New York Times
Editorial
September 23, 2007

One of the enduring frustrations of presidential elections is that candidates and their parties sound like Tweedledum and Tweedledee on many issues. In 2008, when it comes to health care, which is emerging as a defining domestic issue, voters will find stark differences in philosophy and commitment between Democrats and Republicans.

The three leading Democratic candidates all want to achieve universal or near universal health insurance coverage. The four leading Republican candidates espouse no such goal and barely mention the uninsured. The Democrats are willing to put substantial federal money into health care reform. The Republicans are not. The Democrats would expand government health insurance programs and give the federal government a greater role in regulating the insurance industry. The Republicans generally want to shrink federal programs and free the insurance industry from what they consider regulatory shackles.

Compared with these sharp differences between the two parties, the distinctions between leading candidates within each party are small, mostly a matter of tactics to achieve comparable goals. We far prefer the Democrats’ approach to health insurance, since at least they want to address an issue that must be resolved for reasons of economics, public health and fairness. Sadly, none of the leading candidates, in either party, has the vision or the political courage to propose radical solutions for the big underlying problem behind America’s health care crisis: the inexorably rising costs.

The Republican Candidates

Two Republican candidates have yet to grapple seriously with health care reform. John McCain, running largely on Iraq and national security, has not said anything substantial about health care, nor has he even included it among issues listed on his campaign Web site. Fred Thompson has only a brief paragraph on his Web site in which he opposes new mandates, higher taxes or a Washington-controlled program, and calls for free-market solutions. He has also called for reduced spending on entitlements and says he would have opposed the new Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Rudolph Giuliani, who leads the Republican field in national polls, has only sketchy plans but has made it clear that he favors free-market approaches and is strongly opposed to what he mislabels as the Democrats’ push for socialized medicine. Borrowing from President Bush, he proposes a tax deduction of up to $15,000 to help families buy private health insurance instead of getting it through their employers. He believes millions of people might choose that option, creating a market in which insurance companies would rush in with affordable policies to cover them, and the nation would begin to move away from the employer-based system that the Democrats are trying to bolster. For the poor, he envisions some combination of vouchers and tax refunds to help buy policies but has given no indication of how much that program would cost or how he would pay for it.

His proposals are not likely to make much of a dent in the ranks of the uninsured. Tax deductions are of little use to low-income people who pay little or no income tax, and insurers are notorious for refusing individual policies to high-risk or chronically ill people. Given Mr. Giuliani’s eagerness to ease regulation of insurance companies it is hard to see how he could make that market work better.

Mitt Romney has the most developed health plan among the Republicans, as one might expect given his prominent role in spurring health care reform in Massachusetts. As governor of that left-leaning state, he helped make Massachusetts a leader in providing universal coverage, mostly by mandating that everyone must buy health insurance or pay a financial penalty. But as a candidate in the Republican primaries he has changed course, disavowing any need for mandates and contending that what was right for Massachusetts would not be right for the country.

Instead of a national reform effort, he wants the 50 states to devise their own plans, but without much financial help from the federal government. He promises federal incentives to help states deregulate their health insurance markets to encourage cheaper policies.

His key proposal at the national level centers on tax deductions to help people pay for health care. He would allow individuals to deduct their out-of-pocket expenditures — and any premiums paid for insurance policies they bought on their own rather than through their employer — from their taxable income. For those who still cannot afford coverage, he would encourage states to redirect money now used for charity care to help low-income people buy private health insurance. There would be no new federal money for this purpose. His advisers estimate the proposals would cost a modest $10 billion a year in reduced revenues to the United States Treasury.

The problem of relying on tax deductions to increase insurance coverage is that they mostly favor the better off. The problem with relying on the states to enact the needed reforms is that the plight of the uninsured would be left to the whims of geography. Few states have the financial resources that allowed Massachusetts to move to universal coverage, and many states lack the expertise to mount a sophisticated program.

The Democratic Candidates

Although Republicans routinely lambaste the Democrats for supporting socialized medicine or government programs in which bureaucrats would dictate your health coverage, the plans put forth by the three leading Democratic candidates — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards — are all very careful to build on the existing system of employer-based coverage supplemented by government programs like Medicare, Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

None of them is proposing a “single payer” system run by the government. And all bend over backward to reassure people that they can maintain their current coverage if they like it. Their political goal is to head off opposition from those who fear that their own coverage might suffer in the course of covering some 47 million uninsured people.

