PNHP

Taking back the health care debate

Taking back the health care debate

It's time to get angry about the fact that an opportunity for health care reform is slipping through our grasp

By Nancy Welch
Vermont Woman
August 27, 2009

THE MORNING after the November election, I visited my father in a Cleveland rehab hospital. Weak from surgery to reinforce his disintegrating spine, he was nevertheless grinning as I walked in. “We’re going to get national health care,” he said.

My father was not a radical, not even a lifelong liberal. But having suffered through a layoff in the mid-1970s, he later watched with helpless frustration as his children struggled with multiple layoffs, a home foreclosure, loss of health insurance and mounting debt.

What I should say, then, is that my father was not born a radical, but if supporting a national health program is a radical position, he–like millions of others–had become one by the time he died, 101 days into Obama’s presidency.

My father didn’t live to see the resurrection of the lunatic far right, nor the sad confusion–“Keep government out of my Medicare!”–that results when we debate health care just once every 20 years, and without any mobilization to counter the misinformation that the intractable opponents of reform are bound to spread.

My father would also never learn that well before the corporate deployment of angry mobs to derail the August town hall meetings, President Obama had promised the pharmaceutical industry not to seek lower drug prices for “public option” beneficiaries nor allow the re-importation of cheaper drugs from Canada. If he had lived, my father might have concluded that Obama, like the Clintons in 1992, had been routed by an industry lobby whose power is too great, an American “your-health-your-problem” individualism too deeply entrenched.

But before any of us exchange “Yes, we can” for “No, we can’t,” consider:

— With rising unemployment swelling the ranks of the uninsured toward 50 million, with medical costs the leading cause of personal bankruptcy even for people with insurance, and with thousands lining up in a single day in one Los Angeles suburb for the free care offered at a M.A.S.H.-style clinic, the desperate need is plain.

— With all credible studies demonstrating that public insurance provides better care to more people at less cost than our government is already spending on health care, and with Medicare’s 44-year track record, an affordable–and popular–solution to this crisis is at hand.

— With clear Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and a national economic meltdown that forced even Alan Greenspan to admit his free-market faith was mistaken, Obama should have been well poised to advocate not merely for limited reform of private insurance accompanied by a public option, but for a government-administered, taxpayer-funded national health insurance program–single-payer or “Medicare for All.”

— With 556 union organizations in 49 states endorsing Congress’s Medicare for All bill (introduced by John Conyers in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate), joined with the grassroots army of Obama volunteers whose aspirations for change soared beyond getting their candidate elected, the means to launch a mass popular campaign for single-payer was–and still is–at hand.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

IF 2009 seems like deja vu, it’s because Obama took a page from the Clintons’ sorry playbook. Like Hillary Clinton, who in 1992 told Physicians for a National Health Program’s David Himmelstein that she had no interest in polls showing 70 percent of Americans favoring national health insurance, Obama and the congressional Democrats barred single-payer from consideration, going so far as to arrest 13 doctors and nurses in May who sought a place for single-payer at the Senate’s “public roundtables.”

Like Bill Clinton, who struck a deal with the “Jackson Hole” insurance-industry insiders not six weeks into his presidency, Obama asked corporate insurers to help Congress draft the various bills.

Yet even a bill that would expand the private insurance market by requiring people to purchase high-deductible policies and that would hand corporate insurers public dollars to peddle skimpy polices to the young and poor doesn’t satisfy industry lobbyists and the “Blue Dog” Democrats tucked in their pockets.

Meanwhile, in the vacuum created by Democratic Party leaders when they shut out single-payer advocates lest they frighten the big business “stakeholders,” the Republican far right has staged a comeback.

Where we should have seen thousands demonstrating for the services urgently needed in an economic crisis, we have hundreds holding signs that aren’t only ridiculous, but vilely racist and, especially when accompanied by firearms, frightening. My father was shaken by the rabble who turned out for Klan-like Palin rallies across Ohio last summer. He would have been stunned to witness their return from November’s defeat.

I suspect, however, that my father would also have been–like his favorite commentators–righteously angry. Consider Rachel Maddow castigating Obama for his “collapse of political ambition,” and Bill Maher calling for a progressive party to “represent the millions of Americans who aren’t being served by the Democrats.” What a welcome change from 1992 when most commentators blamed a supposedly government-phobic American public for the demise of a national health plan Clinton never sought.

