PNHP

Santa Monica physicians push for single-payer

Santa Monica physicians push for single-payer

By Susan Cloke
Opinion
Santa Monica Mirror, Dec. 10, 2009

“Right now the rest of the developed world is spending less money and getting better health care,” said Marcia Angell M.D. testifying for Single-Payer Health Care at the Senate Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions Hearing.

Health insurance is on the national agenda because it’s breaking the national economy. But it is also a highly personal and individual problem. Are you worried about your health care? If you are, stay healthy. It’s your best option. Healthy people can buy health insurance. Anyone deemed a risk by the insurers pays higher costs for the same coverage. People who are ill often lose their health insurance.

Entering the debate is Physicians for a National Health Program, a single-issue organization dedicated to education and advocacy for comprehensive, universal, single payer health insurance. Founded in 1987 by David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, both primary care physicians and both professors at Harvard, PNHP now has 17,000 members, 900 in the Los Angeles area. (www.PNHP.org)

Santa Monica physicians Matt Hendrickson, Gene Oppenheim, Geoff White, Nancy Greep and Steve Tarzynski, joining thousands of American physicians frustrated by insurance companies getting in the way of providing good care for patients, started a Santa Monica chapter of PNHP. Sheila Kuehl, the author of the groundbreaking bill for single payer in CA, twice passed by both houses of the CA legislature and twice vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger, spoke at their first event.

Dr. Hendrickson, says, “We need single payer. We are the only developed nation with a for profit health insurance system. The current proposals in the House and Senate bills do provide some relief. They will remove pre-existing conditions as an opportunity for health insurers to refuse coverage and there may be a public option open to some people. At the same time most Americans will be required to buy insurance, which will hugely benefit the insurance companies.”

“Tragic and touching,” is how Dr. Hendrickson characterized his volunteer work at the Forum for the RAM (Remote Area Medicine) event. “People waited all night, sleeping on bleachers that had been set up in the parking lot, for a chance to get free medical service. This was a sad first for California and we must do better.”

“The American health system is uniquely expensive and inflationary. Last year we spent about $2.5 trillion on health care and costs are growing much faster than the background inflation rate. Our system is unsustainable. And, if that weren’t enough, we don’t get anywhere near our money’s worth.” said Dr. Angell, PNHP member, Harvard Medical School faculty and former editor-in-chief, New England Journal of Medicine.

The health insurance debate is central to our nation’s economic future and to our personal futures. In this country with its well-trained physicians, its great medical schools and its impressive history of contributions to medicine, we have every reason to expect the best in health care. But we need more than training the best doctors; we need the best access.

Speaking to that point, on May 5, 2009, Dr. Margaret Flowers and seven other doctors went to D.C. The Senate Finance Committee had convened a round table of 15 experts. PNHP had requested a seat at the round table and Committee Chairman Senator Baucus had refused. He did not include any advocate for single payer. So they went to our nation’s capitol to testify. Not only were they not allowed to speak, they were arrested. You can watch the un-American spectacle of Senator Baucus calling in the Capitol police to arrest the physicians as they stood at the hearing and requested to speak to the committee on YouTube.

Our president said, on July 22, 2009, “I want to cover everybody. Now, the truth is unless you have what’s called a single-payer system in which everyone’s automatically covered, you’re probably not going to reach every single individual.” Barack Obama

What Say You? Are you healthy?

Do you worry about health insurance?

What do you think we should do?

Originally published under the title “WHAT SAY YOU: Are you Healthy?”

http://www.smmirror.com/MainPages/DisplayArticleDetails.asp?eid=11475

Contradictory Republicans Still Flummoxed By Medicare

By Bob Cesca
Huffington Post, December 9, 2009

If it weren’t for the fact that the Washington media establishment is gamed in favor of Republicans, it’s very likely that they would have long since been relegated to nothing more than a LaRouche-style crackpot cult, handing out mimeographed pamphlets outside the post office.

How else, other than via the self-conscious deference afforded it by the press, do the Republicans get away with issuing the following two press releases within a single 24 hour span:

Sunday: “Cutting Medicare is not what Americans want.”

Monday: “Expanding Medicare a plan for financial ruin.”

In case you’re wondering, these statements didn’t come from one of the many far out wingnuts like Steve King, Michele Bachmann or Virginia Foxx (Medicare recipient). They were, in fact, dispatched from Senate Minority Leader (And Real-Life Albino Sleestak) Mitch McConnell’s office. Yes, the highest ranking Republican in Congress wrote-up both headlines, ostensibly proof-read and unapologetically shoved into the public record.

Two press releases that exactly contradict each other. Yet I’m a little disappointed that Mark Halperin and Chuck Todd didn’t fire off tweets about how the opposing headlines were “bad news for Obama.” After all, every Republican gaffe is somehow “bad news for Obama.” And so they get away with it.

As we have observed over the years, this Republican contradiction problem has been a feature of modern Bush Republicanism for a while now, but it’s only during the past year that the gap between contradictory statements — let’s call it the Wingnut Gap — has narrowed down to just 24 hours. Prior to this week, it took several years for, say, the Republicans to contradict their “criticizing the commander-in-chief during wartime undermines the troops” mantra, or for Glenn Beck to accuse the Obama administration of being Maoists then to inexplicably suggest that America needs to be “more like the Chinese.”

Say nothing of the contradictions evident in Sarah Palin’s America-hating commie Castro headgear.
And don’t give her the benefit of the doubt on this, either. She’s not smart enough to wear it with deliberate irony.

But this is a dynamic that’s most prevalent when the Republicans discuss Medicare. It really flummoxes them. After all, they despise socialized medicine. They despise single-payer health insurance. They despise government-run health care. They voted against the formation of Medicare during the high water mark of LBJ’s Great Society. They ultimately would love to privatize (or drown in a bathtub) the whole thing and be done with it.

Yet at the same time, 55 Republican members of Congress are on Medicare. Congressman Weiner wrote up a list that includes Mitch McConnell. I could be wrong, but I also think proxy-Republican and anti-government-run-insurance drama queen Joe Lieberman, at 67 years old, receives Medicare. He’s eligible. Additionally, I’m still attempting to ascertain how many Republicans get their primary care from the government-run Office of the Attending Physician. The office won’t give me a partisan breakdown of their patients, but we can safely assume that, based on ideology, it’s all Democrats, right?

Today, embattled Republican David Vitter spoke in favor of Byron Dorgan’s Canadian drug-importation amendment and, in the process, praised the Canadian system — which is, as you know, single-payer. However, Olympia Snowe said she doesn’t support the Gang of 10’s Medicare buy-in compromise, but she supports the Canadian importation measure. So she’s siding with the rank and file Senate Republicans against single-payer health insurance on the buy-in, but she supports the single-payer system on the drug importation amendment. And it’s not just Snowe and Vitter. The congressional Republicans are all toeing this upside-down We Hate-Slash-Love Medicare position.