The Democratic plans have far more similarities than differences. All three would move toward universal coverage and would rely heavily on mandates to do so. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards would require everyone to take out health insurance. That would bring young and healthy people into the system to help subsidize coverage for the more sickly, and would eliminate the problem of “free riders,” who show up uninsured at the emergency room and get very expensive care without paying. Mr. Obama would require parents to get insurance for their children but has no mandate for adults.

All three would require big employers to provide health insurance or contribute to the cost of covering their employees outside the workplace. But they differ in the treatment of small businesses, whose opposition helped derail the last big reform effort in 1993. Mr. Edwards is the toughest. He would require small businesses to provide insurance coverage or help pay for coverage elsewhere. Mr. Obama would exempt them from any mandate. Mrs. Clinton, in what looks suspiciously like a bribe to buy small business support, promises them a tax credit for providing coverage.

The Clinton plan would cost an estimated $110 billion a year, the Edwards plan $90 billion to $120 billion, the Obama plan $50 billion to $65 billion. All three would finance their programs partly by rolling back Bush-era tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 a year and partly with debatable savings they would get through cost-cutting.

All three would require insurers to accept everyone without regard to pre-existing conditions, would provide tax subsidies to low-income people, and would establish purchasing pools to help individuals get low group rates.

There would be a menu of options for people dissatisfied with their current policies because of high costs or limited benefits, including both private health plans and a public program that would compete alongside them. That would provide an interesting test of whether government or private plans are more effective and popular, a matchup that critics of “government-run” programs seem determined to avoid.

The Clinton plan has an innovative proposal to limit the premiums that families have to pay to a certain percentage of their income, as yet undefined. That is a welcome protection for consumers but could cause problems if medical costs continue to rise far faster than wages.

WHAT’S MISSING

All of the plans, both Republican and Democratic, fail to provide a plausible solution to the problem that has driven health care reform to the fore as a political issue: the inexorably rising costs that drive up insurance rates and force employers to cut back on coverage or charge higher premiums. All of the plans acknowledge the need to restrain costs, but most of the remedies they offer are not likely to do much.

Electronic medical records to eliminate errors and increase efficiency, more preventive care to head off serious diseases, and better coordination of patients suffering multiple, chronic illnesses are all worthy proposals, but there is scant evidence they will reduce costs. Proposals to import drugs from abroad, allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, restrain malpractice expenses, increase competition among health plans, and empower consumers to shop more wisely for medical care might help a bit. But many experts doubt that any of this will truly put the brakes on escalating health care costs.

No top candidate in either party has broached more drastic remedies, like limiting the use of expensive new technologies, cutting reimbursements to doctors and hospitals, or forcing people to use health maintenance organizations. And no one has suggested imposing higher taxes on everyone, not just the wealthy, to finance universal coverage. These solutions are not even discussed on the campaign trail lest they alienate voters and interest groups.

At this stage, the various plans should be considered as broad outlines of where the candidates want to go, with details to be worked out later. Voters who put a high priority on covering all or most of the uninsured will prefer the Democrats’ approach, as we do. The chief danger is that the Democrats have a tendency to imply that everyone can be covered with good benefit packages without inconveniencing anyone but the wealthy. Their cost and savings assumptions will need thorough analysis when more detailed plans emerge.

Voters who put a higher priority on reshaping the health care system along free-market lines than on achieving universal coverage will prefer the Republican plans. Those plans’ likely impact on costs will also need to be analyzed when more details emerge. The “magic of the market” may be less than magical.

Given the wide split between Republican and Democratic approaches, the polarized politics in Washington, and the overriding need to find a way out of the morass in Iraq, it will be an uphill battle to achieve consensus on health care any time soon. But at least voters will have a clear choice of which way the candidates are headed.

By Morton Mintz
mintzm@earthlink.net

Nieman Watchdog
COMMENTARY | September 21, 2007
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?s=0440erl1clzons1f

Substantial mainstream reporting on single-payer health insurance should have been triggered–or so one might think–by a succession of studies over the years that establish that Canada’s health-care system saves or improves large numbers of lives while not wasting money on administrative expenses and fat executive-pay packages. Almost without fail, Canada gets higher ratings than the U.S.

In 2000, for example, the World Health Organization examined and rated the health systems of 191 nations. The United States ranked 37th. Canada scored significantly better although it was not outstanding–it placed 30th. But this study was only one of many that had Canada topping the U.S. (Click here and go to pages 152 to 155 in a PDF file for the rankings of all 191 countries.)