Maher’s call for a party of the people is reminiscent of the mid-1930s, when burgeoning support for a labor party spurred a reluctant Roosevelt into delivering much of the New Deal. Even more welcome are signs of stirring among activists on the ground, from the boycott against Whole Foods, whose CEO opined against health care reform in the Wall Street Journal, to Vermont’s Health Care Is a Human Right campaign, whose carpools carried hundreds–many carrying “Single-Payer Now!” signs–to August’s town-hall meetings.

An Oregon group called “Mad as Hell Doctors” plans a September cross-country caravan to demand “Health Care for People–Not Profit!” Imagine them joined by “Mad as Hell Nurses,” by “Mad as Hell Patients”–and also by “Mad as Hell Women” demanding, with “Medicare for All,” the repeal of the Hyde Amendment so we finally have full reproductive health care rights.

My father may not have been a radical, but he understood radical action might be needed for winning health care, reversing the Bush tax cuts, stopping the wars. In November, he said, “See what he does. Then you can say, ‘To the barricades.'” I think he’d agree: The time is now.

Whole Foods CEO vs. Conservative Support for NHS, Medicare

By Ben Day
Mass-Care
Monday, August 17, 2009

Last week Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal opposing health care as a right, and proposing instead that insurers be allowed to foist crummier health plans on residents and that states be limited in their ability to regulate health insurers. The root cause of our health crisis, Mackey claims, is that people are failing to keep themselves healthy, and need to be held responsible:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070.html

Many news outlets have already run stories about customers boycotting Whole Foods based on the op-ed. There is, however, one supreme irony in John Mackey’s op-ed. It begins with a quote from former Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Mackey writes “the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system.” What Mackey forgets is that the Conservative Party in the UK has NEVER attempted to roll back health care as an entitlement. Margaret Thatcher when running for re-election in 1982 famously proclaimed “The National Health Service is safe in our hands,” and Conservative Party leader David Cameron just days ago published an online article regarding the Party’s commitment to the NHS. He wrote: “One of the wonderful things about living in this country is that the moment you’re injured or fall ill – no matter who you are, where you are from, or how much money you’ve got – you know that the NHS will look after you.”

The United States is one of the few countries where a right to health care is considered a liberal position, and conservatives publicly attack the proposal. Those who have lived under single payer would no sooner dismantle the right to health care than we would dismantle Medicare for our seniors as a right. Opposing single payer health care is as untenable a position in the UK – for candidates of any party – as would be attempts to eliminate the right to health coverage for seniors in the US. Particularly in light of the recent attacks even a public option has come under from right-wing media and politicians, this is a key talking point for advocates of single payer to discuss at divisive town hall meetings, and on radio programs.

FURTHER LINKS

ABC article on boycotts of Whole Foods:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=8322658&page=1

David Cameron article on Conservative support for the NHS:
http://www.conservatives.com/News/Blogs/We_are_proud_of_the_NHS.aspx

Older Health Affairs article on “Why Britain’s Conservatives Support a Socialist Health Care System:”
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/4/1/41.pdf

JHPPL: Exploring the Concept of Single Payer

Today’s message is in honor of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy who told us,
“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Special Issue: Exploring the Concept of Single Payer

Single Payers, Multiple Systems: The Scope and Limits of Subnational Variation under a Federal Health Policy Framework

By Carolyn Hughes Tuohy, University of Toronto
Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law
August 2009
Neither Obama nor any other major contender for the presidency in 2008 proposed a universal single-payer (“Medicare for All”) model. The Obama proposal for a new public plan, to be offered in parallel with regulated private plans through a National Health Insurance Exchange modeled on the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), would indeed represent a distinctive American hybrid, but it would not be a single-payer system. By definition, a government plan is not “single payer” if it competes with other insurers in offering comprehensive coverage. This is not merely a definitional issue, however: it has critically important implications for the economic and political dynamics of the system. Economically, competition between public and private insurers raises potentially crippling problems of risk selection requiring a regulatory framework that has so far eluded even those European jurisdictions with much longer experience with the regulation of social and private insurance. Politically, such a competitive framework renders the arena much more pluralistic and volatile — and effective regulation therefore much more difficult — than does a pure single-payer model with its central axis of profession-state accommodation.
In 2009, the colliding waves of hope, generated by the election of Barack Obama, and fear, generated by global financial turmoil, may produce (a paradigm shift in U.S. health care policy and a paradigm shift in the political landscape). At the very least, it seems inevitable that they will yield a larger governmental role in the health care arena. The shape of the resulting hybrid, and whether that hybrid has any room for a single-payer element, is much less clear.
http://jhppl.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/34/4/453

The fact that the entire August issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law is devoted to exploring single payer certainly indicates that the concept has not died within the policy community.
Although a majority (but by no means all) of the political community dismisses single payer as not being politically feasible, much of the policy community accepts it as a feasible policy approach that would bring affordable health care to everyone. Even those opposed based on ideology understand clearly the feasibility of single payer from the policy perspective. Otherwise why would the opponents of reform keep insisting that policies that improve our health care financing would inevitably lead to a single payer system?