No wonder the teabaggers and dittoheads are screeching in gibberish — steam shooting from their ears. When it comes to Medicare, they have no idea what to support or how to support it. All they know is that President Obama should keep his government hands off their Medicare — whether or not they understand that the government, in fact, runs Medicare. He just should. So there.

The fact is that if the Republicans really supported Medicare, they should also support the Medicare buy-in proposal for Americans between the ages 55-64. But they won’t. Why? Because they hate Medicare. Even though many of them are on it. And even though many of them say they want to protect it from “ruin.”

But expecting logic, reason and consistency from the Republicans is wasted time. (See also Fox News Channel’s Rasmussen poll analysis showing a total of 94 percent of Americans think climate scientists falsified their evidence, while 26 think they didn’t, thus indicating a total of 120 percent.)

The fact remains that the private health insurance system is broken and America is being left behind by the rest of the world as we cling to the decaying wreckage of a failed healthcare system. Medicare is an obvious solution.

If Medicare works for senior citizens, then it can work for everyone else. Expanding the revenue base for Medicare by upwards of 2 million Americans with this buy-in plan, allowing a younger, healthier and, consequently, less costly population to buy into the system by paying the full, unsubsidized premiums, will only help to ameliorate Medicare’s fiscal problems. Likewise, widening the buy-in window to include all adults would ultimately stabilize Medicare even further, because we’d ostensibly be adding even younger and healthier people to the pool, allowing chunks of their unused premiums to flow upwards to older, sicker recipients who need it.

And if you, Mr. and Mrs. Republican, are against a Medicare option for everyone, then you have to be against Medicare period. And feel free to be against it. You just can’t have it both ways — no matter how ridiculous and contradictory your congressional leadership is.

Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog! Go!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/contradictory-republicans_b_386492.html

Lesson for Congress: Medicare Advantage

New Report Highlights Medicare Advantage Insurers’ Higher Administrative Spending

Committee on Energy and Commerce
U.S. House of Representatives
December 9, 2009
Today Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Bart Stupak released a new report which found that 34 Medicare Advantage insurers expend significant sums on profits, marketing, and other corporate expenses.
The report found:
From 2005 through 2008, the average Medicare Advantage insurer spent over 15% of premium revenue on profits, marketing, and other corporate expenses. Two-thirds of the Medicare Advantage insurers surveyed by the Committee had a medical loss ratio below 85% during at least one of the four years examined. Six of the insurers had medical loss ratios below 75% in one or more years. In comparison, traditional Medicare spends less than 1.5% on administrative expenses and over 98% on health care. In the aggregate, the Medicare Advantage insurers spent $1,450 per beneficiary in 2008 on profits, marketing, and other corporate expenses, nearly ten times as much as traditional Medicare spent on administrative expenses per beneficiary.
Requiring all Medicare Advantage insurers to have a medical loss ratio of 85% would provide billions of dollars in additional medical services to seniors. The total amount spent on profits, marketing, and other expenses by Medicare Advantage insurers over the last four years was $27 billion. The House health care reform bill requires Medicare Advantage plans to spend at least 85% of their total premium revenues on medical claims. If this threshold had been in effect from 2005 through 2008, the Medicare Advantage insurers would have spent an additional $3 billion on their beneficiaries’ medical care, enough to eliminate all copays for preventive care for all Medicare beneficiaries for ten years.
In 2007 and 2008, Medicare Advantage insurers with medical loss ratios lower than 85% paid their executives over $1.2 billion. In 2007, a company that had a medical loss ratio of 79% paid an executive over $35 million. The same company paid 16 more executives salaries and bonuses worth $1 million or more. Another company with a medical loss ratio of 79% paid more than $210 million in compensation to 260 executives.
Medicare Advantage insurers have spent millions on expensive retreats. In 2007, one company with a medical loss ratio of 83% spent $3.1 million for two events in Hawaii. In 2007, a company with a medical loss ratio of 84% spent $2.5 million on employees and agents at a retreat in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico and $1.4 million on an event in Rome, Italy. In 2008, a company with a medical loss ratio of 82% spent $1.5 million on a meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland and $1.8 million on a trip to Cancun, Mexico.
http://energycommerce.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1851:new-report-highlights-medicare-advantage-insurers-higher-administrative-spending&catid=122:media-advisories&Itemid=55
Full report:
http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20091209/MedicareAdvantageReport120909.pdf

Congress and the Obama administration decided up front that reform would be based on private insurance plans, rejecting without consideration the single payer Medicare for all model.
They are proposing innovative pilot programs as experiments in containing health care costs, glossing over the logistical nightmares and the lack of a foundation in policy science, as they move forward with these untested policies. Yet they have right in front of them one of the most important, most expensive, and most credible real-life experiments ever conducted: contrasting the government Medicare model with the private Medicare Advantage insurance plans.
In comparing traditional Medicare with Medicare Advantage, we need to set aside from consideration the funds that are used to pay for actual health care since these are our funds merely held in trust for the payment of medical bills. What we need to compare are the costs of the administrative services that are being provided by each entity.
The experiment has been completed, and the results are in. The private Medicare Advantage insurers spend nearly ten times the amount per beneficiary that is used to administer the government Medicare program. TEN TIMES!
Some might say that we aren’t being fair because some of the ten fold increase in spending goes to profits and to expensive retreats for the private insurance executives, whereas the traditional Medicare program doesn’t have those obligations. In this instance, what’s fair in the business community is fraud in the government.
Congress has the results of this study. The report has been generated by one of its own committees. Our legislators have a fundamental moral obligation to study this crucial real-life experiment. They then need to act upon it instead of upon the magical thinking behind the nebulous pilot projects.
In fact, even this report contains one such flawed policy recommendation. They recommend that the private insurers be limited to 15 percent of the insurance pool to use for administration and profits. That is still about eight times the administrative costs of Medicare. EIGHT TIMES! Is that the best that Congress can come up with?
Medicare is already under attack for its perceived parsimoniousness. Since the pilot projects would be designed to further reduce spending within the Medicare program, that perception would be amplified, seriously threatening the support of the health care providers.
We first need the broad, solid infrastructure of single payer Medicare for all and only then should we consider new pilot projects that are based on sound policy science that would work for all of us, providing quality care while protecting our finances. The probability of getting the policies right would be much greater in a single system in which patients, providers and the government are all working together toward a common goal: quality, affordable health care for all.
There is something for those who disagree: a little vicarious serendipity. You can check out the brochures and websites of the expensive resorts, and then close your eyes, lean back and dream about the great time that the insurance executives are having with the money you paid them in the form of excessive insurance premiums. Pleasant dreams.

Dr. Scheiner: On life, health care reform and his former patient Obama

By Kennedy Elliott  

Medill Reports, Dec. 9, 2009

He approves the swine flu vaccine, sings to his patients and said he may be one of few people to have been uninvited to the White House. Dr. David Scheiner, President Barack Obama’s former physician, has been serving the Hyde Park community for more than 20 years.

Scheiner’s office sits along the side of a large parking lot on 52nd Street, also home to a McDonald’s and a ribs restaurant.

