By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 23, 2007

I was making small talk with Dan and Sharon Brodrick in a waiting area filled with anxious-looking patients on the first floor of St. Thomas Hospital. Mrs. Brodrick seemed tired, but she managed a smile. Her husband, a former truck driver who is now an ordained minister, was the talkative one.

“We found out five days after her 56th birthday,” he said. “How’s that for a happy birthday?”

While maintaining a pleasant facade for the outside world, the Brodricks, married 37 years and still deeply in love, are spinning toward the abyss.

“We’re in big trouble,” said Mr. Brodrick.

Mrs. Brodrick learned last May that she had cancer of the duodenum, and it had already spread to her liver and pancreas. Not only is the prognosis grim, but the medical expenses will soon leave the couple destitute. Mrs. Brodrick has no health insurance.

The emotional toll has been nearly as devastating as the physical. Mrs. Brodrick told her husband that she wasn’t ready to leave him. “I don’t want to die,” she said. When he told her they had to cling to their faith in God, she replied, “I know that God can take care of this. But how’s he going to do it?”

The American Cancer Society has been campaigning to raise awareness of the desperate plight of people trying to deal with cancer without health insurance. I offer Dan and Sharon Brodrick as Exhibit A.

The Brodricks never had much money, but they raised two boys and managed to buy a modest home in Gainesboro, a rural town about 90 miles east of here. Dan Brodrick severely damaged his back in an accident at work several years ago and is disabled. His wife has suffered from a variety of illnesses.

But by carefully managing their meager income, they have lived in reasonable comfort. “With a little bit of savings,” said Mr. Brodrick, “and with what I’ve been drawing in disability, we figured we’d be all right.”

But the absence of health insurance for Mrs. Brodrick left a gaping hole in their financial plan, and they knew it. She had been covered by her husband’s health insurance while he was driving a truck. But that coverage ended when he was forced to retire.

“We tried to buy insurance for her,” said Mr. Brodrick. “We applied to dozens of companies. But they wouldn’t touch her because she already had health problems.”

Without insurance, Mrs. Brodrick received treatment for her various ailments under a special program for uninsured patients at St. Thomas. But the cancer diagnosis was an entirely different story, a step for the Brodricks into a realm of dizzying, unrelieved horror.

First came the biopsy, accompanied by reassuring comments from doctors. Then came word that the tumor was indeed malignant. That was followed by surgery.

“They opened her up, and then they closed her right up again,” said Mr. Brodrick.

Not only had the cancer metastasized, it was moving very aggressively. Various estimates were given, each one shorter than the last, about how long Mrs. Brodrick might live.

While his wife was being prepped for chemo, Mr. Brodrick sat in the corner of another room and spoke about what it was like to have one’s life all but literally blown apart.

“It tears you down,” he said. “You’d like to fight this with your bare hands, but you can’t. We’ve been married 37 years Sept. 2, and when I think about it, it was the quickest 37 years I’ve ever seen go by in my life. It went by in a flash. And we have leaned on each other that whole time.”

The hospital is not billing the Brodricks for its costs. “But,” said Mr. Brodrick, “I’ve still got to pay the doctors’ bills and pay for the drugs. And the drugs are very expensive.”

He reeled off a long list of charges that are coming at him like machine-gun fire, bills that he cannot afford to pay.

“So we’re selling the house,” he said. He sat quiet for a moment, then added in a soft voice, “You shouldn’t have to go live in a tent somewhere just because you don’t have insurance.”

He said he wanted to tell his story publicly because he knew there were millions of others without health insurance, and that there are many families, like his own, facing the long, dark night of devastating illness.

“Something has to be done,” he said.

Mr. Brodrick was able to get his wife into a renowned cancer center in the Midwest to get another opinion on the course of treatment she was receiving.

“They said it was the perfect treatment for her and they wouldn’t change a thing,” he said. “They said the success rate with that treatment was 5 percent or less.”

He looked at me. “We’ve got faith in God,” he said. “Without that you might as well throw yourself off a cliff, because there’s nothing else left.”

