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NYT Rounds Up ‘Left-Leaning Economists’ for a Unicorn Hunt

NYT Rounds Up ‘Left-Leaning Economists’ for a Unicorn Hunt

By Doug Henwood
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, FAIR.org, Feb. 17, 2016

With Hillary Clinton ramping up her attacks on Bernie Sanders as a budget-buster—in the February 11 debate, she claimed  his proposals would increase the size of government by 40 percent—the New York Times (2/15/16) offered a well-timed intervention in support of her efforts: “Left-Leaning Economists Question Cost of Bernie Sanders’ Plans.”

While the “left-leaning” is no doubt meant to suggest critiques from those who would be inclined to sympathize with Sanders, all the quoted economists have ties to the Democratic establishment. So slight is their leftward lean that it would require very sensitive equipment to measure.

Opinion pieces critical of Sanders often begin with a pledge of allegiance to his “impracticality.” This story, by Times reporter Jackie Calmes, is an “objective,” newsy version of that:

“With his expansive plans to increase the size and role of government, Senator Bernie Sanders has provoked a debate not only with his Democratic rival for president, Hillary Clinton, but also with liberal-leaning economists who share his goals but question his numbers and political realism.”

Though Sanders wants to increase federal spending on infrastructure, college tuition and childcare, as well as other programs, the bulk of his proposed increase would be for establishing a single-payer healthcare system, and that’s what Calmes’ piece focuses on. It would replace the current mix of multiple forms of public insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, state and local programs) and private insurance with a unitary federal system, much like what Canada has. It would not nationalize doctors and hospitals, as in Britain; only the payment side would be socialized. Sanders refers to it as Medicare for All, which is a simplification, but close enough for politics.

The liberal-leaning economists that Calmes rounds up suggest that Clinton may have been too modest in her accusation that Sanders wants to jack up the size of government by 40 percent. No, Calmes warns that “the increase could exceed 50 percent, some experts suggest, based on an analysis by a respected health economist that Mr. Sanders’ single-payer health plan could cost twice what the senator…asserts.”

As if that wasn’t scary enough, Calmes turns to mockery: “Alluding to one progressive analyst’s criticism of the Sanders agenda as ‘puppies and rainbows,’ Mr. Goolsbee said that after his and others’ further study, ‘they’ve evolved into magic flying puppies with winning Lotto tickets tied to their collars.’”

The theme of magic was further developed in a piece by New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman, “My Magic Unicorn” (2/16/16), in which the word “unicorn” appears six times (not counting the headline). Krugman’s column, which denounces Sanders’ proposals as hopelessly unrealistic, refers to Calmes’ news story for support, a news story that itself reads like an op-ed in disguise. [Krugman illustrated his column with an image of this tapestry: Detail from “The Unicorn Defends Itself” (The Cloisters). If in his metaphor a single-payer healthcare system is a unicorn, then presumably the people poking it with spears are establishment journalists.]

The “Mr. Goolsbee” quoted in the story is Austan Goolsbee, who was a long-time adviser to Barack Obama before he became president, and then served on Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. (During the 2008 campaign, Goolsbee was reported as having assured the Canadian government that Obama’s anti-NAFTA talk was “more reflective of political maneuvering than policy”—New York Times, 3/4/08.) Now Goolsbee teaches economics at the University of Chicago’s business school and is a consultant to hedge funds. A very left-leaning resume there.

And the “progressive analyst” who came up with the “puppies and rainbows” line is Ezra Klein, who in mid-January wrote a harshly disparaging piece, “Bernie Sanders’s Single-Payer Plan Isn’t a Plan at All,” on the website he co-founded, Vox (1/17/16). How times change: As long-time FAIR contributor Seth Ackerman showed in an incisive analysis (Jacobin, 1/25/16), Klein was once a strong proponent of a single-payer scheme.

In a 2007 piece for the American Prospect (4/22/07), Klein explored what he called “the best healthcare systems in the world,” including Canada’s, looking for lessons for the US. (Krugman liked the piece enough to put it on a 2012 syllabus for a Princeton class on the welfare state.) Klein’s conclusion, expressed in his opening sentence, was that while medicine is hard, health insurance is simple: We should emulate these other systems that achieve both universal coverage and cost control, like those of Canada, France, Germany and the UK. Though he now holds Sanders’ advocacy of single-payer in disdain, Klein specifically praised Canada’s single-payer system, citing a 2003 paper by Steffie Wooldhandler, Terry Campbell and David Himmelstein in the New England Journal of Medicine (8/21/03) that found that administrative costs were over three times as high in the US than in Canada, mainly because of the inefficiencies of private health insurance. Eliminate private insurance and you enjoy hundreds of billions in savings.

The “respected” health care economist—it’s funny how journalists stick that handle in front of some names and not others—that Calmes cites is Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University, who, as she discloses, “advised the Clintons in the 1990s.” Indeed he did; he served in Bill’s cabinet where, according to his Emory faculty bio, he “coordinated all financial estimates and program impacts of President Clinton’s healthcare reform proposals for the White House.”

Sanders has proposed paying for his single-payer health insurance program mainly by raising taxes on the rich and imposing a 6.2 percent payroll tax on employers and a 2.2 percent income tax on households (while fully exempting lower-income households and partly exempting middle-income ones from the tax). Those tax increases would replace current spending on private insurance, so it would be very wrong to call them new spending.

Thorpe’s paper argues that Sanders underestimates the cost of his single-payer health insurance scheme by close to half. More realistic assumptions would require substantial tax increases across the board and result in lower wages for the presently uninsured as employers compensate for the new payroll tax. Frightening, if true, and Calmes and her headline writer frame the article to persuade us that it is.

Woolhandler and Himmelstein, authors of the 2003 article on administrative costs that Ezra Klein used to like, are not persuaded by Thorpe. In a Huffington Post piece (1/29/16), they find his estimates of administrative savings from a shift to a single-payer system too low and his assumptions of an increase in demand for healthcare too high. He ignores the cost of tax breaks that would disappear under single-payer and assumes no savings on drugs and medical devices, despite the government’s strong bargaining position as the exclusive purchaser. (Calmes alludes to their critique in the piece with a single sentence: “Mr. Thorpe and Sanders aides and allies have been battling online.” The words “battling online” link to the Woolhandler/Himmelstein piece; a print reader would be totally in the dark.)

As Woolhandler and Himmelstein point out, in earlier studies—one done for the state of Missouri, and another for the National Coalition on Health Care—Thorpe projected large savings from single-payer reform. Now this former Clinton adviser finds the opposite.

There’s a political angle to Calmes’ piece as well, which she uses longtime Democratic economist Henry Aaron to deliver. (Aaron is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank that a congressional staffer once described to me as “a graveyard for conservative Democrats.”) Aaron calls the idea of single-payer a “fairy tale” in the current political climate. Citing the testimony of “other economists in a ‘lefty chat group’ he joins online,” Aaron believes that were Sanders elected, he’d destroy his political capital by fighting such a doomed fight.