An 81-year-old woman sits in the corner of the doctor’s examination room one recent morning and looks reverently at Scheiner. Giving her a diligent and thorough exam, he shakes his head. “I am not happy with you, Ms. Robertson. Not happy at all,” the doctor says in a firm but gentle voice.

Back in his office, he explains that he fears she is starving to death. With none of her family members willing to live with her and monitor her well-being, he is doubtful that she will be able to stay independent much longer.

Though the woman’s case is one of the saddest he sees on a regular basis, her story is not unique. With a wealthy stream of U.S. congressmen, University of Chicago faculty and clergymen as patients, physicians at Hyde Park Associates treat a predominantly elderly population who are on Medicare.

Scheiner shakes his head and stares out of his office window onto the battered buildings below with a furrowed brow. It is not unusual for Scheiner to get this wrapped up in his patients, he said. Coming from a small family himself, he refers to his patients as his family.

Scheiner grew up in New Jersey and attended medical school at Columbia University. His subsequent residency at Michael Reese Hospital brought him to Chicago. Over the next several years, he worked at a few practices on the South and West sides of Chicago, landing in Hyde Park and working with the charismatic Dr. Quentin Young.

He joined Young, a renowned physician and health care reform activist, in practice in 1979. He calls it “the best decision I ever made.” Though Young retired years ago, Scheiner has remained at Hyde Park Associates, on-call 24 hours a day and seeing on average 20 to 25 patients a day.

“David is extremely passionate about patient care, and extremely popular with his patients,” Young said. “Deeply involved.”

Young became a sort of mentor to Scheiner, though the two differed in behavior about how “active” a physician should be in pushing a health care agenda to patients. Young had no qualms about insisting upon the importance of a national health care system to the politicians that came through his doors. Scheiner on the other hand expressed more reserve in his opinions and felt that, if patients wanted to hear his political views, they would ask.

This became more important with one patient in particular, a rising star on Capitol Hill – Illinois’ Sen. Barack Obama. Scheiner had been President Obama’s primary care physician for more than 20 years until he left Chicago for the White House.

Scheiner saw Obama’s popularity with staff and other patients at Hyde Park Associates and said he knew instantly that the young politician would become a leader in national affairs. Surprisingly, though, Scheiner said that he did not discuss views about health care reform with the future president.

“David would say, ‘That would be unethical,’” Young said with a laugh. “I certainly didn’t think it was unethical.”

In fact, Scheiner’s seemingly valuable views from the perspective of a physician working within the system were never heard by Obama. But, like Young, Scheiner has been a long-time advocate of health care reform. And reporters flocked to him when he announced that he did not support Obama’s proposed health care agenda earlier this year.

Scheiner supports a single-payer insurance system, which would create a single non-profit insurance institution for everyone, much different than the current free-market system. He said that the government has a moral and social obligation to provide health care to the public, just as it provides libraries and sanitation. But he takes the stance that the public option, where the government would provide health insurance coverage, will not be as effective as it is claimed to be.

“The public option as it stands now, even if it gets through, is bad. It’s inadequate,” he said. It would offer one government plan among all of the current health insurance options.

“It’s not going to be competitive [with insurance companies], and that’s exactly the point. It has become meaningless. If the whole thing fails, it has the potential to set things way back,” Scheiner said.

Critical of the insurance industry, he said industry giants “profit from people’s misery.” And if they exist in a new health care environment, strict and precise regulation should be enforced to keep them financially in check. But Scheiner said he assumes his criticism of the President’s public option for health care explains why he was recently “disinvited” from attending a White House event the day before it was scheduled.

The White House did not respond to questions regarding Scheiner’s statements by the time of publication.

Scheiner’s advice for Obama is not to worry about pleasing constituencies for a presidential run in 2012 but rather to tackle tough issues and be a “one-term President,” if necessary.

“He doesn’t need people to love him, he’s being too timid. And it’s tough – this is a country that is basically conservative. But he should lead us,” Scheiner said.

Despite his already progressive tendencies, Scheiner said he is getting more radical as he ages. After Scheiner became more vocal with his political opinions in the backdrop of U.S. health care reform, the National Review at one point called him a socialist, he said.

“I consider that a badge of honor,” he added, chuckling. Scheiner also said he initially became a doctor for the idealism and romanticism of it all.

He recalled a defining moment in his career when he was called upon to save a man’s life. The man had collapsed due to a diabetic episode, and needed an injection to restore consciousness. Scheiner began running down the street, medicine in hand, and injected the life-saving antidote in the patient’s arm. This dramatic and theatrical event is exactly what Scheiner meant by romanticism, he said.

Days later, Scheiner received the same call, and again had to run to the scene to save the same man’s life. Scheiner heroically injected the medication, though a bit more disenchanted. Days later, Scheiner received another call about the same man, who had collapsed again. However, the repetition had taken its toll on his enthusiasm for being a hero.

“Even a fantasy can be overdone, I guess,” he said.

And Scheiner isn’t making plans to retire any time soon. Forever a competitor with his mentor, he jokingly said that he’ll stay in practice longer than Young, who retired at 85.

“I’ve done essentially everything you can possibly do in medicine,” he said.

“I walk around with a sandwich board that says ‘I’m a doctor.’ Whenever someone calls me ‘Mr. Scheiner,’ I sort of get shivers. My identity is as a physician, and that’s part of it’s going to be so hard for me to retire – I don’t know if there’s going to be anything left when they take away the ‘Dr.’”

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=152733


Medicare buy-in?

Harry Reid: Democrats reach 'broad agreement'

By Carrie Budoff Brown & Patrick O’Connor
Politico
December 9, 2009

Senate Democrats have reached a “broad agreement” on a health reform bill, Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday night — a plan that would replace the public option in the current Senate bill with a new national insurance plan offered by private insurers, and a chance for older Americans to “buy in” to Medicare.

To win over liberals disappointed at losing the public option, Democrats would allow older Americans starting at age 55 to buy into Medicare, the popular program for the aged. The Medicare expansion would be a significant victory for Democrats, who spent years pushing for it. The proposal would in effect create a public health insurance option for older Americans, since Medicare is government-funded and government-run.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30371.html

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

The most efficient, most effective, and least expensive method of providing reasonably comprehensive health care for everyone would be to replace all current public and private financing programs with a single, improved Medicare program that covered absolutely everyone. Some have suggested that we can do this incrementally, with the first step being to allow individuals 55 and over to buy into Medicare. Is this a good idea?

Harvard professor Steffie Woolhandler provides us with some insight: “Lowering the eligibility age for Medicare to 55 only works if it is mandatory.  Otherwise it becomes the place where all the sickest patients get dumped.  That might be okay for the sick people since Medicare is often better and more secure than private coverage, but it would drive total health care costs (and premiums) up, not down.”

The current Medicare risk pool is composed of seniors with a high rate of chronic disease and with the expenses of end-of-life care, plus younger individuals with long-term disabilities. Since this is a very high cost population, the prorated premiums would be unaffordable for most individuals 55 thru 64. A separate risk pool would have to be established that would be limited to this age bracket. Unfortunately, 55 thru 64 is still the most expensive age sector of all individuals under 65 and so premiums would still be unaffordable for most, especially after you add in the impact of adverse selection as Steffie Woolhandler has described.