Between November 2002 and March 2003, the official statistics agencies of the United States and Canada did their first-ever joint survey of the health status, rates of illness, behavioral risk factors, use of health care, and access to health care. The survey included 3,505 Canadians and 5,183 U.S. residents. The results were analyzed by two associate professors of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“A single-payer national health insurance system would avoid thousands of needless deaths and hundreds of thousands of medical bankruptcies each year,” Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein concluded in the July 2006 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. In addition, U.S. residents turned out to be less healthy than Canadians, with higher rates of nearly every serious chronic disease examined in the survey, including diabetes, arthritis, and chronic lung disease. And more than seven times as many U.S. residents as Canadians reported that cost kept them from getting needed care.

Some other examples:

* In April 2007, the Canadian online medical journal Open Medicine examined the results of 38 major studies that compared health outcomes of patients in Canada and the United States with “diverse problems…including cancer, coronary artery disease, chronic medical illnesses and surgical procedures.” The key finding: “Available studies suggest that health outcomes may be superior in patients cared for in Canada versus the United States, but differences are not consistent.” Yet Canada spends only about 10 percent of its gross domestic product on health care while the U.S. spends approximately 15 percent of its GDP, or 50 percent more, the journal noted. And in 2003 Canadians were spending only 53 percent as much per capita for health care as were Americans: US$3,003 per Canadian v. US$5,635 per American.

* In May, the Commonwealth Fund compared the quality of care, access to it, and other key issues in six countries: the U.S, Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom on such key issues. The U.S. ranked last.

* In July, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out that the U.S. health care system does worse than others that cost far less, including Britain’s, “which spends only about 40 percent as much per person as we do.”

And in August, Associated Press Writer Stephen Ohlemacher wrote:

Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries.

For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles. Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.

“Something’s wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

“A baby born in the United States in 2004 will live an average of 77.9 years. That life expectancy ranks 42nd, down from 11th two decades earlier, according to international numbers provided by the Census Bureau and domestic numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics.”

Also in August, a thoroughly researched lead editorial in the Times called it a “delusion that we have ‘the best health care system in the world,’ as President Bush sees it, or provide the ‘best medical care in the world,’ as Rudolph Giuliani declared.”

Single-payer is government-financed, not government-run, and it is therefore not “socialized,” as are some other universal-care systems. Private physicians, private hospitals, and other private caregivers are paid by the government of Canada, just as their U.S. counterparts are paid under Medicare.

These are simple, instantly-available facts. Yet Americans are deluged by uninformed and false and misleading commentary, ideologically-driven denunciations of “socialized medicine,” and bad-mouthing of Michael Moore and “Sicko.” Here are some examples from a compilation by Caroline Kao in the August “Extra! Update”:

Single-payer healthcare…is frequently described as ‘government-run’ or ‘socialized’ health care or medicine (e.g., US Today, 6/13/07; CNN, 6/25/07; O’Reilly Factor, 6/27/07…

On CNBC (Kudlow & Co., 6/20/07), right-wing filmmaker Stuart Browning mourned the loss of personal choice, saying Moore and HR 676 (a U.S. single-payer bill] supporters “advocate systems in which we would not be able to spend our own money on our own bodies.”

Fox’s Morton Kondracke (Beltway Boys, 6/24/07) warned of a slippery slope from single-payer care to a socialist dictatorship, saying that “Moore basically wants socialized everything…”

The same network’s Sean Hannity called Michael Moore “‘a pathetic propagandist'” who is “‘not even any good at it’ (Hannity and Colmes, 6-19/07).

On Sept. 14, during an hour-long report on “America’s health-care system,” ABC’s 20/20 co-host John Stossel, MediaMatters reported, “interviewed five advocates of free-market approaches to health care but only one advocate of increased government-mandated health coverage. The five free-market advocates were interviewed on air for a total of 6 minutes, 24 seconds, while the lone advocate of a public health system, filmmaker Michael Moore, was interviewed on air for a total of 1:40.”

A few days earlier, New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks wrote three sentences indicating that he shares the dedication of President Bush to the preservation of private insurers no matter what.The first sentence: “Some liberals, believing that government should step in as employers withdraw, support a European-style, single-payer health care system.”

