternatives being swooned over today by the insurance companies and others invested in pure market-based solutions, the politicians who cater to them and those pundits who counsel us to lower our expectations. Among these proposals are laws to force individuals to purchase their own insurance; starting health savings accounts; and expanded mandates that employers provide benefits for their employees or pay into a pool for coverage for those without insurance.

Their common theme is a reliance on commercial mechanisms that created the present crisis by sacrificing quality, affordability and access for private profit. And all these solutions are doomed to repeat that cycle.

Consider the current fashion of the moment, the Massachusetts model. Every adult in that state is required to buy insurance coverage by July or face penalties. Subsidies are provided for low-income residents.

But the plan has gaping holes. Parents are not obligated to buy insurance for their children. Moderate-income or even middle-income adults who would have to spend hundreds of dollars more each month for full family coverage may choose to gamble with their children’s health or just cut back on other basic needs.

Further, the plans available to middle-income residents typically have deductibles that can run into thousands of dollars. Consumers are likely to foot the bill for many health care services in addition to the premiums the law would require them to pay. And, in the event of a serious illness or accident, they may find their cut-rate plan abandons them to financial ruin.

Consumers are even likely to lose the choice of a physician because they will be forced to pick among the doctors whose services are covered by the low-cost plan they can afford.

The Massachusetts plan is loved by the health care industry because it transfers huge pots of public money to private health care corporations.

Health savings accounts, marketed as “consumer-directed” solutions because they pair a high-deductible plan with a tax-free personal spending account, are similarly catastrophic. HSAs simply shift the cost of coverage from insurers to individuals, promote rationing of care and do nothing to reduce the number of uninsured.

Rather than reduce the bloated 30 percent of every health care dollar spent on administrative overhead and waste, HSAs actually increase administrative costs with servicing fees paid to the financial institutions that are climbing over each other to grab their chunk of this new lucrative market.

By contrast, consider the approach in every other industrialized nation in the world: either a national health system with public administration and public hospitals and clinics, or a single-payer system, with one entity that pays for all health care services with adequate funding to the private caregiver, hospital and clinic of the consumer’s choice.

Poll after poll documents that Americans overwhelmingly support either approach. A single-payer system is not just a dream, it’s legislation — HR 676 in Congress, and a measure in California by Democratic state Sen. Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica, Senate Bill 840, which was vetoed by Schwarzenegger in September. It will be reintroduced in 2007.

While politicians clamor to come up with inferior alternatives, it will be up to all of us to remind them why this country’s inferior market-based plans will simply extend our national disgrace.

About the writer: Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of the California Nurses Association. She can be reached at execoffice@calnurses.org.

By Marcia Angell
Boston Globe
December 31, 2006

IN SEPTEMBER, an ABC News/Kaiser Family Foundation/USA Today survey found that 56 percent of Americans preferred a government-run universal health system “like Medicare” to our current employment-based system run by private insurers. That is, they want a single-payer system. Among the causes of rising costs, respondents were most likely to name private insurance and drug company profits.

If this were a presidential election, it would be a landslide. Yet policy makers and the media dismiss single-payer by telling us the public doesn’t want it. They falsely raise the specter of rationing and restricted choice of doctors. So we end up with schemes like Massachusetts’s squeeze-blood-from-a-turnip health plan, which preserves the insurance industry while requiring individuals to pay most of the costs.

Why is this? The insurance lobby has succeeded not only in blocking single-payer health care, but in keeping it out of public discourse. We are the only advanced country with market-driven private health care. Other countries spend about half as much per person, cover everyone, and get better health results. Shouldn’t this option be on the table?

Marcia Angell, MD, is senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Jonathan Tasini
January 02, 2007

Jonathan Tasini is the the executive director of Labor Research Association. He is returning from a hiatus to write his occasional column for TomPaine.com, “Working in America.” His blog, Working Life, chronicles the labor movement and other issues affecting American workers.

Since I never indulge in New Year’s resolutions, I thought, instead, it would be worth drawing up an economic to-do list for the Democratic leaders. It would be a guidepost for the Congressional leadership, or for presidential-wannabes so that we, the voters, can find out what they stand for besides simply audacity and hope. The lesson from the 2006 election is that people want dramatic change, not poll-tested, cautious half-measures. So, be bold.

The threat to a progressive agenda is not the lack of hugs and soaring rhetoric. Rather, the challenge is pretty clear: Will Democrats be willing to break from the false worship of the twins gods of the so-called “free market” and so-called “free trade”? This worship has made Democrats quiver, tremble and crumble in the face of policies that have been devastating to our country and the world for the past several decades, and made them incapable of advancing ideas and proposals that people so desperately need.

“Free market” and “free trade” are both marketing phrases. There is no such thing as a “free market” because every corporation in America profits thanks to subsidized public goods like education, roads, the electric power grid, and (albeit, too permissive) regulatory management of the stock market, which imposes stability and deters dishonest behavior. So-called “free trade” is a mirage–nothing is free about a global trading regime that has iron-clad protection for capital investment and corporate intellectual property, and thrives on controlling and suppressing wages of workers, particularly in China.

Will Democrats stand up and clearly say that the real choice is not over politically empty slogans or accusations of ‘protectionism’ but over what rules we want to govern how the economy operates for the benefit of our families and communities? Do we want rules that support people and their communities or rules that help powerful, global corporations? Once Democrats do so, the political road is easy because such a plea has broad support across the country, no matter how people define themselves ideologically. It comes down to this: Are you for everyone having health care, a fair wage, solid retirement, and being able to live in a democratic system that allows the people to decide how corporations behave?

Here are three things to do, pronto:

Health Care: A Universal Right–With Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., leading the way, we can expect all sorts of half-measured, warmed-over Clinton-lite national health care plans, all of which will fail to solve the long-term moral and economic health care crisis. Most Americans who support a national health program favor a single-payer system, which keeps the private delivery of health care in the hands of physicians and hospitals, but takes away the moving of money from the insurance industry and places it under a single public agency. Sound familiar? Sure, it’s called Medicare, which is why the bill by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., H.R. 676, is often referred to as “Medicare For All.” Only a single-payer system will wring out the administrative savings–as much as $300 billion per year–that we can use to cover the current uninsured and make up the cost to provide full benefits to every American. Single-payer will increase our individual personal wealth far more than a minimum wage increase.

The rest of this article can be read here: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/01/02/a_10step_program_for_democrats.php