Suppose that a Medicare buy-in for those over 55 were to be established, and that higher government subsidies were provided to cover the higher costs, then what do you have? You have created a public option. Yet the reason being given for the Medicare buy-in is that it is a trade-off to get the progressives to agree to abandoning the public option.

So the agreement seems to be to eliminate the public option from consideration by establishing a public option. But is the proposal a public option that would allow everyone the opportunity to buy into Medicare? Apparently not. After all, this is Congress at work.

Although details have not been released, it appears that this Medicare buy-in would be limited by the same rules already proposed for the public option. Individuals who already are eligible for employer-sponsored coverage, Medicare, or Medicaid would not be eligible to participate in the insurance exchange, yet the Medicare buy-in would not be available outside of the exchange (except perhaps during a transition before the exchange is established). Thus the net effect of this buy-in is to further limit the public option only to those 55 and over who meet all other qualifications for the exchange – a ratcheted-down version of the public option.

An elective buy-in for Medicare will only add to the perpetuation of inequities, fragmentation, administrative inefficiencies, inadequate fiscal supervision and other deficiencies that plague our health care financing system. Adding to our dysfunctional system only compounds the dysfunction. We need to replace the system with an efficient single payer model.

Could we do that in incremental steps by first moving absolutely everyone over 55 into our existing Medicare program? Yes, but why would we do that? There would be complex transitional issues in changing this sector from a revenue source for Medicare into both a revenue source and an expense as they become beneficiaries of the program. Another increment could be MediKids for all children, though that would involve other transitional issues. Then how soon would we phase in everyone else, with yet still more transitional issues?

Incremental steps increase the complexities and costs of the transition while delaying access for many who already have impaired access and financial burdens caused  by our dysfunctional system.

A single, disruptive transition would actually be more efficient administratively, while lowering transitional costs. Much more important, a single transition would ensure that no person would have to wait any longer to access the care that he or she needs merely because of an inability to pay for that care.

If we advocate for less than we need, we’ll end up with cheap chits that will eventually be traded away, and then what are we left with?

INTERVIEW: Dr. Andy Coates

Selling out health care reform

By Ashley Smith
December 9, 2009

The battle for health care reform is heating up in Congress. The House has already passed one bill, and the Senate is debating another version. But as Dr. Andy Coates explains, both bills will fail in solving the health care crisis–and, in fact, place a greater financial burden than ever on working people.

Coates is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), co-chair of Single Payer New York and a steward in the Public Employees Federation in New York. He talked to Ashley Smith about what’s wrong with the health care proposals in Washington.

We’ve heard lots of hype from the Democrats about the House and Senate bills. What’s in these two bills, and what will they mean for workers?

The crux of each bill is compulsory private health insurance. The government will use its power to compel every individual to purchase private health insurance, or enroll in Medicaid. The bills don’t make private health insurance affordable; they propose to subsidize private insurance premiums for those who live on modest means.

For example, the House bill will subsidize the premiums of those whose income is 400 percent of the federal poverty level and below. Taxpayers would pay for this. But it would still mean that people who earn 200 percent to 400 percent of the federal poverty level would have to pay 8 to 12 percent of their income for private insurance premiums, or pay a fine and stay uninsured.

That would be the so-called “choice.” For the uninsured, paying for expensive insurance would amount to an enormous wage cut. And then they’ll get skimpy coverage, with high co-pays, high deductibles and all those other onerous and unworkable measures that come with very expensive private insurance.

One of the justifications that Obama and the Democrats used for these bills is that they will control the cost of health care. Are they telling the truth?

TOTAL HEALTH care spending will not be brought under control by either of these bills. It will not bend the cost curve. As health care costs continue to increase dramatically, the crisis of unaffordable health care will continue, for ourselves and our families, with increased out-of-pocket costs, new mandatory premium payments and ongoing medical bankruptcies, will remain acute.

What about the so-called public option? What impact will it have on the health care system?

THE PROPOSALS for the public option as they stand are meaningless from the point of view of reform, and ridiculous as a way to influence the insurance market. There are so many compromises, it might be renamed the incredible shrinking public option. And also, as a TV talking point, it has often eclipsed a focus on what’s really in the bill.

But I think that there’s more fundamental point. The public option was never a proposal for workable reform. It’s actually a neoliberal concept. Marie Gottschalk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has written an article in the new Socialist Register 2010 entitled “U.S. Health Reform and the Stockholm Syndrome.”

She argues that when it comes to health reform, American reformers are like hostages who identify with, and even defend, their captors. I heard her speak in New York, where she said it seemed that if a window opened to permit real health reform, many “reformers” wouldn’t even try to climb out.

What do you mean that the public option is in fact a neoliberal proposal?

The public option idea is basically that the insurance market will will magically meet our needs, as long as there is consumer choice and fair competition. This is the ideology popularized by Ronald Reagan. If only a government agency could be added alongside these giant, highly profitable insurers with their oligopoly control, then the marketplace would magically reform itself. Does that make any sense?

The insurance market rewards insurers that avoid paying for the care of sick. The public option would have to play by the same rules and compete on the same market. So in the best-case scenario, the public option would tend to enroll the sickest patients, and, in turn, would have higher, not lower, expenses. The Congressional Budget Office recently made this very point in a report on the House bill.

So a successful public insurer next to the private companies might instead put us on the fast track to permanent two-tiered health care, a deplorable trend already well underway.

But most likely of all, if enacted, the public option would turn out nationally just as it has in Maine–a failure, not a reform. In Maine, a state-funded public insurance called DirigoChoice has been around since 2003. Since then, it has enrolled fewer than 10 percent of the uninsured, it has not done a thing to control costs, and this year, it faces a fiscal crisis that threatens its future existence

What impact will these bills have on the health care crisis?

IMMEDIATELY ON the passage of the bill, very little would change. There is some insurance regulation, but we should note that this is regulation the industry itself proposed.

For instance, the insurance companies will have to stop rescissions–arbitrary cancellation of policies that come usually with the “coincidence” of the patient getting sick. But they can still cancel policies if the policyholder commits “fraud”–or if you simply can’t pay your premiums. And over the decade, the insurers stand to gain tens of millions of new customers and hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies.

So I think that passage of the bill is virtually irrelevant to the everyday crisis. The main features in the House bill are not scheduled to start until 2013, and those in the Senate bill won’t start until 2014. Then it still won’t lessen disparities, or guarantee access to everyone, or improve the quality of care, or reduce costs. In fact, the main things in the bill have already failed at the state level, including the public option, including mandatory insurance.

For most people, health insurance will still be tied to their jobs, right?

Yes. When you lose your job, you will still lose your health insurance. Even worse, illness can lead to job loss and loss of insurance. Not just for the patient. If someone in your family gets very sick, the illness can cause you to miss work, too–going to appointments, to chemotherapy, waiting after surgery, coming home from the hospital, going to the pharmacy, going back to the hospital.