Europe has several different systems of universal health care; Canada has long had single-payer in its purest form. Yet Brooks somehow found it necessary to cross the Atlantic, in a manner of speaking. Of course, associating single-payer with Europe, not to mention liberals, is much more likely to turn off readers on it than would be associating it with our next-door neighbor.

Brooks’s second sentence: “That would be fine if we were Europeans.” Leading readers to imagine themselves as Europeans is confusing and vague (who are these Europeans? Belgians? Dutch? French? Germans? Italians?) and consequently also a more likely turn-off than would be leading readers to imagine themselves as our familiar northern neighbors.

And the third sentence: “But Americans, who are more individualistic and pluralistic, will not likely embrace a system that forces them to defer to the central government when it comes to making fundamental health care choices.”

Really? Since 1965, Medicare has been, as Brooks would have it, forcing all elderly Americans “to defer to the central government.” In the ensuing 42 years, has anyone noticed signs of a rebellion among the “more individualistic and pluralistic” Americans who happen to be Golden-Oldies?

Most importantly: Single-payer is, at bottom, Medicare for all. What evidence would Brooks offer that Medicare for all would not be embraced by, say, the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance? Or by the 40 of 100 Americans found in a Consumer Reports survey to be inadequately insured? Or by the 44 out of 100 Americans, who, in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, identified “health care costs” as their top economic worry?

The lack of mainstream in-depth coverage of universal health-care systems–established long ago by every industrialized nation except our own–has given a pass to sloppy, biased reporting and deceptive, misleading punditry. The impoverishment of our politics and governance–and health-care and pocketbooks–were natural consequences.

Morton Mintz (Nieman ’64) is a senior adviser to the Nieman Watchdog project.

By Morton Mintz
mintzm@earthlink.net

Nieman Watchdog
COMMENTARY | September 21, 2007
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?s=0440erl1clzons1f

Substantial mainstream reporting on single-payer health insurance should have been triggered–or so one might think–by a succession of studies over the years that establish that Canada’s health-care system saves or improves large numbers of lives while not wasting money on administrative expenses and fat executive-pay packages. Almost without fail, Canada gets higher ratings than the U.S.

In 2000, for example, the World Health Organization examined and rated the health systems of 191 nations. The United States ranked 37th. Canada scored significantly better although it was not outstanding–it placed 30th. But this study was only one of many that had Canada topping the U.S. (Click here and go to pages 152 to 155 in a PDF file for the rankings of all 191 countries.)

Between November 2002 and March 2003, the official statistics agencies of the United States and Canada did their first-ever joint survey of the health status, rates of illness, behavioral risk factors, use of health care, and access to health care. The survey included 3,505 Canadians and 5,183 U.S. residents. The results were analyzed by two associate professors of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“A single-payer national health insurance system would avoid thousands of needless deaths and hundreds of thousands of medical bankruptcies each year,” Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein concluded in the July 2006 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. In addition, U.S. residents turned out to be less healthy than Canadians, with higher rates of nearly every serious chronic disease examined in the survey, including diabetes, arthritis, and chronic lung disease. And more than seven times as many U.S. residents as Canadians reported that cost kept them from getting needed care.

Some other examples:

* In April 2007, the Canadian online medical journal Open Medicine examined the results of 38 major studies that compared health outcomes of patients in Canada and the United States with “diverse problems…including cancer, coronary artery disease, chronic medical illnesses and surgical procedures.” The key finding: “Available studies suggest that health outcomes may be superior in patients cared for in Canada versus the United States, but differences are not consistent.” Yet Canada spends only about 10 percent of its gross domestic product on health care while the U.S. spends approximately 15 percent of its GDP, or 50 percent more, the journal noted. And in 2003 Canadians were spending only 53 percent as much per capita for health care as were Americans: US$3,003 per Canadian v. US$5,635 per American.

* In May, the Commonwealth Fund compared the quality of care, access to it, and other key issues in six countries: the U.S, Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom on such key issues. The U.S. ranked last.

* In July, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out that the U.S. health care system does worse than others that cost far less, including Britain’s, “which spends only about 40 percent as much per person as we do.”

And in August, Associated Press Writer Stephen Ohlemacher wrote:

Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries.

For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles. Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.

“Something’s wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

“A baby born in the United States in 2004 will live an average of 77.9 years. That life expectancy ranks 42nd, down from 11th two decades earlier, according to international numbers provided by the Census Bureau and domestic numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics.”