I’m familiar with this line of argument from a liberal chat group I used to hang out with online (it takes its off-the-record secrecy with great seriousness)—it may be the same one, but I can’t tell for sure. It goes like this: The right so dominates the present scene that one can do nothing but play defense, hoping to salvage what remains of social spending but never daring to ask for more. Political capital, in this account, can only dwindle when put to work; unlike other forms of capital, it never pays returns. The right never thought that way when it was plotting its ascendancy from the 1950s through the 1970s.

Calmes gave the last word to Thorpe, who concludes from a failed attempt to bring single-payer to Vermont that it would be unworkable on a national scale. Vermont’s plan wasn’t really single-payer; providers would still have had to contend with multiple payers, thereby limiting administrative savings, and the state would have little bargaining power with drug and device manufacturers. The experience of a small state in a big country is hardly conclusive.

What might be more persuasive is the experience of our northern neighbor, a country very much like ours. Canada covers almost all its population at a cost of 10.2 percent of GDP. Even after Obamacare, about a tenth of the US population is uninsured, but that incomplete coverage costs us 16.4 percent of GDP.

Britain’s system costs 8.9 percent of GDP, a little over half what we pay. Both countries have longer life expectancies than we do. But we should be afraid of the unicorns.

Doug Henwood is the author of “My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency.”

You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or write to public editor Margaret Sullivan at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes or @Sulliview). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

http://fair.org/home/nyt-rounds-up-left-leaning-economists-for-a-unicorn-hunt/

PNHP note: Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) is a nonpartisan educational organization. It neither supports nor opposes any candidates for public office.

The Only Way the US Can Ever Get Affordable Health Care

By John Geyman, M.D.
Truthout, Feb. 17, 2016

Now that Bernie Sanders has brought forward his progressive agenda, including real health care reform through a single-payer universal Medicare for all program, the knives are out from the Republicans as well as Hillary Clinton to distort and discredit this option with false information.

Going forward, we have three basic alternatives to further reform our health care system: (1) continue with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with improvements as needed (which Clinton supports with barely a hint of what those changes might be); (2) the Republican “plan,” including repeal of the ACA and emphasizing market-based “fixes,” such as health savings accounts, selling insurance across state lines, and further privatization of both Medicare and Medicaid; and (3) National Health Insurance (NHI) through a Medicare-for-all plan, as currently embodied in HR 676, legislation pending in the House of Representatives.

Let’s cut through the smoke and mirrors of the debate and compare each alternative in terms of costs, affordability, and what we get in terms of access, quality, and sustainability.

First, looking at costs, we have experience with market approaches to cost containment over the last three-plus decades – none have worked tocontrol either costs or prices. The ACA, with virtually no price controls, has given us, with various government subsidies, six years for private insurers, hospitals, drug companies, and others in the medical-industrial complex to expand their markets with minimal oversight.

Private health insurers have bulked up, consolidated, gamed the new “system” for profits and shareholder returns even as they complain of not making enough money and threatening to withdraw from the ACA’s exchanges. (1) The CEO of the largest insurer, UnitedHealthcare, Stephen Hemsley, pocketed $66.1 million ($254,328 per day) total compensation in 2014. (2)

Republican policies have accelerated privatization of Medicare and Medicaid, adding higher burdens of administrative overhead and profits at public expense. Their policies are based on the concepts that markets can fix our problems and patients’ demands are at the heart of inflating health care costs. Hence their reliance on “consumer directed health care,” with its high-deductible, low-value policies which have failed for many years.

You can’t believe most of the claims that are being made about the costs of single-payer NHI. Clinton is saying that the middle class will be hit with a big tax increase without mentioning what patients and families will save and get with NHI. She says that Sanders’ numbers for savings for typical American families under NHI “don’t add up.” (3) Some economists are also jumping on the bandwagon to discredit NHI. Paul Krugman, still thinks it is “not politically feasible” because of the political and economic power of the medical-industrial complex, and worries about “disruption for patients” with the ACA, but doesn’t acknowledge the huge gains that NHI would bring with far more efficiency than our current multi-payer system. (4) Economist Kenneth Thorpe, an Emory University professor who served in the Clinton administration, claims that NHI would break the bank, and cost $1 trillion more a year than estimated as he grossly underestimated savings on overhead, drug costs, and other government expenses while assuming a grossly exaggerated increase in utilization by patients. (5)

Despite demagoguery on the issue, we have solid information on the costs – and savings – of NHI. The landmark 2013 study by Gerald Friedman, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, estimated that implementation of single-payer NHI will save $592 billion annually by cutting administrative waste of private insurers ($476 billion) and reducing pharmaceutical prices to European levels ($116 billion). Those savings would be enough to cover all the uninsured and provide comprehensive coverage for all other Americans, even including dental and long-term care. Co-payments and deductibles will be eliminated, savings will fund retraining of displaced workers and phasing out investor-owned for-profit delivery systems over a 15-year period. (6)

How will this be paid for? Table 1 proposes a progressive financing plan under which 95 percent of Americans will pay less than they do now for insurance premiums, deductibles, co-payments, and out-of-pocket payments for health care. Only 5 percent of high-income Americans will pay more. The payroll tax will become the main health care tax for people with annual incomes below $225,000 – $1,500 for those with incomes of $50,000, $6,000 for those earning $100,000, and $12,000 for those with incomes of $200,000.

With NHI, all Americans will have full choice of doctors and hospitals, quality of care for the whole population will improve, bureaucracy will be sharply reduced, and we will finally have a more accountable and sustainable system. (7) Employers will be relieved of their burden of providing health insurance for their employees and may be able to convert some of their previous contributions to employer-sponsored insurance to employees’ forgone wage increases as they gain a healthier workforce and become more competitive in global markets. Physicians and other health professionals will have a simplified billing system and more time for direct patient care.

We already pay much more in taxes each year for health care than we realize. In their just-published article in the American Journal of Public Health, Drs. Woolhandler and Himmelstein report that the US government, at taxpayer expense, is now paying 65 percent of the total annual tab for health care – $2.1 trillion last year, $6,560 per person, more per capita than people pay in taxes in any other advanced country with universal health insurance. As they report, much of this taxation is invisible to us, such as government spending to buy private health coverage for public employees and tax subsidies for private employer-sponsored insurance and other privately paid care. (8)

We have to recognize renewal of opposition to NHI for what it is – Clinton’s conflicts of interest and involvement with Wall Street, despite her denials (e.g. $2.8 million in speaker fees from the health care industry between 2013 and 2015) (9); corporate media beholden to Wall Street; and a Republican consensus to block whatever President Obama does at every turn, without giving us any assurance that they will govern in the public interest.

This really is a perilous moment in the history of US health care. The ACA is fundamentally flawed – a bailout to a failing private health insurance industry and other corporate stakeholders in the medical-industrial complex. Tweaks around the edges of the ACA will never bring us cost containment in a sustainable way. If Republicans gain more control of Congress, and even the presidency in 2017, health care for much of our population will get much worse in terms of access, affordability, and quality. Research over many years has shown that the majority of Americans want NHI.

We have to come to grips that we cannot afford our present multi-payer financing system. There is more than enough money in the system to pay for it, but its waste and profiteering prevent us from getting what we are already paying for. We have to get the politics right to get the system we need – single-payer financing that we all can afford.