In such situations, people often lose their jobs in the United States. That’s the purpose of the Family Medical Leave Act. But even so, in our insane system, people lose their health insurance because they have no paycheck. These cruelties will remain a fact of life. Can we swallow such a bitter pill with a bit of tonic that more of the people who lose their jobs will now be eligible for Medicaid? I don’t think so.

Would it be better if no bill passes than one of the proposals in Congress today?

Single Payer New York, the coalition that I am a co-chair of, had a steering committee discussion a few months back. It was our opinion at that time that it would be better to keep arguing for single payer, and not take a position on a bill that hadn’t come out. More recently, Single Payer New York put out an unequivocal statement that recommends a “no” vote. We have also applauded Rep. Eric Massa of western New York for his principled vote against the House bill.

Personally, I think we should embrace any dialogue that advances the grassroots, kitchen-table debate about health care in this country.

The costs and hassles of health care are breaking working-class families. Prescriptions are not affordable, appointments can’t be had, our insurance is tied to our job or our spouse, millions of people are impacted by bankruptcy and Medicaid is a dis
aster. Too often, a personal crisis, health care amounts to an accumulating social crisis. The Democratic bills now in the Congress are no solution.

The single-payer movement had attracted Democratic support in the House for a bill known as HR 676 that would have established a single-payer system. Leaders among these Democrats promised that there would at least be votes on single payer. Why didn’t they deliver?

Forgive me for the long story here, but what happened this year was really remarkable and very positive. How many people are on full-time paid staff for single payer in the whole country? Less than a dozen or so, if that? Yet, there was a year of sustained mobilization, starting before Obama’s election, that grew and grew, from local, volunteer organizing.

The AFL-CIO convention passed a resolution this fall that endorsed single payer and the broader concept of social insurance, building on support for HR 676 within the unions. And then the Democratic Party leadership had to maneuver and spin all year long, trying to keep single payer off the table. These are a testament to the strength and energy of the grassroots inside and outside the AFL-CIO.

Back at the end of July, New York Congressman Anthony Weiner and six other HR 676 co-sponsors, brought into the Energy and Commerce Committee an amendment to substitute the text of HR 676 for the House bill. The leadership needed to get the main bill out of committee that day, the day before the summer recess. One day earlier, about a thousand people visited Congress and rallied outside the Capitol for single payer.

So while Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman, the committee chair, didn’t want to have a debate on single payer in the committee, neither could they simply push it aside. So Pelosi offered Weiner a deal. If he withdrew the amendment in committee, she would let him put it on the floor of the House for a debate and vote.

Weiner took the deal, but it was the single-payer grassroots who really called Nancy Pelosi’s bluff. We recognized that a floor vote–a losing vote–would be a historic precedent, not just that single payer would get to the floor of the House for the first time, but that the grassroots movement would be the force to put it there. Plus we hoped to see members of the House of Representatives stand for single payer and be counted. We wanted to know who our true friends were, with an eye on the 2010 elections.

So a campaign of lobbying, picketing and protesting commenced, from dozens of local organizations and a handful of national organizations. It brought to Congress hundreds of thousands of phone calls and faxes and e-mails, maybe millions–far more than anyone would have predicted. Protests grew vigorous. In fact, over 150 people were arrested in nonviolent civil disobedience actions at insurance companies and at congressional offices, including Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco office.

Weiner, an ambitious guy, jumped in with a bit of pizzazz. He got on television, and at one point turned the tables on the interviewer by asking what it was that insurance companies added to health care. Single payer helped his stature. But the week that the House bill came up, Weiner published a piece on the Huffington Post that was all about the public option, with no mention of single payer.

Earlier, we had expressed our dismay because he wanted to change some of the HR 676 language to leave out the undocumented immigrants–changing “residents” to “citizens” in the amendment. On the other hand, to his credit, he worked to get his single-payer amendment to the floor up to the very end. And Pelosi never would have negotiated with Weiner without the grassroots heat, charming though Weiner might be.

In fact, the day before the vote, there was a full-page ad by the AFL-CIO and eight unions, including the California Nurses Association, in Roll Call calling for a “yes” vote on the Weiner Amendment. By this point, the Democratic Party leadership must have been surprised and frustrated that they had to keep finding new ways to keep single payer off the table. We heard rumors that even the White House had helped squelch the amendment vote.

In a curlicue twist, late on the Thursday before the Saturday House vote, Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers together issued a letter saying that the Weiner amendment would be “tantamount to driving the movement over a cliff.” A losing vote for single payer on the House floor would hurt the cause, they said.

Their opinion stood in direct contradiction to the single-payer advocates who saw the efforts demanding the amendment as historic and imperative. Nancy Pelosi must have been overjoyed, for the letter gave her a new excuse to knock single payer off the table.

Pelosi also made an argument that in retrospect seems like pure chutzpah. She said that if a single-payer amendment came to the floor, she might also have to allow an amendment to restrict abortion rights to the floor. So we were to be mollified by the thought that if the single-payer amendment was withdrawn, at least women’s rights would be protected.

But we know how that turned out. We asked for health reform, and they gave us an abortion ban. Is that the true state of the Democratic Party today? To get the Democrats own “Blue Dog” right wing to vote for “health reform,” largely conceived and written by the insurance companies, they had to trade away women’s rights? Good grief.

Meanwhile, Kucinich had another amendment that would make it slightly easier for single payer to be enacted state by state. The Kucinich amendment came through the Education and Labor committee, where Kucinich got it passed with help from Republicans, but it wasn’t included in the bill. This amendment, too, was the focus of grassroots action–and is still.

He has since been fighting to get the state-by-state amendment back into the final legislation, with some success, getting the Progressive Caucus to endorse the idea. After Kucinich voted against bill, he issued a clear and powerful statement explaining his vote by saying the private insurance companies are the problem, not the solution.

What’s the lesson of this experience?

We just found out that Bernie Sanders will put a substitute single-payer amendment before the Senate, with at least two other senators promising to vote for it. But when the dust settled in the House, only two representatives, Dennis Kucinich and Eric Massa, voted against the bill because it wasn’t single payer. Two. The rest went with the Democratic Party leadership and voted for the bill–abortion ban and all. Evidently, this is what it means to be a progressive Democrat in Congress today.

It also tells us that we need to build a bigger grassroots movement. We are learning that the Democratic Representatives–and I daresay the Republicans, too–will respond to a grassroots mass movement, but we have to build that movement. No one will do it for us. As we do so, we must maintain our independence from elected officials. We have to continue to pressure them, sure–but our eyes should be on the grassroots, not the Democratic Party. I think that’s the most important lesson.

We might also remember that single payer will be won when it becomes a mainstream demand. So the goal of the movement should be to make our proposal the litmus test for the entire nation–left, right and center. The whole country simply must have a health system built upon the principle of solidarity. What other kind of society would we want to live in?

What’s the way forward for the single-payer movement?

