By John McVey
The Journal (WV)
March 25, 2009
SHEPHERDSTOWN — The panelists at the “Health Care for All – How?” forum Tuesday evening started with the premise that the way Americans pay for health care needs to be changed.
Their question was, “How do we get there from here?”
Dr. Margaret Flowers of Maryland Physicians for a National Health Program and Richard McVay of Penn Action were the panelists for the forum, which was sponsored by Eastern Panhandle Single-Payer Action Network and the Shepherd University Health Center.
Hannah Geffert, an adjunct professor at Shepherd, was the moderator.
Almost 100 people attended the symposium in the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies on the Shepherd campus.
Flowers, who left her pediatrics practice to work full time on a single-payer health care system, gave a bit of the history of how health care is paid for in America.
She said that during World War II, companies were prohibited from giving raises to employees, so in order to attract and keep the best workers, businesses began offering benefits, such as paid health care insurance, to their employees.
“No other country ties health insurance to employers like we do,” she said.
The health care provider dynamic changed in the 1980s, Flowers said. Private, for-profit health care providers became dominant.
“Patients became customers, and health care became a commodity,” she said.
This system is very good at making money but not very good at providing health care, Flowers said.
To her, the solution is a single-payer, publicly funded, privately delivered, health care system, namely, the expansion of Medicare to cover everyone in the country from cradle to grave.
The shift would take place all at once, without a transition period in which private and public insurance companies would compete for customers.
However, she said there is a large, well-heeled special interest group that opposes such a plan – insurance companies.
“They love mandatory insurance, subsidies and a public-private partnership,” Flowers said. “They don’t like a single-payer program.”
She and McVay agree that the time is ripe to push for reforming the way Americans pay for health care.
“We have to get it done this year,” McVay said. “The alignment is right. The mood of the people is right. The next big issue is health care, and we can’t straighten out the economy without health care reform.”
He also agreed that there is a big battle ahead because of monied interests opposing any kind of reform that would take the private insurance companies out of the picture.
However, McVay would like to see a hybrid form of payer system, at least to start. There would be both private insurance companies and a public system competing for customers, although he said the single-payer system eventually would win out.
Responding to a question from the audience, McVay said his group wants to start at the state level.
“Politically, it makes sense to start with the states, build a system, a model, and then take it to the federal level,” he said.
Minimum wage and Social Security started with the states, then were adopted by the federal government, McVay said.
The key to changing the system is getting business on board, he said.
McVay and Flowers also agreed without hesitation that health care is a human right.
“The way (health care) is delivered in this country is immoral,” McVay said.
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