By Peter Phillips and Bridget Thornton
MinutemanMedia.org
Published Friday, October 19, 2007

Health and disability insurance companies are systematically cheating the American public. Michael Moore’s top-grossing movie Sicko is one example of the growing concern surrounding health care in the US.

The number of Americans without health insurance reached forty-seven million at last count, or sixteen percent of the population. The cost is rising two to three times faster than inflation and is the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the country. We pay more and get less medical care than the rest of the industrialized world. The total per capita health care cost in the US exceeds the expense per person in all other full care countries.

The Institute of Medicine estimates that as many as eighteen thousand Americans die prematurely each year because they do not have health insurance. This figure does not include those who die prematurely each year because their insurers delay, diminish, or deny payment for promised benefits. Reports about people who die unnecessarily from withheld services seldom receive broad coverage in the corporate media. Lack of media coverage has led to a nation of people uninformed about how national health and disability policies are controlled by the private insurance industry and how government regulators are powerless to do anything about it.

If industrialized countries around the world offer health care as a basic right, why is it not happening in the US? Private insurance companies are motivated to make as much money as possible and do so by systematically delaying, diminishing, and denying payment for promised services, and blaming individuals for their own misfortune.

On the boards of directors of the nine largest insurance companies are one hundred thirteen people. These directors are some of the richest in the world. They hold one hundred fifty past and/or present positions with major financial or investment institutions in the US, including such major firms as J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Lord Abbett, Bank of America, and Merrill-Lynch. Additionally, these board members have connections to some of the largest corporations in the world including General Motors, IBM, Ford, Microsoft, and Coca Cola. The combined affiliations among the one hundred thirteen health insurance directors represent revenue of over 2.5 trillion dollars 2006.

As some of the richest most powerful citizens in America, health care executives dominate health policy with their campaign donations and active lobbying. They spend millions to keep themselves in the insurance business despite overwhelming evidence that we would all be better off without them. They use these profits to propagandize the American public and influence voters through scare tactics of “socialized medicine” and long delays of service that supposedly occur in single-payer systems.

The single-payer advocacy group, Physicians for a National Health Program, reports that private insurance corporations spend an enormous amount of money on business-oriented expenses rather than health-related investments. A 2003 study in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that spending for administrative costs associated with health care amount to over $320 billion per year or about thirty-one percent of health care costs in the US overall. The administrative costs in the Canadian national healthcare system amount to 16.7 percent, or about half of the overhead in the US.

Countries with common pool or single-payer systems provide similar levels of service to every person. In such countries, it is the responsibility of society as a whole to provide health care for each individual.

Americans have a choice. We can continue with a high-cost profit-driven private insurance system leaving millions to languish without care, and millions more to face the frustrations of systematic delays, diminished care, and denials of promised benefits. Alternatively, we can build a common pool health care system that provides necessary care to everyone — for less than what we are now paying.

Let’s find and support politicians who will provide universal health care outside of corporate fat-cat control.

Read Practices in Health Care and Disability Insurance: Delay, Diminish, Deny, and Blame by Peter Phillips and Bridget Thornton

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored. Bridget Thornton is a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program. All statements above are fully documented in their new study “Practices in Health Care and Disability Insurance: Delay, Diminish Deny and Blame — www.projectcensored.org.

Gore’s New Statement Is Clear: It’s Time for Universal, Single-Payer Healthcare

The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee thanks Al Gore for his forceful new words in support of the kind of universal, non-profit, single-payer healthcare that this country desperately needs–and that is succeeding in nearly every other industrialized democracy.

The statement reflects a growing national consensus that a national, non-profit insurance system would clearly out-perform the private insurance corporations that spend up to one-third of their overhead on overhead and profits…and that it is long past time to put an end to the nation’s healthcare crisis.

On this issue, however, the public is far ahead of most of the political class. A March New York Times/CBS poll found that the vast majority of Americans want a total restructuring of the healthcare system, and preferred a single-payer system to the current private insurance system 47% to 38%. Unfortunately, many politicians continue to accept money from health insurance corporations, and push plans that mandate Americans to purchase expensive and inefficient private insurance products.