What we need above all else is confidence. Our demand is popular, workable and just. We learned this year that there really is a social movement for single payer coming into being. We should be telling our advocates this: if you keep doing what you have been doing, we will win single payer. All year long, we have had the attention of the Congress and the White House. Much as they wanted to, they could not shake us.

It
‘s really up to us. We can build this movement. The health care crisis will persist in spite of the Democrats’ 10-year plan. With unemployment still rising and possibilities for a frank political crisis emerging, we might soon find a situation in which something has simply got to give. We need to learn to articulate broader benefits of single-payer reform as an economic rescue and as personal liberation for working people.

Our grassroots single-payer movement will also grow by learning to fight on related issues. For example, in Braddock, Pa., the western Pennsylvania single-payer activists have gotten involved in defending a community hospital from closing. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center–itself an insurance company by the way, and a massive corporation with a millionaire CEO–bought up the health care infrastructure in the area, including Braddock Hospital.

If we had single payer, we wouldn’t have this corporate medicine, building a new hospital in the wealthy suburb and closing the hospital in the old city. If we had single payer, health care priorities would be planned to meet the needs of the community, not the corporate bottom line.

The single-payer movement needs to join local struggles like this one and articulate how single payer would help solve these problems. That’s how we will be able to forge out of a nascent movement a force that can overwhelm the opposition to single payer in Washington, D.C.

Medicare buy-in?

Harry Reid: Democrats reach ‘broad agreement’

By Carrie Budoff Brown & Patrick O’Connor
Politico
December 9, 2009
Senate Democrats have reached a “broad agreement” on a health reform bill, Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday night — a plan that would replace the public option in the current Senate bill with a new national insurance plan offered by private insurers, and a chance for older Americans to “buy in” to Medicare.
To win over liberals disappointed at losing the public option, Democrats would allow older Americans starting at age 55 to buy into Medicare, the popular program for the aged. The Medicare expansion would be a significant victory for Democrats, who spent years pushing for it. The proposal would in effect create a public health insurance option for older Americans, since Medicare is government-funded and government-run.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30371.html

The most efficient, most effective, and least expensive method of providing reasonably comprehensive health care for everyone would be to replace all current public and private financing programs with a single, improved Medicare program that covered absolutely everyone. Some have suggested that we can do this incrementally, with the first step being to allow individuals 55 and over to buy into Medicare. Is this a good idea?
Harvard professor Steffie Woolhandler provides us with some insight: “Lowering the eligibility age for Medicare to 55 only works if it is mandatory. Otherwise it becomes the place where all the sickest patients get dumped. That might be okay for the sick people since Medicare is often better and more secure than private coverage, but it would drive total health care costs (and premiums) up, not down.”
The current Medicare risk pool is composed of seniors with a high rate of chronic disease and with the expenses of end-of-life care, plus younger individuals with long-term disabilities. Since this is a very high cost population, the prorated premiums would be unaffordable for most individuals 55 thru 64. A separate risk pool would have to be established that would be limited to this age bracket. Unfortunately, 55 thru 64 is still the most expensive age sector of all individuals under 65 and so premiums would still be unaffordable for most, especially after you add in the impact of adverse selection as Steffie Woolhandler has described.
Suppose that a Medicare buy-in for those over 55 were to be established, and that higher government subsidies were provided to cover the higher costs, then what do you have? You have created a public option. Yet the reason being given for the Medicare buy-in is that it is a trade-off to get the progressives to agree to abandoning the public option.
So the agreement seems to be to eliminate the public option from consideration by establishing a public option. But is the proposal a public option that would allow everyone the opportunity to buy into Medicare? Apparently not. After all, this is Congress at work.
Although details have not been released, it appears that this Medicare buy-in would be limited by the same rules already proposed for the public option. Individuals who already are eligible for employer-sponsored coverage, Medicare, or Medicaid would not be eligible to participate in the insurance exchange, yet the Medicare buy-in would not be available outside of the exchange (except perhaps during a transition before the exchange is established). Thus the net effect of this buy-in is to further limit the public option only to those 55 and over who meet all other qualifications for the exchange – a ratcheted-down version of the public option.
An elective buy-in for Medicare will only add to the perpetuation of inequities, fragmentation, administrative inefficiencies, inadequate fiscal supervision and other deficiencies that plague our health care financing system. Adding to our dysfunctional system only compounds the dysfunction. We need to replace the system with an efficient single payer model.
Could we do that in incremental steps by first moving absolutely everyone over 55 into our existing Medicare program? Yes, but why would we do that? There would be complex transitional issues in changing this sector from a revenue source for Medicare into both a revenue source and an expense as they become beneficiaries of the program. Another increment could be MediKids for all children, though that would involve other transitional issues. Then how soon would we phase in everyone else, with yet still more transitional issues?
Incremental steps increase the complexities and costs of the transition while delaying access for many who already have impaired access and financial burdens caused by our dysfunctional system.
A single, disruptive transition would actually be more efficient administratively, while lowering transitional costs. Much more important, a single transition would ensure that no person would have to wait any longer to access the care that he or she needs merely because of an inability to pay for that care.
If we advocate for less than we need, we’ll end up with cheap chits that will eventually be traded away, and then what are we left with?

Here Come the Apologists

Yes, This Health Care Bill Really is Worse Than Nothing

By HELEN REDMOND
Counterpunch, December 8, 2009

If you join a fight for social justice you many win or lose, but just by being part of the struggle, you win, and your life will be better for it.

–Howard Zinn

Already defenders and apologists for the Democrat’s health care legislation are busy at work. In the next few weeks they will be working overtime to persuade, cajole, shame and ruthlessly attack if necessary, anyone opposing health care legislation. They’ll reserve special hysteria, invective and contempt for those of us who continue to support a single-payer, national health care system.  And because it is the holiday season, we will be called heartless health care Grinches and silly, single payer, Bernie Sanders Scrooges. There will be accusations: “If you don’t support health care reform legislation, you support the status quo.” Implicit in the indictment is single-payer advocates, with their pie-in-the-sky idea that health care is a human right for all, will be responsible for the continued impoverishment and immiseration of the American people if a bill doesn’t pass.

Joshua Holland, an editor and senior writer for AlterNet and Uwe E. Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton, have begun the onslaught.
In a piece posted on AlterNet November, 24th titled, “Is the House’s Health Bill Really Worse than Nothing?” Holland attacks Dr. Marcia Angell, author, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a leader of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP.) Dr. Angell opposes the House bill and believes it’s “worse than nothing.” For that she earns the disdain of Joshua who just can’t accept there isn’t something in the bill worth supporting, even though he agrees with her trenchant criticism of the bill’s gaping defects. He claims she ignores the “primary thrust of the legislation” which for Holland is “the fact that the House legislation would do quite a bit for millions of real Americans struggling through a very real health care crisis.” “Real” Americans, a “real” health care crisis? The insinuation is Angell, and by affiliation PNHP, isn’t operating in the real world of real suffering if they don’t support whatever bill Congress delivers to the Oval Office for a signature. That’s interesting. An organization of 16,000 doctors that conducts research on major aspects of the health care crisis and have been on the frontlines for real reform for decades doesn’t understand what’s real?