Order a copy of The Human Face of Obamacare

Visit www.johngeymanmd.org and www.copernicus-healthcare.org

References:

1. Mathews, AW. Insurers flag deepening losses on health law. Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2016.
2. SEC 14A Schedules, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, 2014.
3. Nelson, CM, Meckler, L, Nicholas, P. Clinton, Sanders clash over cost of plans. Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2016.
4. Krugman, P. Op-Ed. Health reform realities. New York Times, January 18, 2016.
5. Himmelstein, DU, Woolhandler, S. On Kenneth Thorpe’s analysis of Senator Sanders’ single-payer reform plan. The Huffington Post, January 29, 2016.
6. Friedman, G. Funding H. R. 676: The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act. How We Can Afford a National Single-Payer Health Plan. Physicians for a National Health Program. Chicago, IL. July 31, 2013. Available at: htpp://www.pnhp.org/sites/default/files/Funding%20HR%20676_Friedman_final_7.31.13.pdf
7. Ibid # 6.
8. Woolhandler, S, Himmelstein, DU. Single-payer health plan wouldn’t cost U. S. more. Philadelphia Inquirer, February 5, 2016.
9. Jilani, Z. Hillary Clinton’s single-payer pivot greased by millions in industry speech fees. The Intercept, January 13, 2016.

http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/34871-the-only-way-the-us-can-ever-get-affordable-health-care

PNHP note: Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) is a nonpartisan educational organization. It neither supports nor opposes any candidates for public office.

Let’s dispense with myths about ‘Medicare for all’

By Dave Zweifel
The Capital Times, Madison.com, Feb. 17, 2016

Is Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ idea to give Americans “Medicare for all” the bad idea that so many other politicians and media commentators claim it is?

As one who has editorially promoted a national single-payer health care system for the better part of my newspaper career, I suggest that most of the naysayers don’t know what they’re talking about.

The single-payer idea — and that’s what Medicare is for Americans over the age of 65 — has been around since 1948 when Harry Truman was president. Truman viewed it as a needed complement to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s social reforms, including the establishment of Social Security.

It’s been proposed several times since, but the medical establishment, including the insurance and pharmaceutical powers, has become so entrenched and influential that Congress has never given it serious consideration.

It’s curious that opposition to single-payer universal health coverage is a uniquely American malady. Our neighbor to the north, Canada, has had it for decades and Canadians like to point out that not one of their citizens has ever gone bankrupt because he or she got sick. We can’t say that in the U.S., where tens of thousands of families have been financially devastated by unconscionably uncovered medical bills. 

Meanwhile, our allies in Europe and other parts of the industrialized world long ago declared health care coverage a right of every one of their citizens. Yet most of our politicians and many citizens continue to demonize the idea. Even Obamacare, which has been a small step toward universal coverage, has been vilified, even though 11 million more people now have health insurance.

The nonpartisan Physicians for a National Health Program, which has been pushing for an American single-payer system for decades, a few weeks ago felt compelled to answer the misrepresentations that have popped up not only among the partisans running for office, but in several of the nation’s newspapers whose editorial writers and columnists can’t grasp what Sanders is talking about.

First, there’s the canard that a single-payer system would cost American families bundles of money. As the physicians point out, in reality single-payer would pay for itself. By replacing hundreds of insurers and thousands of different private health plans, each having their own marketing, enrollment, billing, actuaries and other duplicated services, with a single, streamlined, tax-financed, nonprofit program, more than $400 billion in health spending would be freed up to guarantee coverage to all of the 30 million Americans currently still uninsured and to upgrade the coverage of everyone else, including eliminating deductibles and co-pays.

One study concludes that 95 percent of U.S. households would come out ahead.

There’s also the claim that the American people are opposed to single-payer. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey showed that 58 percent of Americans support Medicare for all. That result jibes with other national surveys.

The biggest claim knocking the single-payer idea is that in the United States, it’s unrealistic or “politically infeasible.” There’s no doubt that it would face considerable opposition, particularly from the private insurers, the pharmaceutical cabal, and others who profit handsomely off the current health care system.

But should the prospect of a tough battle to once and for all fix America’s health care problems mean that the fight’s not worth fighting? If that be the case, we still wouldn’t allow women to vote, our elderly would still be living in poverty without a program called Social Security and there would be no Medicare even for folks over 65. They were all difficult fights, all considered unwinnable in their times, but the American people held their elected officials accountable and won those fights.

There’s a reason health care costs per capita in the U.S. are nearly double the costs in other developed countries around the world. We’ve created a system that’s inefficient and geared to maximizing profits for layer upon layer of bureaucratic administration.

A single-payer system would fix that. It’s not, as so many like to claim, a complicated and expensive alternative, but the exact opposite.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times (Madison, Wis.). Contact him at dzweifel@madison.com.

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/dave_zweifel/plain-talk-let-s-dispense-with-myths-about-medicare-for/article_7b1d4b57-dcbc-5f28-83a6-c133c17b58f9.html

Single payer misdiagnosed

By Daniel Schaffer, M.D.
The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Wash.), Letters, Feb. 13, 2016

Robert Samuelson (Feb. 8) claims to be an economist, but he has some obvious blind spots, health care financing being one.

He says a single-payer system such as Medicare for All would not save any money, even though every other industrialized nation using one has been able to achieve significant savings. He says that the overhead of for-profit insurance companies is 6 percent, when every study that has been conducted, including that of the Rand Foundation, has put overhead at 20 percent to 30 percent. It’s about 3 percent for Medicare.

He makes the unsubstantiated claim that universal care will result in over-usage that will negate any savings. In Japan, people utilize the health care system three times more often than Americans do, yet Japan’s system represents only 11 percent of gross domestic product, in contrast to 18 percent for the United States.

Conservatives in other countries love publicly funded health care because it saves money and takes the burden of providing health care off the shoulders of business. Are their conservatives smarter than ours, or are ours just blinded by a misguided ideology?

Some type of universal coverage is inevitable because the current system is destined to crash.

Dr. Daniel Schaffer resides in Spokane.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/feb/13/universal-health-care-coverage-inevitable/

Criticism of Bernie Sanders’ health plan missed the mark

By Richard Weiskopf, M.D.
Syracuse.com (N.Y.), Letters, Feb. 16, 2016

I would like to respond to the Feb. 11 column by David Brooks about President Obama in which Brooks mentions Sen. Bernie Sanders’ health care plan to expand Medicare and have universal coverage. Brooks wrote, “Sanderscare would take employer coverage away from tens of millions of satisfied customers, destroy the health insurance business and levy massive new tax hikes. This is epic social disruption.”

According to Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), under the Affordable Care Act, 28.5 million people were uninsured in the first six months of 2015. And tens of millions more are underinsured. Under Obamacare, many more people are now covered, but it is not nearly sufficient. Many who are covered have policies that cover only catastrophic costs, leaving them to pay not only their insurance premiums but much of their health care costs. It is true, as Brooks points out, that people would lose coverage through their employers. He does not make clear however, that all would gain coverage under the government single payer plan. And yes, taxes would have to be raised to pay for it, but that would be balanced by not having to pay for the expensive premiums we have now.