“Al Gore has long been a champion of the environment–and now he’s a champion of America’s patients. There is only one solution to our healthcare crisis, and that is the kind of guaranteed, non-profit, single-payer health insurance that we know works,” said Zenei Cortez, RN, a member of CNA/NNOC’s Council of Presidents.

Called “Healthcare Is A Right,” Gore released the following statement on his Current television channel:

I strongly support universal, single-payer, government-provided–or, government-funded–healthcare. It doesn’t mean the government runs it, it has competition among the different providers. But I just think that we’ve long since reached the stage that its immoral to put people in a situation where they cannot get the medical care they need because their incomes aren’t high enough. I think it ought to be a matter of right and our current system just doesn’t work, its way too expensive. The quality of healthcare is excellent for those who have enough money to buy the very best, but lower-income and low middle-income Americans are not getting good healthcare and so many now can’t afford the private health insurance that they’re going without insurance, millions and millions of people. And I think that to eliminate the incredibly ridiculous cost of all this unnecessary paperwork and different standards for different companies, it is time to have universal health insurance.

George Bush doesn’t want you to think about sick children. He wants you thinking about the fine print of health insurance policies. He wants us to debate types of coverage, premiums and the size of networks, and whether we can afford catastrophic, comprehensive, limited, mini-med or scheduled health insurance. But George Bush doesn’t want you thinking about all the sick children left behind in America. And insurance companies don’t want you thinking about all the children they will bar from care, just so they can maximize profits.

Senior fellows at the Rockridge Institute, including cognitive linguistGeorge Lakoff, author of the best-selling “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” have joined together to examine the hidden truths in our raging national debate over health care. And to bring their new report, “The Logic of the Health Care Debate” to life, the Rockridge Institute has produced a video spot that dramatizes the way in which our current health care system is based on excluding nearly half of the American family — concluding with the provocative question: “Which one of your children would you leave unprotected?”

The video, written by Rockridge senior fellow Glenn W. Smith and produced by Margie Becker of Austin, TX, can be viewed online at

www.RockridgeInstitute.org/health

by DrSteveB
DailyKos
Fri Oct 19, 2007 at 04:47:52 AM PDT

As an epidemiologist I am trained to analyze risk. One of the types of analysis we use in studying a cohort, such as the House of Representatives, is Relative Risk.

Statistics proves that the vote was not bipartisan as some Repuglican apologists in the media are trying to claim.

Relative Risk is:

The proportion of diseased people amongst those exposed to the relevant risk factor divided by the proportion of diseased people amongst those not exposed to the risk factor. This should be used in those cohort studies where those with and without disease are followed to observe which individuals become diseased.

In this case, the cohort is the House of Representatives. The Relative Risk (RR) is the risk of an event (developing a disease; voting against SCHIP) relative to exposure (being a Repuglican). Relative risk is a ratio of the probability of the event occurring in the exposed group versus the control (non-exposed) group, or in this case the probability of the voting against SCHIP for Repuglicans compared to Democrats.

In epidemiology we typically try to reduce the analysis to what is called a “2 by 2 table”

Therefore:

Running the statistical calculations, we find that the Relative Risk = 89.8, with a 95% confidence interval from 22.6 to 357.8; P-value < 0.0001.

What this means is that the probability of voting against SCHIP is about 90 times greater if the Representative is a Repuglican then if they are a Democrat.

Got that?

The probability of a Republican voting against SCHIP are 90 times greater than the probability of a Democrat voting against SCHIP. That is NOT bipartisan!

And yes, it is highly statistically significant, with the chance that this would occur by random chance is less than 1 in 10,000. If we were to re-run the experiment 100 times, 95 times the relative risk would be between 22 and 357.

Just how bad is this? Well the relative risk of lung cancer and smoking is 11, and is often cited as one of the highest we see in medicine.

