By TIM WILKIN, Staff writer
Albany Times Union
First published: Sunday, March 30, 2008
Dr. Richard Propp, formerly of Albany Medical College and active in Albany civic affairs, chairs the Capital District Alliance for Universal Health Care Inc.
The group advocates on behalf of adopting a universal health care system in New York and a national single-payer system in the United States.
Q: What would you like to see happen in health care?
A: I would like to see a very simple thing happen. I would like to see this country do the right thing on health care and think of people first. That is most embodied in (Michigan Congressman) John Conyers’ bill, H.R. 676, which is an expanded and improved Medicare for all.
Q: What is H.R. 676?
A: It would cover all necessary medical care, carried out in doctors’ offices and nonprofit hospitals, just like it is now. The only thing it socializes is the funding of health care, just like Medicare. It does not socialize the practice of medicine — that is one of the bugaboos that conservatives get concerned about.
Everyone will be covered and there will be no bills and no co-pays. So that immediately eliminates about $300 billion worth of indirect and direct overhead that is in our system now.
Q: Do you find resistance to this program?
A: Yes and a lot of the resistance is hard to understand. I guess if you follow the money you can understand it more. The strongest groups opposed to it are the private insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies.
Q: Does the average person realize how serious health care is?
A: In August of 2004, I came across a paper (from Harvard Medical School) that showed that if you did not have insurance, your eight-year survival from diabetes, heart failure or high blood pressure was 50 percent higher than if you were insured. If you were 50 and uninsured, your eight-year mortality was about 18 percent. If you had health insurance, your eight-year mortality rate was 12 percent. That was alarming to me.
Q: Can you talk about the economy and how it relates to health care?
A: Right now the economy is flat. Wages are flat but health care premium costs are going up 10 to 20 percent a year.
Q: You are very concerned about this. How big of a problem is it?
A: This is a huge problem. Even right now the state government is considering whether to approve the GHI-HIP bid to go for-profit. And we are very concerned about that because that is 180 degrees wrong from what we are thinking. We even wonder if there is a conflict of interest.
Supposedly we are going to have a budget shortfall. The governor is already counting on $500 million a year from the sale of GHI-HIP to venture capitalists. We’re wondering if his people are sitting on the review board and he is counting on the money for his budget, is that a conflict of interest? Some people say yes, some people say no.
Blue Cross Blue Shield, when they went for-profit in 2002, the CEO went from a salary of $1.5 million in 2002 to a salary of $6 million in 2006. How many homes does he need?
Q: Where does that money come from?
A: It comes from the people who pay the premiums. That is not my idea of health care. How many more millions uninsured do we have in 2008 than we had in 2002? A couple million, 2 or 3 million more uninsured. That certainly did not solve the uninsured problem. Why would it? They want to insure people they can make some money off of.
Q: How many people in New York are uninsured?
A: 2.7 million people out of 19 million are uninsured and another equal number are under-insured as they get hit with a bad disease.
Q: How alarming is this to you — if something does not happen, things will get worse?
A: Well, it is alarming. The thing that is upsetting is the gurus of health care say that as un-insurance creeps into the middle class, which it’s doing, and the recession gets worse, as it is doing, you will have so many people uninsured or under-insured that the government will have to do something and yet, at the national level, there doesn’t seem to be that sense of urgency and the policies they are projecting are about 180 degrees from the right thing.
Telling poor people they have to buy insurance, to my way of thinking, is not humane policy-making.