Under the present system of multiple health insurers, a large percentage of of the money that private insurance companies collect in premiums is spend for administrative costs. Our current Medicare which covers the elderly is more efficient. A much lower percentage goes for administrative costs leaving more money to spend directly on health care.

Brooks’ dismissal of the single payer health plan advocated by Sanders fails to mention these important points.

For more information about the governmental single payer health plan, go to www.PNHP.org.

Dr. Richard Weiskopf is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program. He resides in Syracuse.

http://www.syracuse.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/02/criticism_of_bernie_sanders_health_plan_missed_the_mark_your_letters.html

PNHP note: Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) is a nonpartisan educational organization. It neither supports nor opposes any candidates for public office.

Medicare’s History Belies Claim That Medicare-for-All Would Disrupt Care

Medicare’s History Belies Claim That Medicare-for-All Would Disrupt Care

It Disrupted Jim Crow, but Otherwise the Transition Was Smooth

By Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein
The Huffington Post, February 16, 2016

Hillary Clinton and others charge that Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan would disrupt and threaten Americans’ health care. But the smooth rollout of Medicare-for-Seniors in 1965 — which many had also predicted would bring chaos — belies that charge.

Medicare, signed into law on July 30, 1965, went live just 11 months later. By then, 18.9 million seniors had signed up, 99 percent of those eligible.

To accomplish this feat (largely without computers) the Social Security Administration mailed an information leaflet and sign-up cards preprinted with each individual’s name and Social Security number (see example below) to seniors on the Social Security and railroad retirement rolls, as well as Civil Service annuitants and a million other seniors identified through IRS records.


Image: Social Security Administration History Archives

To contact hard-to-reach seniors, the federal government reached out to nursing and retirement homes, employers, unions and civic organizations offering to help people apply; organized hundreds of local information meetings; and enlisted postal workers, forest rangers and agricultural representatives to help locate residents of remote areas. The Office for Economic Opportunity hired 5,000 low-income seniors who went door-to-door in their neighborhoods.

All told, Medicare’s overhead costs for the first year totaled only $120 million (equivalent to $882 million in 2015). By comparison, setting up the insurance exchanges for private coverage under Obamacare cost more than $6 billion — about seven times as much. But even the modest figure for Medicare’s start-up costs is an overstatement since it includes the cost of processing six months’ worth of medical bills, not just the enrollment costs. Moreover, Medicare and Medicaid (which was passed at the same time) displaced several smaller federal health assistance programs, saving about $383 million (in 2015 dollars) on their overhead costs.

Even as it became clear that Medicare enrollment was proceeding smoothly, many saw disruption ahead. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a group to the right of the American Medical Association (AMA), threatened that 50,000 doctors would boycott Medicare. (Today, the AAPS is sounding the alarm that Medicare-for-All would take away “what remains of your doctor’s liberty.”) Wall Street Journal headlines warned that “Most MDs Won’t Cooperate,” and foresaw a “Patient Pileup,” as “flocks of Medicare beneficiaries … suddenly clog the nation’s 7,200 hospitals.”

None of this came to pass. Doctors continued to care for elderly patients, mostly accepted Medicare payment, and soon came to rely on Medicare as an economic pillar of their practices. Even the AMA, which had spent millions fighting Medicare’s passage (including an infamous ad campaign featuring then-actor Ronald Reagan) cooperated in the program’s implementation. Hospitals ran smoothly, with only a handful reporting more than minor of problems.

But Medicare did cause a major disruption, it disrupted Jim Crow hospital care.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act banned racial discrimination in facilities receiving federal funds (which included most hospitals), but enforcement was lax until Medicare. Many hospitals, particularly in the South, still refused to care for black patients at all, while others relegated them to separate entrances and shabby basement wards. Black physicians were often barred from hospital staffs, and in many locales ambulance services were separate, and distinctly unequal.

With Medicare on the horizon, federal officials made it clear to hospitals that segregated hospitals would be excluded from the program. In the spring of 1966, three months before Medicare took effect, 51 percent of American hospitals were still segregated. By August of that year, 99.5 percent had desegregated.

While Medicare ended overt racial segregation in hospitals, segregation by insurance remains legal and common — and often perpetrates de facto racial segregation. Most of New York City’s prestigious academic medical centers — and many hospitals elsewhere — maintain separate clinic systems, and even separate wards, for Medicaid patients (the 33 million uninsured need not apply).

Medicare-for-All would give all Americans complete and equal coverage, completing the disruption of hospital segregation that Medicare began a half century ago.

Aside from that welcome disruption, Medicare-for-All would greatly simplify life for hospitals and doctors. Instead of the laborious and expensive task of billing patients and their insurers for each Band-Aid and aspirin tablet, hospitals would receive a lump-sum budget, much as we pay for a fire station. Doctors would bill one plan, using one billing form instead of the dozens of complex billing schemes — each with its own rules and redundant documentation requirements — that we face today.

Most important, Medicare-for-All would end many of the disruptions that our patchwork coverage system currently inflicts on patients. All Americans would, for the first time, enjoy a free choice of doctor and hospital, and would never again be forced to change doctors merely because their insurance changed, or their doctor was dumped from their insurer’s network. And patients’ lives would no longer be disrupted by financial ruin from medical bills.

Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein, professors of health policy and management at the City University of New York School of Public Health at Hunter College and Lecturers in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program, a nonpartisan organization. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those organizations’.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steffie-woolhandler/medicares-history-belies-_b_9245484.html

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

‘Nuf said. Time for Medicare-for-All.

Medicare’s History Belies Claim That Medicare-for-All Would Disrupt Care

Medicare’s History Belies Claim That Medicare-for-All Would Disrupt Care

It Disrupted Jim Crow, but Otherwise the Transition Was Smooth

By Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein
The Huffington Post, February 16, 2016

Hillary Clinton and others charge that Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan would disrupt and threaten Americans’ health care. But the smooth rollout of Medicare-for-Seniors in 1965 — which many had also predicted would bring chaos — belies that charge.

Medicare, signed into law on July 30, 1965, went live just 11 months later. By then, 18.9 million seniors had signed up, 99 percent of those eligible.

To accomplish this feat (largely without computers) the Social Security Administration mailed an information leaflet and sign-up cards preprinted with each individual’s name and Social Security number (see example below) to seniors on the Social Security and railroad retirement rolls, as well as Civil Service annuitants and a million other seniors identified through IRS records.


Image: Social Security Administration History Archives

To contact hard-to-reach seniors, the federal government reached out to nursing and retirement homes, employers, unions and civic organizations offering to help people apply; organized hundreds of local information meetings; and enlisted postal workers, forest rangers and agricultural representatives to help locate residents of remote areas. The Office for Economic Opportunity hired 5,000 low-income seniors who went door-to-door in their neighborhoods.

All told, Medicare’s overhead costs for the first year totaled only $120 million (equivalent to $882 million in 2015). By comparison, setting up the insurance exchanges for private coverage under Obamacare cost more than $6 billion — about seven times as much. But even the modest figure for Medicare’s start-up costs is an overstatement since it includes the cost of processing six months’ worth of medical bills, not just the enrollment costs. Moreover, Medicare and Medicaid (which was passed at the same time) displaced several smaller federal health assistance programs, saving about $383 million (in 2015 dollars) on their overhead costs.

