By MARK A. DUNLEA
Albany Times Union
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
America’s pundits used to deride the old Soviet Union for propping up obsolete factories and industries in the name of jobs.
We don’t hear such criticisms about President Barack Obama and the Democrats’ decision to prop up health insurance companies in the debate over universal health care. Yet our system of health insurance is costing us hundreds of billions of dollars annually, tying up the health care system in paperwork, and contributing to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans annually.
An April 20th news article (“Health reform tough call”) focuses on whether Congress will agree to the Democrats’ call for a public option, allowing Americans the choice of obtaining insurance through a government-sponsored plan. The other major change, with more bipartisan support, is to mandate that everyone has to obtain or purchase insurance.
Nowhere does the article, from The Associated Press, mention the universal health care systems that most of the industrial world already has. A single-payer system merely means that one program pays all bills — just like Medicare — eliminating the need for private health insurance companies. Most serious health policy experts, starting with Obama, admit that single payer would be the best system, in terms of covering everyone, controlling costs and ensuring both quality of care and freedom of choice in choosing doctors and providers. The politicians just don’t believe they can stand up to the insurance companies, so they want to hide this solution from the public debate.
Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton all tried but failed to enact some sort of universal health care. Obama’s demand that private health insurance continue to play a major role will kill universal health care once again.
In recent decades, many states have proudly announced that they have enacted “universal health care” systems. The media tends to dutifully report that these reforms are a model for the rest of the country. In a short period of time, each of these proposals — in Vermont, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Oregon, Minnesota, Florida — collapsed because costs escalated much faster than anticipated while the number of uninsured people declined much slower than expected. They failed to control costs out of a desire to avoid taking on the insurance and drug companies as well as other special interests. And the “subsidized” insurance plans they created offered inferior coverage at prices still too high for many Americans.
Obama and the rest of the Democrats seem committed to repeating these mistakes. They have pulled up chairs at the table for the insurance and drug companies to make sure they are happy with the final solution. Obama also has sought to exclude single-payer advocates.
About one in five dollars in the America economy are spent on health care — much more than the rest of the industrial countries, all of which arguably have better performing health care systems. Reforming one-fifth of the economy means that money has to be moved around. No special interest will willingly agree to a smaller share of the pie. There is where political leadership is needed.
Failure to eliminate for-profit health insurance would doom us once again to lose the struggle for universal health care. We need to define universal health care as meaning that everyone has a right to such services, period — no discussions about creating “affordable policies.” Obama needs to start listening to the American people and have the courage to stand up for real change.
Mark A. Dunlea is co-chair of Single Payer New York and executive director of the Hunger Action Network of New York State.