JHPPL: Exploring the Concept of Single Payer

Today’s message is in honor of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy who told us,

“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Special Issue: Exploring the Concept of Single Payer

Single Payers, Multiple Systems: The Scope and Limits of Subnational Variation under a Federal Health Policy Framework

By Carolyn Hughes Tuohy, University of Toronto
Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law
August 2009

Neither Obama nor any other major contender for the presidency in 2008 proposed a universal single-payer (“Medicare for All”) model. The Obama proposal for a new public plan, to be offered in parallel with regulated private plans through a National Health Insurance Exchange modeled on the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), would indeed represent a distinctive American hybrid, but it would not be a single-payer system. By definition, a government plan is not “single payer” if it competes with other insurers in offering comprehensive coverage. This is not merely a definitional issue, however: it has critically important implications for the economic and political dynamics of the system. Economically, competition between public and private insurers raises potentially crippling problems of risk selection requiring a regulatory framework that has so far eluded even those European jurisdictions with much longer experience with the regulation of social and private insurance. Politically, such a competitive framework renders the arena much more pluralistic and volatile — and effective regulation therefore much more difficult — than does a pure single-payer model with its central axis of profession-state accommodation.

In 2009, the colliding waves of hope, generated by the election of Barack Obama, and fear, generated by global financial turmoil, may produce (a paradigm shift in U.S. health care policy and a paradigm shift in the political landscape). At the very least, it seems inevitable that they will yield a larger governmental role in the health care arena. The shape of the resulting hybrid, and whether that hybrid has any room for a single-payer element, is much less clear.

http://jhppl.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/34/4/453

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

The fact that the entire August issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law is devoted to exploring single payer certainly indicates that the concept has not died within the policy community.

Although a majority (but by no means all) of the political community dismisses single payer as not being politically feasible, much of the policy community accepts it as a feasible policy approach that would bring affordable health care to everyone. Even those opposed based on ideology understand clearly the feasibility of single payer from the policy perspective. Otherwise why would the opponents of reform keep insisting that policies that improve our health care financing would inevitably lead to a single payer system?

Trumka Tells Netroots Nation: "My Preference Is Single Payer"

Kay Tillow
All Unions Committee For Single Payer Health Care–HR 676

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — In a wide ranging speech to the annual Netroots Nation Convention, Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer, said, “My preference, and the feeling of many in the labor movement, is that we should have a single payer health care system.” Netroots Nation is the largest annual assembly of progressive bloggers and web journalists.

Trumka’s speech followed an impassioned appeal for single payer by Pennsylvania State Senator Jim Ferlo who presented the Paul Wellstone Award to Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY). Massa is a co-sponsor and one of the most outspoken supporters of HR 676, single payer healthcare legislation introduced by Congressman John Conyers (D-MI).

Trumka will return to Pittsburgh in mid September for the AFL-CIO Convention where he is expected to be elected President. More than fifty resolutions calling for the endorsement of HR 676 have been submitted to the convention.

Trumka’s remarks can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnNolT275Yw

HR 676 would institute a single payer health care system by expanding a greatly improved Medicare system to everyone residing in the U. S.

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, mental health, home health, physical therapy, rehabilitation (including for substance abuse), vision care, hearing services including hearing aids, chiropractic, durable medical equipment, palliative 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 86 co-sponsors in addition to Conyers. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced SB 703, a single payer bill in the Senate.

HR 676 has been endorsed by 556 union organizations in 49 states including 130 Central Labor Councils and Area Labor Federations and 39 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, NY, NV & MA).

My Brain and the Ontario Health Care System

By Paul E. Barber
Huffington Post
August 25, 2009

You may have seen the stories about the television ad with first person testimony from a woman who claims she had a brain tumor and was unhappy about her care in the Ontario health care system, part of the ongoing assault on “Obamacare.” Five years ago I actually had a brain tumor and dealt with the Ontario health care system. The truth about our system is much different than the misinformation spewing forth over the internet and the airwaves. This is my story.

I am not the type of person who would be described as a hypochondriac. I am more likely to dismiss aches and pains as of no consequence. Thus when I developed some peculiar head and neck symptoms in early 2004 I did not pay much attention to them at first.