Even as it became clear that Medicare enrollment was proceeding smoothly, many saw disruption ahead. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a group to the right of the American Medical Association (AMA), threatened that 50,000 doctors would boycott Medicare. (Today, the AAPS is sounding the alarm that Medicare-for-All would take away “what remains of your doctor’s liberty.”) Wall Street Journal headlines warned that “Most MDs Won’t Cooperate,” and foresaw a “Patient Pileup,” as “flocks of Medicare beneficiaries … suddenly clog the nation’s 7,200 hospitals.”

None of this came to pass. Doctors continued to care for elderly patients, mostly accepted Medicare payment, and soon came to rely on Medicare as an economic pillar of their practices. Even the AMA, which had spent millions fighting Medicare’s passage (including an infamous ad campaign featuring then-actor Ronald Reagan) cooperated in the program’s implementation. Hospitals ran smoothly, with only a handful reporting more than minor of problems.

But Medicare did cause a major disruption, it disrupted Jim Crow hospital care.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act banned racial discrimination in facilities receiving federal funds (which included most hospitals), but enforcement was lax until Medicare. Many hospitals, particularly in the South, still refused to care for black patients at all, while others relegated them to separate entrances and shabby basement wards. Black physicians were often barred from hospital staffs, and in many locales ambulance services were separate, and distinctly unequal.

With Medicare on the horizon, federal officials made it clear to hospitals that segregated hospitals would be excluded from the program. In the spring of 1966, three months before Medicare took effect, 51 percent of American hospitals were still segregated. By August of that year, 99.5 percent had desegregated.

While Medicare ended overt racial segregation in hospitals, segregation by insurance remains legal and common — and often perpetrates de facto racial segregation. Most of New York City’s prestigious academic medical centers — and many hospitals elsewhere — maintain separate clinic systems, and even separate wards, for Medicaid patients (the 33 million uninsured need not apply).

Medicare-for-All would give all Americans complete and equal coverage, completing the disruption of hospital segregation that Medicare began a half century ago.

Aside from that welcome disruption, Medicare-for-All would greatly simplify life for hospitals and doctors. Instead of the laborious and expensive task of billing patients and their insurers for each Band-Aid and aspirin tablet, hospitals would receive a lump-sum budget, much as we pay for a fire station. Doctors would bill one plan, using one billing form instead of the dozens of complex billing schemes — each with its own rules and redundant documentation requirements — that we face today.

Most important, Medicare-for-All would end many of the disruptions that our patchwork coverage system currently inflicts on patients. All Americans would, for the first time, enjoy a free choice of doctor and hospital, and would never again be forced to change doctors merely because their insurance changed, or their doctor was dumped from their insurer’s network. And patients’ lives would no longer be disrupted by financial ruin from medical bills.

Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein, professors of health policy and management at the City University of New York School of Public Health at Hunter College and Lecturers in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program, a nonpartisan organization. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those organizations’.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steffie-woolhandler/medicares-history-belies-_b_9245484.html

‘Nuf said. Time for Medicare-for-All.

Why haven’t the exchanges done more for us?

Cancer Patients Snagged in Health Law’s Tangled Paperwork

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar
Associated Press, February 15, 2016

Hundreds of thousands of people lose subsidies under the health law, or even their policies, when they get tangled in a web of paperwork problems involving income, citizenship and taxes. Some are dealing with serious illnesses like cancer. Advocates fear the problems, if left unresolved, could undermine the nation’s historic gains in health insurance.

The government says about 470,000 people had coverage terminated through Sept. 30 last year because of unresolved documentation issues involving citizenship and immigration. During the same time, more than 1 million households had their financial assistance “adjusted” because of income discrepancies. Advocates say “adjusted” usually means the subsidies get eliminated.

“When people get that bill for a full-price plan, they panic and they cancel the insurance,” said Elizabeth Colvin of Foundation Communities, an Austin nonprofit that serves low-income people. Some worry the problem could undermine the law’s insurance markets, now in their third year.

“These problems can grow, and they can contribute to undermining consumer faith in the system, and that could lead to attrition,” said Rachel Klein of Families USA, an advocacy group that supports the health law.

Pressured by a Republican-led Congress hostile to Obama’s overhaul, the administration is highly sensitive to criticism that some people may be getting benefits they’re not legally entitled to. But Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell recently acknowledged the paperwork tangle is more likely to trap the innocent than fraudsters.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HEALTH_OVERHAUL_PAPERWORK_TRAP

***

Costs, changes led Obamacare enrollment to fall short of earlier estimates

By Jayne O’Donnell
USA TODAY, February 16, 2016

The number of people who signed up for health insurance for 2016 on the state and federal exchanges was up to 40% lower than earlier government and private estimates, which some say is evidence that the plans are too expensive and that people would rather pay a penalty than buy them.

In 2010, the non-partisan Rand Corporation estimated 27 million people would have exchange policies this year and the Congressional Budget Office at that time was estimating 21 million for 2016. CBO even said last June that 20 million people would have plans purchased on the exchanges this year. Just 12.7 million signed up for plans, however, by the end of open enrollment Jan. 31 and about 1 million people are expected to drop their plans — or be dropped when they don’t pay their premiums.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/02/15/costs-changes-led-obamacare-enrollment-fall-far-short-estimates/80061050/

***

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Participation in the ACA exchanges is coming in at a much lower level than were the original predictions. Furthermore, significant numbers drop out each year, and many find that they receive significantly less financial assistance than they expected at enrollment.

Since the exchanges are not working as hoped, perhaps we need incremental innovations that would improve their functioning – you know, those incremental improvements some politicians and policy wonks keep telling us is all that we need to make ACA a universal, affordable system.

But what incremental change would expand coverage to absolutely everyone? What incremental change would make the plans affordable for everyone? What incremental change would ensure that access to care is affordable when facing very high deductibles? What incremental change would ensure that everyone would remain covered by their plans throughout the year, especially when there are so many different reasons that individuals lose their plans?

As mentioned many times before, the flawed health care financing infrastructure is not amenable to simple incremental patches. Keeping the same infrastructure will only perpetuate the severe deficiencies of our dysfunctional financing model. Many will remain uninsured. Many will not be able to afford health care, even if insured. And, worst of all, many will suffer and die.

Maybe we should start tallying the financial hardship, suffering and death in increments so that we can gradually feed that information to the incrementalists who insist this is a small price to pay for keeping intact the model that protects so well our private insurance industry. Maybe then they will understand the evil of defaulting to incrementalism.

Single payer would fix it.

What Obamacare Can’t Do

Single-payer is still the best way to achieve universal health care

By Adam Gaffney, M.D.
Jacobin, Feb. 11, 2016

As the Democratic presidential primary race tightens to a virtual tie nationally, the debate over single-payer health care is growing increasingly tense — and consequential.

In the past several weeks, Hillary Clinton and a host of pundits and policy wonks have articulated an evolving set of arguments about why “Medicare for All” is not affordable, achievable, or worth the effort. A number of rejoinders have made the case that it is, on the contrary, all of these things. More recently, a new line has emerged: yes, current reforms fall short of universal health care, but no, single-payer isn’t necessary to achieve it.