The vote was not bipartisan.

Republicans are a very toxic exposure.

The way to prevent this (the cure) is elect a lot more Democrats.

By Bryce Benson
Chico News Review

At a routine checkup last December, a local doctor advised Sandra Goulart to wait a year before having necessary blood work done.

Ten and a half months later, Goulart is counting the days until she turns 65. Dec. 7, she’ll finally be eligible for Medicare, and she’ll be able to stop living in fear of getting sick, and even have the mammograms she said she has skipped.

She has insurance, but like many Americans she is underinsured, something Dr. Don McCanne, speaking at a health care forum last Thursday (Oct. 11) in the Chico City Council chambers, said 28 percent of privately insured Americans experience.

McCanne is a senior health policy fellow for and past president of the group Physicians for a National Health Program. The event was sponsored by the California Nurses Association and the League of Women Voters. OneCareNow, a grassroots campaign supporting single-payer health insurance, and the Butte County Healthcare Coalition, which has long advocated for the same, were there in force.

Even before her doctor visit last year, Goulart felt the burden of being underinsured. When she had a skin cancer removed from her nose, her insurer paid roughly $150 of the $3,000 to $4,000 bill.

“Oh, this is one of the worst companies out there,” McCanne told Goulart after the forum, when she showed him a letter from MEGA Life and Health Co., informing her that her monthly payment would increase to $619 beginning Nov. 1, 2007.

The only reason she has a policy with what she called a “junk insurance” company is that no other insurance company would take her, she said. Twenty-five years ago she had the virulent form of skin cancer, melanoma, and since then it has been nearly impossible to obtain health insurance.

She couldn’t believe her insurer “had the nerve” to raise her premium for her last month in the private health insurance world but said that out of fear she’s keeping the plan so that at least she’ll have “something to fight” if her health goes south and MEGA won’t pay.

“It’s scary that people are waiting to turn 65 so they’ll be eligible to receive adequate health insurance,” Goulart said.

If the underinsured are scared, McCanne said, think how the roughly 47 million Americans with no insurance at all must feel. They live every day with a feeling of insecurity.

“Who wants to see Medicare totally abolished?” McCanne asked his audience of around 100.

When everyone kept their hands in their laps, he asked sarcastically, “What, are you a bunch of socialists?”

He did that to prove a point. In any discussion of single-payer health insurance, it inevitably is equated with socialism. In reality, McCanne said, the plan is “Medicare for everyone.”

In a week (meaning today, Oct. 18), McCanne said, the House of Representatives will vote on whether to override President Bush’s veto of an expanded State Children’s Health Insurance Plan, the highly successful program that is equivalent to Medicare for children of low-income families. The battle over SCHIP represents the increasingly more prevalent debate over whether private or government-run programs are more efficient and affordable.

Even though most Americans support government health-care programs such as SCHIP, Medicare and Medicaid, President Bush, who enjoys government-funded health insurance himself, is steadfast in his efforts to privatize not only SCHIP but most social programs, like Social Security, McCanne said.

In California, 6.5 million people are uninsured, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to implement universal health care, too. However, his approach is much different.

There are two options for health care reform, McCanne said. The current privatized system can be expanded, or a single-payer system can be organized.

Schwarzenegger’s plan expands on the current system by requiring all Californians to buy health insurance, much like the law requiring drivers to have auto insurance. But, just as with auto insurance, McCanne said, not everyone will buy health insurance; thus not everyone will be covered.

Schwarzenegger’s answer is to fine those who don’t comply.

This is a backward approach, McCanne said. If people can’t afford insurance, how will they pay the fine?

A similar program isn’t working in Massachusetts, despite the fact many politicians have labeled it the model for health care reform, McCanne said. In fact, the level of uninsured actually increased in 2006 to more than 10 percent of the state’s population.

“We can no longer afford the waste and inefficiency, the high overhead and outrageous executive salaries of the private insurance industry,” McCanne said. “Only reforms that end our reliance on defective private coverage and assure guaranteed coverage for all will work.”