Even when I called for an appointment with my GP in March, I was asked by the receptionist if it was urgent and I said no. The GP said he was puzzled by my condition and referred me to a neurologist. I saw him in early April. His assessment included some physical tests, all of which I passed with flying colors. This is perhaps not surprising as throughout this period I was regularly Scottish country dancing, a physically and mentally demanding form of exercise that no doubt kept me in decent shape.

I did have some blood pressure abnormality. The neurologist concluded, not inappropriately, that I should see a cardiologist and said he would recommend that my GP refer me. Shortly thereafter I had an appointment for early May.

A week or so later we were invited by close friends to a delightful Saturday evening dinner. I didn’t think I had drunk too much wine, but my wife was driving, so it didn’t matter. When I woke up the next morning, it was Sunday April 17 and I felt quite sick with a headache — a hangover I thought at the time.

However, unlike all previous hangovers, this one did not disappear on Sunday afternoon — I remained very ill and in bed. By the afternoon of Wednesday April 21, we finally concluded, after consulting my GP on the phone, that I should seek emergency treatment the next day if I showed no improvement.

Late that night, unable to sleep because of a splitting headache, I got up to take some strong headache medication. The last thing I remember was reaching up to the cabinet containing the pills. My wife then heard a crash as I hit the floor. I had collapsed and gone into a convulsion.

This is the point where we discovered just how fast and effective our health system could be. The complaints you hear directed at Canada’s health system about waiting times for treatment are simply without foundation. As you will see from what happened next, my experience says quite the opposite.

The next thing I recall I was being carried downstairs by some fire fighters who responded to the 911 call and had made it to our house ahead of the ambulance. I was taken immediately in the ambulance to the Mount Sinai Hospital emergency. I drifted in and out of consciousness and don’t remember much from that period but a CAT scan done in the wee hours of Thursday, April 22, 2004 revealed a large mass in my brain.

A few hours later I was admitted to the Toronto Western Hospital neurology ward (which has an international reputation for excellence). I had a brain tumor and needed surgery. The doctors were optimistic that what they didn’t get with surgery could be dealt with by chemotherapy and radiation. They assumed I had brain cancer but they said it would be a few weeks after surgery before tests could determine the exact nature of the tumor. The medical staff could scarcely believe that I had actually been at work the previous Friday.

Hooked up to an IV and rehydrated I began to feel a little better. However, I discovered that I had lost considerable sensation on my right hand side. I could not hold a cup of water without dropping it, a very distressing discovery.

Early the next morning, Friday, April 23, I had an MRI. This marvelous machine provided a precise three dimensional portrait of the tumor. That evening my neurosurgeon, Dr. Taufik Valiante, came by the hospital room to discuss my case. He felt I needed surgery in the near future, although not necessarily right away (he thought I might have to wait a week). However, he cheerfully went off to check on the availability of the space and personnel needed to do the surgery, and found we could do it the next day.

Just 60 hours or so after my collapse, on Saturday, April 24, 2004, I underwent five and a half hours of surgery to remove a large brain tumor. The surgery left a large scar running across the top of my head, now just barely visible through my thinning hair. Twinges in my right hand and stiffness in my lower right leg are the only long-term consequences of my experience. I have an MRI every couple of years (I just had one) to check that the tumor has not returned.

Despite the extensive nature of the surgery, it was performed so skilfully that I felt able to leave the hospital and go home the following Tuesday — April 27, 2004. And the next day Dr. Valiante called with the news that the tumor was benign, a slow growing pilocytic astrocytoma, generally thought of as a brain tumor one sees in children. I would not need any further treatment. In less than a week the system had me on the road to full recovery. My wife recalls this period as a blur of unfolding events.

By the way, I did see the cardiologist a week or two later while still recovering from surgery. She did a few tests and pronounced me fine.

As you can see from my story, the delays encountered in my care were entirely of my own making, not wait times in the health care system. Once it kicked into gear, I received incredibly fast, world class health care. Apart from my initial ride in the ambulance and my hospital phone, the only other cost to me was the rental of the hospital TV set. A couple of days after the surgery I remember watching a Toronto Blue Jays-Minnesota Twins game, featuring a first rate performance by then Blue Jays starter Ted Lilly. Full value for my money spent on the TV and full value for my tax dollars that pay for our health care system.

Our experience with Canada’s health care system has been first rate. This includes the cancer care my wife is currently receiving, which has included a sophisticated procedure whereby she successfully received a transplant of her own stem cells at the wonderful Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. She did not have to wait for that complex operation either: it was performed upon completion of the essential preliminary treatment.