Clinton argued as much at the most recent debate: “I don’t want us to start over again . . . I want to build on the progress we’ve made. Go from 90 percent coverage to 100 percent coverage.” Scott Lemieux outlined a similar vision in a Guardian article last Friday headlined “Americans don’t need single payer healthcare to get universal coverage.” “Single payer healthcare,” Lemieux writes, is not interchangeable with “European-style healthcare.”

He notes that some continental European countries have non-single-payer systems that achieve universal coverage through a combined public/private model. We could thus follow the same path by expanding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) rather than charting a new, more disruptive one (i.e. single-payer).

But while the incremental approach might sound appealing, staying on the track set out by the ACA would be the wrong move. As other countries show, trying to achieve equitable, universal health care within the confines of a private insurance system is bound to result in disappointment.

The Dutch Road

Perhaps more than any other, the Netherlands’ health system is held up as a potential model for the US. Lemieux mentions it as a possible framework. And Paul Krugman describes the Netherlands (and Switzerland, which has a similar system) as having “near-universal coverage even though they rely on private insurers.”

This isn’t a novel pitch. In 2008, as health care reform was under intense debate in the US, an article in the journal Health Affairs noted that “Americans may be interested in the Dutch system” insofar as “it combines mandatory universal health insurance with competition among private health insurers.”

The Netherlands archetype is fairly new. Before 2006, Dutch health care wasn’t single-payer, but it was predominantly public: a social health insurance program covered some two-thirds of the population, and the wealthier minority relied on private insurance.

Though two-tiered, as André den Exter describes in “The Right to Health at the Public/Private Divide,” insurance status at this stage affected neither hospital reimbursement nor waiting time (and benefits were basically the same). Thus, he notes that “there was no incentive [for providers] to treat patients differently.”

If the concern was greater equity, the Dutch could have moved toward a single-payer system, perhaps by first extending the social insurance scheme to everyone. Instead, as Exter describes, the “radical” 2006 reforms did the exact opposite: the social insurance scheme was replaced by an individual mandate–based system for everybody, “carried out by for-profit insurance companies.”  In other words, Obamacare before Obamacare: a regulated, subsidized marketplace of competing private insurance plans (that, to be sure, cover more of the population at a lower cost than in the US).

The 2006 Dutch reforms were based in part on a school of health policy thought associated with the US economist Alain Enthoven, a man who got his start analyzing military strategy for the Pentagon before becoming the foremost proponent of competing private-sector health plans (so-called “managed competition”).

Outside the Netherlands, Enthoven’s ideas have influenced health reform efforts in both his home country — first under Bill Clinton, then President Obama — and in Britain, where Margaret Thatcher began the push to marketize the National Health Service (NHS) in the late 1980s. The 2006 Dutch reforms should therefore be seen as part of a wider, if uneven, neoliberal transition in health systems internationally.

A 2011 article in the New England Journal of Medicine captures the flaws of the Dutch system well. It counts four main shortcomings. First, the 2006 reform did not control expenditure growth — instead, the unwieldy attempt to introduce quasi-market competition “produced high administrative costs and complexity.” Second, uninsurance was not fully eliminated, so some residents still defaulted on their premium payments (and could then be dropped by their insurance company).

Third, the system of “consumer choice,” in which the Dutch are expected to shop around for new insurance plans, didn’t deliver higher customer satisfaction. In a poll cited by the authors, 65 percent of those insured said they had “low or very low levels of trust in private plans.” And finally, while the reform was intended to introduce more market competition, it still brought heavy doses of regulation and bureaucracy.

A less critical September 2015 review in the Journal nonetheless offered some similar conclusions on the Netherlands’ turn away from a public system: “Almost 10 years in, the reforms have not led to the desired cost containment or a leap in quality,” while at the same time “individuals increasingly worry about cost-related access problems.”

The reality is that fragmented, multi-payer systems invariably demand costly administrative apparatuses. A recent comparative study of hospital administrative costs in the US, Canada, and several European countries makes this particularly evident. Among other high-income countries, the United States was found to spend the most on hospital administration. Not far behind it, however, was the Netherlands:


Himmelstein DU, Jun M, Busse R, et al. “A Comparison Of Hospital Administrative Costs In Eight Nations: US Costs Exceed All Others By Far.” Health Affairs (2014).

Nor are these sums chump change. Indeed, in 2010, according to this study, 1.43% of US GDP went to hospital administration alone.

Now, it might seem surprising that England is right behind the Netherlands — doesn’t it have a single-payer system? To a large extent it still does. But as previously noted, Thatcher and her successors worked to inject an “internal market” into the NHS that — along with other pro-market initiatives — has created a much more administratively wasteful and privatized NHS in England. In contrast, the two nations with the lowest administrative spending — Canada and Scotland — have straightforward single-payer systems. The investigators thus conclude:

“In the United States, administration consumes an increasing share of hospital budgets — a share that is far higher than in nations with simpler and less market-oriented payment schemes . . . Reforming the US health care system so that it operated on a single-payer basis could result in large savings on administration.”

Equity and Solidarity

Not all universal health care systems are created equal. Genuine universal health care includes the following four features, at a minimum: universal coverage (i.e. none left uninsured or uncovered), the elimination of financial impediments to care (i.e. no copayments and deductibles), comprehensive coverage (including services currently uncovered or poorly covered in the US), and no inferior “tiers” of access for particular economic or demographic groups.

Achieving this would cost real money. Yet the transition to a single-payer system could achieve efficiency savings that would, as health policy scholars Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein note in a recent op-ed, be “enough to cover all of the uninsured and eliminate co-payments and deductibles for the rest of us.” They estimate upwards of $400 billion annually in efficiency savings.

In contrast, reforms that fall short of single-payer — whether it’s the Dutch model of managed competition, “all-payer” initiatives, or even the “public option” — would not (among other shortcomings) generate those savings, making it more difficult to achieve universal health care worthy of the name.

Yet there is also a much larger political and philosophical issue at stake. For egalitarians, a just health care system must treat all equally. This is difficult — if not impossible — in systems with upper and lower tiers of coverage, with barriers that impede access to particular facilities or doctors for particular groups, and in which a for-profit ethos encourages excluding certain individuals or treatments. Exter raises similar concerns about equity in the case of post-2006 Netherlands:

“[T]he new liberalized health insurance scheme has resulted in preferential health care arrangements that significantly challenge the notion of equity or solidarity within the Dutch health care system . . . Given the limited options of unhealthy and more needy individuals, a substantial inequality in access to health care between several socioeconomic groups will likely emerge over time in the Dutch system.”

The same outcome could be expected in the US.

The Dutch system’s deficiencies also reveal the pitfalls of counterpoising a private US system to the “universal” systems of other high-income nations. Even if European countries’ health systems outperform the United States’, speaking of “European” health systems in the aggregate obscures more than it reveals.

If the Netherlands model demonstrates anything, it’s that some forms of “universal” health care are less worthy of emulation than others. Expanding access the Dutch way (itself based on US policy ideas) would leave intact much of the waste of the current system — without achieving the equity implied by the term “universal health care.”