Holland argues Angell negates her original thesis when she writes, “The bill has a few good provisions (expansion of Medicaid, for example) but they are marginal.” It doesn’t. Her central contention is even with an expansion of Medicaid and a few other “good” provisions, the bill is a bomb because on balance, it entrenches the power and profits of the private insurance industry – the source of the health care crisis.

This isn’t the first time an expansion of Medicaid has been offered as a partial panacea for the health care crisis. And it has to be said: It isn’t necessary to create a huge, complex and expensive piece of national legislation in order to expand the Medicaid Program. Any state can decide at any time to change eligibility rules and insure more residents (Massachusetts did in 2006.) But the overall trend has been the opposite.

According to a study published in the Annals of Family Medicine, “Medicaid programs in all 50 states implemented cost-savings strategies, including benefit reductions, cost sharing and tightened administrative rules during the recent economic downturn.” Medicaid operates within the dysfunctional, multi-payer health care system and has suffered from an expand-contract cycle since its inception. It’s a favorite target for blame-the-victim politicians who want to get poor people off welfare (and health care) and into the workforce with no health care. Under the Clinton Administration’s “welfare reform,” hundreds-of-thousands of mostly women and children lost Medicaid coverage. The Medicaid program is not an entitlement or a right. An onerous redetermination is done every year in most states. And in fact, losing Medicaid coverage for a variety of reasons is the norm.

It’s true – the expansion of Medicaid would help millions of low-income Americans, but for how long? Expansion of Medicaid is a short-term, incremental fix, not a permanent one. And that should be the goal of legislation – a permanent fix to the health care crisis so there is no longer a health care crisis. 

Holland thinks the subsidies are “rather generous.” It’s curious he isn’t asking these questions: If the government were truly reforming health care, why would millions of people need subsidies? Shouldn’t the cost of coverage come down so much its affordable without government assistance?

Here’s the conundrum – if you support subsidies to help people buy insurance and the expansion of Medicaid, you are forced to support the transfer of billions of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of the investor-owned insurance industry and a mandate that criminalizes and punishes people. You also have to accept the Stupak Amendment and the denial of health care to millions of undocumented workers.

There are more poison pills to swallow. Holland thinks it’s fine insurance will still be linked to employment – tell that to the millions who are unemployed and being laid off by the thousands every day. In the House bill, if employers offer insurance, they must pay at least 72.5 percent of the premium for individuals and 65 percent for families. That’s too low and gives companies who pay a higher percentage an incentive to shift costs onto employees until they hit the government-mandated limit. Workers will then be dumped into the insurance exchange because it will be cheaper for employers and once there, because of the mandate, forced to buy stripped down plans with no limits on premiums.

Currently, there are over twenty-five million people underinsured. The majority of people who declared medical bankruptcy started out with insurance. That is the wave of the future. The government will claim more people are insured and technically they will be, but are you really insured if you have a $5000 deductible, high co-pays and less than one-hundred percent coverage for hospitalizations, expensive medication and diagnostic tests?

And what about the much ballyhooed public option which was supposed to keep the rapacious insurers honest and give millions quality, inexpensive health care that Joshua argued for at the expense of advocating for single-payer which he is a supporter of? Eviscerated, not robust at all, and what Paul Krugman now calls “medium-strength.” It’s not even that. The “progressive” Democrats abandoned Holland and his ilk and voted in favor of the bill after they swore not to if it didn’t contain a robust public option with rates tied to Medicare. These are the same “regressive” Democrats that voted in favor of the Stupak Amendment. Holland argues if the final legislation contains Stupak it can’t be supported. But if “Progressive-Regressive” Democrats voted for it the first time, they will vote for it a second time because they don’t have the spines to stand up to President Obama, or for abortion rights.         

Toward the end of his assault on Dr. Angell’s position, Holland writes, “…drawing the line at the House bill is privileging ideology over getting something done in the short-term, however imperfect it might be overall.” But that is precisely the problem. For decades short-term, imperfect reforms are offered that inexorably lead right back to the crisis. Then more short-term, imperfect reforms are offered and the cycle continues. Instead of attacking the p
rivileged ideology of for-profit, corporate controlled health care, Joshua attacks single-payer ideology and argues to abandon it in order to get something, anything done.

Single-payer supporters also reject his false choice of “trying to push for the best package possible or leaving a disastrous status quo in place…” The not so subtle message is if a bill doesn’t pass we will be responsible for the disastrous status quo that is the state of health care in this country. Sorry Joshua, but that responsibility will rest with the Obama Administration that at every turn placated the profit hungry, parasitic insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

And if a bill does pass this year, we can hurry up and wait 4 years because that’s when it will be enacted! So, disastrous status quo for 4 more years, then in 2013 implementation of a disastrous bill that will continue to leave 20 million uninsured. I can hardly wait. 

Uwe E. Reinhardt dismisses and disrespects Dr. Don McCanne, another leader of PNHP, for arguing current health care legislation can’t be supported and instead the fight for a single-payer health care system must continue.

Reinhardt wrote in response to Dr. McCanne’s comments on the letter he and 22 other prominent economists sent to President Obama: “Don is a mensch, but a dreamer. Let’s face it, this very limited bill, should it pass into law, is the very best Americans can hope for. This country will never have a sensible, efficient health care system, and perhaps not even a totally humane one. For better or worse, we must get used to it.”

Reinhardt’s work is full of contradictions. He writes extensively on health care and understands that a government-run, single-payer system is the best way to control the cost of health care and insure everyone. Like in Taiwan. But Reinhardt is thoroughly pessimistic the political movement that is necessary to bring about that kind of system can be built and can win. So he tells us we have to get used to 45 thousand people dying every year for lack of health care. We have to get used to millions of families being bankrupted from medical bills. It’s the very best Americans can hope for and if you don’t hope for that you are a stupid dreamer. I couldn’t disagree with Dr. Reinhardt more. We cannot and will not get used to that barbarism.
Obviously Reinhardt hasn’t been paying attention to the movement for single-payer and what we have accomplished during this round in the health care debate.  

Reinhardt needs to come down from his Ivy Tower and join the movement for single-payer. It’s really not so bad down here at the grassroots level, Uwe. There is PNHP with 16,000 members. The California Nurses Association (CNA) supports single-payer and has thousands of members, too. Sections of the labor movement support single-payer. There are grassroots, single-payer organizations in almost every state with committed members who got arrested in acts of civil disobedience at insurance company headquarters. And poll after poll consistently shows the majority of Americans want government-run, guaranteed and financed health care.

If Reinhardt came over strongly and unequivocally to the side of single-payer, he could help the movement take a giant step closer to winning a humane, efficient health care system. He could use his prodigious talents of number crunching and economic analysis to demonstrate the superiority of single-payer and to demoralize and defeat The Powers That Be who listen to his economic prognostications on health care reform. Reinhardt could be a founding member of an organization of economists for single-payer and name it Economists for Single-Payer Network (ESPN.) He could be a proud member of a social movement struggling to make health care a human right in the richest capitalist country in the world.