Also in August, a thoroughly researched lead editorial in the Times called it a “delusion that we have ‘the best health care system in the world,’ as President Bush sees it, or provide the ‘best medical care in the world,’ as Rudolph Giuliani declared.”

Single-payer is government-financed, not government-run, and it is therefore not “socialized,” as are some other universal-care systems. Private physicians, private hospitals, and other private caregivers are paid by the government of Canada, just as their U.S. counterparts are paid under Medicare.

These are simple, instantly-available facts. Yet Americans are deluged by uninformed and false and misleading commentary, ideologically-driven denunciations of “socialized medicine,” and bad-mouthing of Michael Moore and “Sicko.” Here are some examples from a compilation by Caroline Kao in the August “Extra! Update”:

Single-payer healthcare…is frequently described as ‘government-run’ or ‘socialized’ health care or medicine (e.g., US Today, 6/13/07; CNN, 6/25/07; O’Reilly Factor, 6/27/07…

On CNBC (Kudlow & Co., 6/20/07), right-wing filmmaker Stuart Browning mourned the loss of personal choice, saying Moore and HR 676 (a U.S. single-payer bill] supporters “advocate systems in which we would not be able to spend our own money on our own bodies.”

Fox’s Morton Kondracke (Beltway Boys, 6/24/07) warned of a slippery slope from single-payer care to a socialist dictatorship, saying that “Moore basically wants socialized everything…”

The same network’s Sean Hannity called Michael Moore “‘a pathetic propagandist'” who is “‘not even any good at it’ (Hannity and Colmes, 6-19/07).

On Sept. 14, during an hour-long report on “America’s health-care system,” ABC’s 20/20 co-host John Stossel, MediaMatters reported, “interviewed five advocates of free-market approaches to health care but only one advocate of increased government-mandated health coverage. The five free-market advocates were interviewed on air for a total of 6 minutes, 24 seconds, while the lone advocate of a public health system, filmmaker Michael Moore, was interviewed on air for a total of 1:40.”

A few days earlier, New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks wrote three sentences indicating that he shares the dedication of President Bush to the preservation of private insurers no matter what.The first sentence: “Some liberals, believing that government should step in as employers withdraw, support a European-style, single-payer health care system.”

Europe has several different systems of universal health care; Canada has long had single-payer in its purest form. Yet Brooks somehow found it necessary to cross the Atlantic, in a manner of speaking. Of course, associating single-payer with Europe, not to mention liberals, is much more likely to turn off readers on it than would be associating it with our next-door neighbor.

Brooks’s second sentence: “That would be fine if we were Europeans.” Leading readers to imagine themselves as Europeans is confusing and vague (who are these Europeans? Belgians? Dutch? French? Germans? Italians?) and consequently also a more likely turn-off than would be leading readers to imagine themselves as our familiar northern neighbors.

And the third sentence: “But Americans, who are more individualistic and pluralistic, will not likely embrace a system that forces them to defer to the central government when it comes to making fundamental health care choices.”

Really? Since 1965, Medicare has been, as Brooks would have it, forcing all elderly Americans “to defer to the central government.” In the ensuing 42 years, has anyone noticed signs of a rebellion among the “more individualistic and pluralistic” Americans who happen to be Golden-Oldies?

Most importantly: Single-payer is, at bottom, Medicare for all. What evidence would Brooks offer that Medicare for all would not be embraced by, say, the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance? Or by the 40 of 100 Americans found in a Consumer Reports survey to be inadequately insured? Or by the 44 out of 100 Americans, who, in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, identified “health care costs” as their top economic worry?

The lack of mainstream in-depth coverage of universal health-care systems–established long ago by every industrialized nation except our own–has given a pass to sloppy, biased reporting and deceptive, misleading punditry. The impoverishment of our politics and governance–and health-care and pocketbooks–were natural consequences.

Morton Mintz (Nieman ’64) is a senior adviser to the Nieman Watchdog project.

By Barbara Ehrenreich
The Huffington Post
Posted September 20, 2007

Bow your heads and raise the white flags. After facing down the Third Reich, the Japanese Empire, the U.S.S.R., Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, the United States has met an enemy it dares not confront — the American private health insurance industry.

