Rose Ann DeMoro
The Times (of London)
August 21, 2009
The bizarre US healthcare debate, replete with wild distortions of the NHS, must seem incomprehensible to many in the UK. News reports have emphasised images of enraged conservatives fearing fabricated “death panels” or traumatised elderly people urging “hands off my Medicare”.
They face mostly Democratic legislators and some liberal advocacy groups who are circling their wagons around an embattled President Obama to defend their proposed minor revisions to the status quo after already surrendering more comprehensive reform.
To other industrialised countries, this fear of government having a role in protecting the health and safety of its citizens must seem especially hard to fathom. Among leading nations, only in the US is healthcare not a fundamental right, but bartered for profit by a maze of corporations.
The result is about 45 million Americans with no health coverage and tens of millions more denied medical care because their insurer won’t pay for it.
President Obama has had no trouble describing the problem. “We are held hostage at any given moment by health insurance companies that deny coverage or drop coverage or charge fees that people can’t afford,” he said in Montana in mid-August. But from the outset Mr Obama dismissed the call for a systemic transformation, deciding instead to seek support from conservative legislators and negotiate with the largest healthcare corporations in the hope of neutralising their opposition.
What’s left is a plan that will force the uninsured to buy private insurance, with subsidies for those on low incomes and limited constraints on high pricing and the denials of treatment that characterise the present faltering insurance-based system. In sum, it looks like another huge corporate bailout, after the one for the banks, for an equally unpopular insurance industry.
As a result, mobilising activists has proved a challenge, as the White House and Congress have found out in recent weeks as they struggle to counter those denouncing them from the right. Even the grassroots network built by Mr Obama that set new standards for campaigning last year has failed to produce much enthusiasm for his health plan.
America’s nurses and many doctors continue to press for wider reform, to a national or single-payer system that would look familiar to the rest of the industrial world. It is still possible. But time is running out.
Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of the California Nurses Association/ National Nurses Organising Committee, the largest US union of nurses