Helen Redmond, LCSW, is a medical social worker in Chicago. She can be reached at redmondmadrid@yahoo.com. She blogs at http://helenredmond.wordpress.com  

http://www.counterpunch.org/redmond12082009.html

U.S. nurses unions merge, back healthcare overhaul

Merger forms largest union of medical professionals

By Tim Gaynor
Reuters, Dec 7 2009

Three nurses unions merged on Monday to form the largest-ever labor organization for U.S. medical professionals, which is expected to wield greater clout in collective bargaining and the national healthcare debate.

Leaders of the new 150,000-member National Nurses United, comprising union locals from Maine to Hawaii, said their top priority would be to seek to organize the overwhelming majority of registered nurses who remain without union representation.

Of roughly 1.5 million nurses who provide direct patient care in U.S. hospitals and clinics, about 80 percent have no union contract, NNU officials said.

The merger, approved unanimously by delegates to the founding convention in Phoenix, unifies the California Nurses Association, with 83,000 members in California and several other states; the United American Nurses, with 45,000 members, mostly the Midwest, and the 22,000-member Massachusetts Nurses Association.

The move comes as President Barack Obama is battling to rally support for his top domestic priority, an overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system that extends coverage to millions of uninsured people and curtails spiraling costs.

He faces sharp divisions among lawmakers in the Democratic-controlled Congress over his proposal for a new government-run insurance plan, or public option, an approach fiercely opposed by Republicans and private health insurers.

NURSES SEEK STRONGER HEALTH OVERHAUL

Deborah Burger, president of the California nurses group, said the merger would likely lend powerful support for the more progressive aims of the overhaul, but she said Obama’s plan would not go far enough.

“What we’ve got now isn’t really healthcare reform, it’s a reshuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic as far as our patients are concerned, and we’re going to make sure that we … have universal healthcare that is truly universal and has eliminated the insurance companies,” she told Reuters.

Aside from a bigger voice in the healthcare debate, the merger is expected to give nurses greater leverage in collective bargaining after decades of growth in national hospital chains that have largely resisted union organizing.

The labor movement sees an opportunity to bolster its ranks in the healthcare industry, a sector that has continued to create jobs during the recession and is expected to see 20 percent employment growth above 2006 levels by 2016, according to U.S. Labor Department statistics.

“This is where the jobs of the future lie,” said Chris Tilly, director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Baby boomers like me are aging and will soon need a lot of nurses, so this is an area where there’s going to be a lot of expansion. There’s going to be a lot of hard political decisions to make,” he said.

Plans to organize nonunion nurses go hand-in-hand with ongoing efforts to end mandatory overtime for nurses and other cost-cutting hospital practices that nursing advocates say have stretched patient care too thin.

The focus on patient care also figures in the union’s aim to seek passage of federal legislation setting national standards for nurse staffing levels.

Dian Palmer, president of the Nurse Alliance of the Service Employees International Union, which represents 85,000 nurses, hailed the merger of the three unions, saying it would help “ensure the delivery of safe, quality care for everyone in our country.” (Additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles, editing by Chris Wilson)

$126,000 drug that only makes the desperate sick

Questioning a $30,000-a-Month Cancer Drug

By Andrew Pollack
The New York Times
December 4, 2009

A newly approved chemotherapy drug will cost about $30,000 a month, a sign that the prices of cancer medicines are continuing to rise despite growing concern about health care costs.

Critics, including many oncologists, say that patients and the health system cannot afford to pay huge prices for drugs that, on average, provide only a few extra months of life at best.

And Folotyn (made by Allos Therapeutics) has not even been shown to prolong lives — only to shrink tumors. The drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in late September as a treatment for peripheral T-cell lymphoma, a rare and usually aggressive blood cancer that strikes an estimated 5,600 Americans each year.

(James V. Caruso, the chief commercial officer for Allos) said the price of Folotyn was not out of line with that of other drugs for rare cancers. Patients, moreover, are likely to use the drug for only a couple of months because the tumor worsens so quickly, he said.

In a note to clients in October, Joshua Schimmer, an analyst at Leerink Swann, estimated that a typical treatment would last 3.5 months and cost $126,000, or about $36,000 a month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/health/05drug.html?_r=1&hpw

And…

Prescribing Information for Folotyn (pralatrexate injection)

Allos Therapeutics, Inc.
Issued: September 2009

Indications and Usage:

Folotyn is indicated for the treatment of patients with relapsed or refractory peripheral T-cell lymphoma (PTCL). This indication is based on overall response rate. Clinical benefit such as improvement in progression free survival or overall survival has not been demonstrated.

Adverse reactions (list includes only those events occurring in 10 percent or more of patients treated):

Mucositis
Thrombocytopenia
Nausea
Fatigue
Anemia
Constipation
Pyrexia
Edema
Cough
Epistaxis
Vomiting
Neutopenia
Diarrhea
Dyspnea
Anorexia
Hypokalemia
Rash
Pruritis
Pharyngolaryngeal pain
Liver function test abnormal
Abdominal pain
Pain in extremity
Back pain
Leukopenia
Night sweats
Asthenia
Tachycardia
Upper respiratory tract infection

Percent of patients experiencing any adverse event: 100 percent

Forty-four percent of patients (n = 49) experienced a serious adverse event while on study or within 30 days after their last dose of Folotyn.

http://www.folotyn.com/pdf/package-insert.pdf

And…

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Amendment in Senate)

The Library of Congress, THOMAS
H.R.3590

Title VII – Improving access to innovative medical therapies
Sec. 7002, (a), (2), (k)
(7) Exclusivity for reference product
(A) Effective date of biosimilar application approval – Approval of an application under this subsection may not be made effective by the Secretary until the date that is 12 years after the date on which the reference product was first licensed under subsection (a).

http://thomas.loc.gov/

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

Fotolyn is a new miracle drug brought to us by our highly revered pharmaceutical industry. This new drug has no demonstrated clinical benefit, though all patients have adverse reactions, almost half of them serious – including death.

In an astonishing moment of candor, James Caruso, chief commercial officer for Allos, provided reassurance that the very high monthly cost of Fotolyn would not be protracted since the tumor worsens so quickly.

What makes this drug a miracle only the investment community can understand. Desperate patients will spend an average of $126,000 for this worthless drug. On Wall Street that’s a miracle, but within the health policy community, that’s a tragedy.

You can be assured that, in crafting health care reform, Congress has responded to the very high prices of newer patented therapeutic agents, but in a perverse way. Recognizing the great potential of genetically-engineered biologics, Congress has included in the legislation an unprecedented 12 year exclusivity, protecting the firms from competition of biosimilar products.

Maybe the biotech firms will be able to parley this into seven-figure treatment programs for the desperately ill. The soak-the-sick policies may not work for patients, but they certainly work well for Wall Street. And doesn’t that seem to be where Congress’s loyalties lie these days?