With the courageous exception of Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic candidates have all rolled out health “reform” plans that represent total, Chamberlain-like, appeasement. Edwards and Obama propose universal health insurance plans that would in no way ease the death grip of Aetna, Unicare, MetLife, and the rest of the evil-doers. Clinton — why are we not surprised? — has gone even further, borrowing the Republican idea of actually feeding the private insurers by making it mandatory to buy their product. Will I be arrested if I resist paying $10,000 a year for a private policy laden with killer co-pays and deductibles?

It’s not only the Democratic candidates who are capitulating. The surrender-buzz is everywhere. I heard it from a notable liberal political scientist on a panel in August: We can’t just leap to a single payer system, he said in so many words, because it would be too disruptive, given the size of the private health insurance industry. Then I heard it yesterday from a Chicago woman who leads a nonprofit agency serving the poor: How can we go to a Canadian-style system when the private industry has gotten so “big”?

Yes, it is big. Leighton Ku, at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, gave me the figure of $776 billion in expenditures on private health insurance for this year. It’s also a big-time employer, paying what economist Paul Krugman has estimated two to three million people just turn down claims.

This in turn generates ever more employment in doctors’ offices to battle the insurance companies. Dr. Atul Gawande, a practicing physician, wrote in The New Yorker that ”a well-run office can get the insurer’s rejection rate down from 30 percent to, say, 15 percent. That’s how a doctor makes money. It’s a war with insurance, every step of the way.” And that’s another thing your insurance premium has to pay for: the ongoing “war” between doctors and insurers.

Note: The private health insurance industry is not big because it relentlessly seeks out new customers. Unlike any other industry, this one grows by rejecting customers. No matter how shabby you look, Cartier, Lexus, or Nordstrom’s will happily take your money. Not Aetna. If you have a prior conviction — excuse me, a pre-existing condition — it doesn’t want your business. Private health insurance is only for people who aren’t likely to ever get sick. In fact, why call it “insurance,” which normally embodies the notion of risk-sharing? This is extortion.

Think of the damage. An estimated 18,000 Americans die every year because they can’t afford or can’t qualify for health insurance. That’s the 9/11 carnage multiplied by three — every year. Not to mention all the people who are stuck in jobs they hate because they don’t dare lose their current insurance.

Saddam Hussein never killed 18,000 Americans or anything close; nor did the U.S.S.R. Yet we faced down those “enemies” with huge patriotic bluster, vast military expenditures, and, in the case of Saddam, armed intervention. So why does the U.S. soil its pants and cower in fear when confronted with the insurance industry?

Here’s a plan: First, locate the major companies. No major intelligence effort will be required, since Google should suffice. Second, estimate their armed strength. No doubt there are legions of security guards involved in protecting the company headquarters from irate consumers, but these should be manageable with a few brigades. Next, consider an air strike, followed by an infantry assault.

And what about the two to three million insurance industry employees whose sole job it is to turn down claims? Well, I have a plan for them: It’s called unemployment. What country in its right mind would pay millions of people to deny other people health care?

I’m not mean, though. If we had the kind of universal, single-payer, health insurance Kucinich is advocating, private health insurance workers would continue to be covered even after they are laid off. As for the health insurance company executives, there should be an adequate job training program for them — perhaps as home health aides.

Fellow citizens, where is the old macho spirit that has sustained us through countless conflicts against enemies both real and imagined? In the case of health care, we have identified the enemy, and the time has come to crush it.

Contacts:
Merton Bernstein
Founding Member, National Academy of Social Insurance
Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis
bernstein@wulaw.wustl.edu
508-896-8383

By Jessica Martin
Washington University in St. Louis News & Information

Sept. 18, 2007 — “Universal health care is getting the attention it deserves, but unfortunately the proposals receiving the most attention ignore the ‘Big Leak,'” which is the enormous non-benefit costs incurred by health care providers who must match their billions of billings with thousands of differing private health care plans,” says Merton C. Bernstein, a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. “Putting everyone under the Medicare umbrella would eliminate that leak,” he says.

“Medicare’s single-payer system would reduce non-benefit spending by doctors, hospitals, clinics, laboratories and health care insurers by about $300 billion a year, providing funds to insure everyone without additional outlays.”

Bernstein is available to discuss current universal health care proposals as well as the Medicare-for-all option. His current comments on health insurance follow:

Health insurance companies, unlike Medicare, deal with vast administrative costs:

“Hundreds of private insurers offer innumerable differing plans,” Bernstein says.