A single-payer national health program must therefore remain a central goal for progressives and the Left. Placating the private insurance industry isn’t a price we can afford to pay.

Adam Gaffney is a physician whose work has appeared in Salon, Dissent, and In These Times. He blogs at theprogressivephysician.net.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/gaffney-single-payer-sanders-healthcare-obamacare-aca-clinton/

PNHP note: Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) is a nonpartisan educational organization. It neither supports nor opposes any candidates for public office.

AFGE Endorses HR 676, National Single-Payer Bill

News release
Single Payer News, Feb. 16, 2016
 
The National Executive Council of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) has unanimously endorsed HR 676, national single payer legislation sponsored by Congressman John Conyers of Michigan. The resolution was submitted by AFGE National Vice President Arnold R. Scott of District 6.
 
With 1,100 local unions, AFGE is the largest federal employee union and has 670,000 members across the country.
 
The text of the AFGE resolution is below:

Union Resolution in Support of HR 676, National Single Payer Legislation, Expanded and Improved Medicare for All

Submitted by:  NVP Scott
 
Whereas, America’s health care system is in deep trouble.  In spite of efforts to regulate the insurance industry for-profit health insurance companies are finding ways to skirt the law.  The Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, made it possible for some of the uninsured to find coverage, but did not resolve the problem that health insurance companies are pricing care beyond our means, and
 
Whereas, unions have battled to achieve the highest standards of health care for members and their families, and those gains have lifted up health benefits for all workers, even those who have no union.  All of these achievements are now under constant attack as costs rise and employers seek to shift those costs to workers.  Union multiemployer health plans are struggling under the unfair advantages allowed to non-union companies.  Rising copays and deductibles make it more difficult for those who have insurance to get the care they need.  The excise tax of 2018 will make things worse, and
 
Whereas, employers seek to drop health benefits for early retirees, for spouses, for part-timers.  Some corporations use bankruptcy laws to shirk their contractual health care obligations.  The rising cost of health insurance is blocking progress in wages and other areas, and
 
Whereas, insurance companies rather than patients are deciding what doctors we can see and what hospitals we can use.  Drug company profits soar as, so far, congress has not used the power of bulk purchasing to bring down the prices.  The US spends double per capita what other industrialized nations spend, yet ranks far below in life expectancy and infant mortality, and
 
Whereas, we deserve better.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  Firefighters don’t ask us to pay before they save our families from burning houses.  They just proceed to do the right thing.  Health care is just as important as fire protection.  Lives are at stake and all of us should have the best care that this wealthy nation has the ability to provide.  Our tax dollars subsidize the research, the medical schools, and the hospitals.  Unions led the way in other industrialized countries to assure universal coverage with good care through a form of single payer, and Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D-MI) has introduced HR 676, Expanded and Improved Medicare for All.  HR 676 will establish a single payer health care system by expanding a greatly improved Medicare to cover everyone.  It will restore our right to choose our physicians and free us from insurance company interference in medical decisions.  It will free our health care from corporate control, and
 
Whereas, HR 676 will cover everyone for all necessary medical care including dental, prescription drugs, hospital, surgical, outpatient services, primary and preventive care, emergency services, mental health, home health, physical therapy, rehabilitation (including for substance abuse), vision care, chiropractic, eyeglasses, hearing aids, other medical devices and long term care.  HR 676 will end deductibles and copayments, and
 
Whereas, HR 676 will save hundreds of billions annually by eliminating the high overhead and profits of the private health insurance industry and by using our purchasing power to rein in the drug companies.  The transition to national health insurance would apply the savings from administration and profits to expanded and improved coverage for all, and
 
Whereas, standing up for all working people and leading the effort to win healthcare for all we will affirm labor’s rightful role as a leader in the fight for social justice.  Bold action by our unions can rally the nation to pass HR 676.
 
Therefore be it resolved, that AFGE wholeheartedly endorses Congressman Conyers’ bill HR 676, “Expanded and Improved Medicare for ALL,” a single payer health care program.
 
Be it further resolved, that AFGE will work with other unions and community groups to build a groundswell of popular support and action for single payer universal health care and HR 676 until we make what is morally right for our nation into what is politically possible.
 
And that AFGE will send a copy of this resolution to Congressman Conyers, to all members of the US House and Senate, to the AFL-CIO Executive Council, and to the news media.
 
And further, that AFGE will take other actions to mobilize our members and our community at the grassroots to encourage other members of the House to sign on as co-sponsors of HR 676 and to encourage Senators to introduce a companion bill in the Senate.
 
Passed unanimously by the National Executive Council of the American Federation of Government Employees, November 2015.
 
#30#

HR 676 would institute a single payer health care system by expanding a greatly improved Medicare to everyone residing in the U.S. Patients will choose their own physicians and hospitals.

HR 676 would cover every person for all necessary medical care including prescription drugs, hospital, surgical, outpatient services, primary and preventive care, emergency services, dental (including oral surgery, periodontics, endodontics), mental health, home health, physical therapy, rehabilitation (including for substance abuse), vision care and correction, hearing services including hearing aids, chiropractic, durable medical equipment, palliative care, podiatric care, and long term care.

HR 676 ends deductibles and co-payments. HR 676 would save hundreds of billions annually by eliminating the high overhead and profits of the private health insurance industry and HMOs. In the current Congress, HR 676 has 60 co-sponsors in addition to Congressman Conyers.

HR 676 has been endorsed by 623 union organizations including 151 Central Labor Councils/Area Labor Federations and 44 state AFL-CIO’s (KY, PA, CT, OH, DE, ND, WA, SC, WY, VT, FL, WI, WV, SD, NC, MO, MN, ME, AR, MD-DC, TX, IA, AZ, TN, OR, GA, OK, KS, CO, IN, AL, CA, AK, MI, MT, NE, NJ, NY, NV, MA, RI, NH, ID.
 
For a list of union endorsers, or a sample endorsement resolution, contact:
 
Kay Tillow
All Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care–HR 676
c/o Nurses Professional Organization (NPO)
1169 Eastern Parkway, Suite 2218
Louisville, KY 40217
(502) 636 1551
 
Email: nursenpo@aol.com
http://unionsforsinglepayer.org
https://www.facebook.com/unionsforsinglepayer

The $3 trillion elephant in the presidential campaign

By Ed Weisbart, M.D.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Feb. 16, 2016

Remember the heated discussions about health care in the Republican debates? No, you don’t, because they were arguing about things like fantasy football. In fact, all we heard about health care was, “Repeal Obamacare!”

We get it, being a member of The Repeal Obamacare Club is a prerequisite for running for president on the GOP ticket, as is having no plan with which to replace it.

Jeb Bush promotes tax credits for individuals to purchase “affordable” and “portable” plans. We hope Bush thinks “affordable” means less than 10 percent of annual income, but given that he wants to retain the same insurance industry whose bureaucracy now consumes 30 percent of every health care dollar, it’s unlikely.

Ben Carson supports health savings accounts, a great idea for healthy and wealthy individuals, but a terrible idea for everyone else who would be more deeply trapped in increasingly expensive plans. It’s a particularly bad idea for women, whose annual cost of care typically is $1,000 more than it is for men.