“Those differences usually reflect marketing considerations rather than medical goals. In contrast, Medicare has one set of charges in a region. That helps explain Medicare’s low administrative costs — about 2 percent of benefit outlays. In addition, Medicare does not have the marketing and advertising costs that add significantly to private insurer outlays. In dealing with Medicare, medical care providers need master only one set of rules and schedule of charges — a clear gain in efficiency.”

Giving patients a choice:

“Some contend that their proposals offer patients a choice,” he says. “To start, patients don’t choose their coverage, their employers do. Even when there are several plans on offer, the employer chooses which ones to include. Further, the employer chooses who administers the plans. That’s where much of insurance competition occurs — who can offer the lowest cost to the employer/chooser; that turns on who can produce lowest benefit payout.

“The choice patients cherish most is who will be their doctor and which hospital will provide care. Many private insurance arrangements limit those choices. Under Medicare, the patient chooses.”

Proposed plans rely on tax breaks and other subsidies:

“The major proposals depend upon tax breaks and other subsidies to make coverage appear more affordable,” Bernstein says. “This merely shifts costs to other plan participants or taxpayers. This increase total costs and thereby make the programs themselves less affordable.”

Contacts:
Merton Bernstein
Founding Member, National Academy of Social Insurance
Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis
bernstein@wulaw.wustl.edu
508-896-8383

By Jessica Martin
Washington University in St. Louis News & Information

Sept. 18, 2007 — “Universal health care is getting the attention it deserves, but unfortunately the proposals receiving the most attention ignore the ‘Big Leak,'” which is the enormous non-benefit costs incurred by health care providers who must match their billions of billings with thousands of differing private health care plans,” says Merton C. Bernstein, a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. “Putting everyone under the Medicare umbrella would eliminate that leak,” he says.

“Medicare’s single-payer system would reduce non-benefit spending by doctors, hospitals, clinics, laboratories and health care insurers by about $300 billion a year, providing funds to insure everyone without additional outlays.”

Bernstein is available to discuss current universal health care proposals as well as the Medicare-for-all option. His current comments on health insurance follow:

Health insurance companies, unlike Medicare, deal with vast administrative costs:

“Hundreds of private insurers offer innumerable differing plans,” Bernstein says.

“Those differences usually reflect marketing considerations rather than medical goals. In contrast, Medicare has one set of charges in a region. That helps explain Medicare’s low administrative costs — about 2 percent of benefit outlays. In addition, Medicare does not have the marketing and advertising costs that add significantly to private insurer outlays. In dealing with Medicare, medical care providers need master only one set of rules and schedule of charges — a clear gain in efficiency.”

Giving patients a choice:

“Some contend that their proposals offer patients a choice,” he says. “To start, patients don’t choose their coverage, their employers do. Even when there are several plans on offer, the employer chooses which ones to include. Further, the employer chooses who administers the plans. That’s where much of insurance competition occurs — who can offer the lowest cost to the employer/chooser; that turns on who can produce lowest benefit payout.

“The choice patients cherish most is who will be their doctor and which hospital will provide care. Many private insurance arrangements limit those choices. Under Medicare, the patient chooses.”

Proposed plans rely on tax breaks and other subsidies:

“The major proposals depend upon tax breaks and other subsidies to make coverage appear more affordable,” Bernstein says. “This merely shifts costs to other plan participants or taxpayers. This increase total costs and thereby make the programs themselves less affordable.”

Wall Street Journal
Letter to the Editor
September 19, 2007; Page A19

In regard to John Stossel’s Sept. 13 editorial-page commentary “Sick Sob Stories:” By focusing on the narrow subject of bone marrow transplantation, Mr. Stossel is missing the big picture of the major problems in health care in the U.S.

He fails to comment on the fact that there are 47 million people in the U.S. who do not have any health care. While promoting health care for profit, he neglects to mention that 31% of health-care costs in this country are for administrative salaries and advertising. Salaries of HMO executives (along with their lawyers and lobbyists) are obscene. The previous CEO of United Health Care made $1.6 billion (including back dated stock options) last year. This is not where health-care dollars should go. The current for-profit health-care system is not working.

The only solution is to eliminate the HMOs and go to a single-payer system that does not have to be administered by the government. The savings would increase reimbursements to health-care providers (and, it is hoped, stem the annual loss of primary care physicians) so that there would be greater access to care for more patients with fewer hassles.

J. David Gaines, M.D., FACP
Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine
Yale University School of Medicine
New Haven, Conn.