Ted Cruz crows, “Repeal every blasted word of Obamacare.” With what? All the problems Obamacare addressed? Crisis treatment in ERs instead of prudent prevention? Denials for pre-existing conditions? Denials for people with the audacity to get sick and actually use their insurance? Annual and lifetime caps?

Marco Rubio, like Jeb, would give you a refundable tax credit to purchase insurance. How does that control costs? And how is that so different from the premium subsidies provided by Obamacare, which Rubio opposes?

Donald Trump promises: “I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.” So far, Trump offers no details. He either doesn’t have them or doesn’t want us to know them. But when he does, they’ll be “fabulous!”

And what about the Democrats? Hillary Clinton would retain the Affordable Care Act and lower out-of-pocket and prescription costs, but she hasn’t said how. The Affordable Care Act has saved countless lives, but it is essentially an insurance-reform/subsidy program, not the comprehensive solution our nation needs to remedy our chronic bloating of health care costs.

Bernie Sanders supports HR 676, the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, co-sponsored by Rep. William Lacy Clay and 63 other U.S. representatives. It’s a comprehensive plan with robust details. It provides full coverage without premiums, like people enjoy in all other advanced countries, at roughly half of what we spend per person in the United States today.

Any candidate who isn’t forthcoming with these details is ignoring our current dire reality. Our health care system has a literal death grip on this nation. It is the new “giant sucking sound” of money being vacuumed from our entire economy and into health care’s deep, private-profit pockets.

More than another cycle of modest reform, we need to base our solution upon our nation’s most successful health care system, Medicare. We need to divorce our health insurance from our employers, releasing businesses from that burden and giving job mobility back to employees. We need to implement universal access to health care, paid for by progressive taxes, delivered by the world’s best doctors and hospitals. We need to replace our woefully wasteful private insurance system with the efficiency of Medicare.

By eliminating sales, marketing, underwriting and other non-productive administrative functions required of private insurers, Medicare’s overhead is 2 percent; private insurance’s is 18 percent.

We have some of the best health care in the world, but far too many Americans can’t afford to use it, and everyone pays way too much for it. Medicare offers 50 years of proof that our government can administer health care as well or better than anywhere else in the world. Let’s make it available to each and every American, and demand that anyone running for high office explain how they could do better. They won’t because they can’t.

Dr. Ed Weisbart is chairman of Physicians for a National Health Program — Missouri chapter.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/the-trillion-elephant-in-the-presidential-campaign/article_ae4ef099-5c48-52c2-902d-7c1714f91730.html

PNHP note: Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) is a nonpartisan educational organization. It neither supports nor opposes any candidates for public office.

Medicare for all is what U.S. needs

By Jack Bernard
The Citizen (Fayetteville, Ga.), Feb. 16, 2016

I enjoyed reading Dr. Scherz’s (opinion column, 1-10-16), which was well written. As a retired senior level healthcare exec and former GOP elected official, I understand his frustration with the downside of Obamacare (the ACA). I hear much the same from my two sons, who are practicing physicians.

But, I am not in agreement with Scherz’s suggested solution, i.e., going back to the time before we had primary care insurance and having individuals fend for themselves, negotiating direct agreements with each of their doctors. The paperwork, research, skill and time required on both sides would be immense.

And, there it is a certainty that the consumer would pay more due to paucity of easily obtainable comparative data and lack of any leverage when dealing with providers. In other words, Medicare can get better rates than an individual because many providers cannot afford to lose the government’s business, accounting for over half of all U.S. healthcare expenditures.

Along the lines of the Scherz approach, a conservative friend mentioned to me the other day that he agreed with Gov. Mike Huckabee on healthcare. The problem with Americans is that we do not know the cost of healthcare services, so we want everything.

True, there are problems with our insurance system, some of which were identified by Dr. Scherz. Health insurance certainly does insulate the patient from costs. That is what all insurance is supposed to do; should we eliminate all types of insurance? Plus, we are already less insulated than other nations (see study cited below).

One alternative is to have no health insurance for anyone, an impractical suggestion advocated by the then-head of the Georgia Medical Association in response to one of my earlier Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorials. Dr. Scherz seems to suggest something similar for primary physician care, although he does not mention the hospital side where much of the cost, and possibly waste, resides.

Another alternative often suggested by conservatives is to have deductibles so high (one physician I know suggested $10,000) that most patients pay just about everything out of pocket. Does anyone other than the 1 percent really think that is an optimum solution? Unfortunately, due to inaction by Congress, the private insurance system seems headed that way now.

Huckabee, Scherz and others are subtly building on the healthcare establishment’s historical position: “We have the best health care in the world.” The real problem is patients and their reliance on insurance to insulate them from costs. So why change anything on the financing end through government programs like Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act, ACA)?

But, how do other nations view our system? The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (the UK’s AMA) did a comparative study in 2011 of 19 countries and found: “In cost-effective terms, i.e., economic input versus clinical output, the USA healthcare system was one of the least cost-effective in reducing mortality rates.”

Our own National Institute of Health (NIH) issued a study (1-9-13) which detailed many problems with our lifestyle, but it also criticized our access problems, stating that 50 million residents had no health insurance. Regarding access, all nations studied did better than the U.S., except Turkey, Chile and Mexico. (Note: Despite its problems, the ACA has made a significant dent in this figure via Medicaid expansion and the healthcare exchanges.)

Specifically, NIH criticized the private-public-provider-payer morass that constitutes American health care delivery and financing, stating that U.S. patients do not receive the care that they need and sometimes receive care that they do not need. It further indicated that “Americans do not experience optimal quality when they do receive health care” due to the “fragmented” nature of our system, creating “inefficiencies and coordination” problems that other nations do not have.

The report also referred to a Commonwealth Fund study which found that Americans were more uncertain than others that their treatments would be adequate if they were seriously ill.

And, NIH found that Americans already had higher deductibles, copayments and out of pocket expenses versus other nations, with 40 percent of those under 65 with insurance reporting access problems due to cost.

As opposed to what many on the right say, the study found that our citizens were more likely than other countries to experience delays when seeing a physician for serious ailments. The study also reported that other studies have shown hospital readmission rates to be higher here, an indicator of lower quality care.

All told, it is a damning indictment of how we get health services in the United States … the result of our excessively expensive but deeply flawed system.

What can we do about the situation? First, stop buying false arguments about the only problem being the patient. We have identifiable access, cost and quality issues.

The website of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) outlines another solution, used by many of the nations who are clearly ahead of us: true national health insurance covering everyone.

With Medicare as the sole payer, not only can costs be controlled and universal access guaranteed, but we can institute national quality measures as well.

Will this grand plan happen tomorrow? No, it will take time. But, if we push our legislators to logically look at facts and science, versus the histrionics of TV entertainers and politician skeptics, that day will come.

Jack Bernard resides in Peachtree City, Ga. His former chairman of a county commission (Jasper County) and chair of the Republican Party there. He is also a a retired healthcare executive and the former director of Health Planning for the state of Georgia. His website is http://universalhealthreform.wordpress.com/.
 
http://thecitizen.com/letters-editor/medicare-all-what-us-needs