On another occasion my son dislocated his shoulder playing a pick up game of ice hockey. He called me at work to help him get to the hospital. When we entered emergency the triage nurse gave Alex a quick inspection and then instantly whisked him away for treatment. Once again, no waiting.

I think our experience with health care is comparable to that of most Canadians. Our system may not be perfect but we are more than happy with how it has treated us, and, like other Canadians, we would not trade it for the American system.

Paul Barber is a former journalist and television producer. This article was originally published at The Reaction.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-e-barber/my-brain-and-the-ontario_b_268128.html

We need major health reform

By Glen Peterson
My View
The Free Press (Mankato, Minn.)
August 25, 2009

The author of two recent My View columns argues against a “public option” being added to our health care system in one column and argues that health insurance should be private in another column. Referring to a report published by the World Health Organization that compared 191 nations, he cites one WHO analysis of “being responsive to patient needs” in which the United States had the highest rating.

He fails to mention that was just one of many analyses conducted, and in the same report the WHO ranked the U.S. 37th in overall health system performance, just ahead of Cuba and Slovania and just behind Costa Rica.

Why does the U.S. compare so poorly to the rest of the industrial world? Among many reasons, our costs are excessive and a great number of Americans are uninsured or underinsured. These problems can be directly attributed to the practices of private health insurers who uniquely in the U.S. provide our primary means of connecting consumers with providers.

According to data published in the medical journal Health Affairs, in 2009 health care spending in the U.S. will total $2.5 trillion or $8,160 per capita (approximately double the health care spending in other industrial countries). Health care spending will account for 17.4 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), compared to typically around 10 percent among other industrial countries.

Approximately 60 percent of the funding for health care comes directly or indirectly from taxes. We already pay as much per capita in taxes for health care as do residents in other nations that cover 100 percent of their citizens without additional costs to consumers or to businesses. Approximately 20 percent is paid by consumers for charges such as premiums, deductibles, co-pays, and other uncovered costs. The final 20 percent comes from employers who provide health insurance as part of employee compensation.

Where does the money we pay for health care go? While publicly administered health care programs such a Medicare or Veterans Health Administration have administrative overhead of about 2 or 3 percent, private insurers have varying costs for overhead. A widely cited and accepted average of 20 percent is consistent with the range of 10 percent to 30 percent that is estimated by Paul Keckly, executive director of Deliotte Center for Health Solutions. Executive compensation is just one example of why private insurer overhead is so costly. Current and previous CEOs of Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth Group both have been awarded unexercised stock options worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The previous CEO, who was ousted in a stock options backdating scandal, had many years of annual compensation of more than $50 million.

The Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor admits that oversight is inadequate and estimates overhead of “non-profit” health insurers to range from 6 percent to 20 percent. CEOs of Minnesota’s three major non-profit health insurers consistently exceed $1 million each in annual compensation with one CEO receiving closer to $3 million in many years. Among other “overhead” costs we are all paying for, The Center for Responsive Politics reports that insurers and HMO’s have contributed more than $40 million to current members of Congress over the past 10 years.

Recently private insurers are spending over $1 million per day on lobbying. Some insurers also pay employees whose job is to find ways and excuses to deny the claims of policy holders, even when denials are life threatening. It is not publicly administered programs that operate “death panels.” These examples of exorbitant costs are being paid for with our money intended to provide needed health care.

A second major problem associated with private health insurance has to do with limited coverage. With 47 million Americans having no form of health insurance approximately 16 percent of Americans have no systematic, reliable access to needed health care services. This “rationing” is virtually nonexistent in other industrial nations.

Also, in a recent study published in The American Journal of Medicine, researchers from Harvard found that 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies in the U.S. were related to medical costs. Of these, 75 percent actually had health insurance. Even with private health insurance, policy holders are tremendously vulnerable to caps, exclusions, denials and similar gaps that can result in needed treatments not being provided and bills not being paid.

Closer to home, during the August recess, staff from Congressman Tim Walz’s campaign office report retrieving over 130 personal stories from Congressional District 1 residents telling of being unable to get insurance, being dropped from insurance, having claims that are denied by insurers, and going broke or bankrupt. These abuses do not occur in publicly operated systems such as Medicare or the Veteran’s Health Administration, or in other industrial nations with entirely or primarily publicly administered health care systems.

The United States has by far the most expensive health care system in the world. Still, millions of Americans are un-served or underserved in our system. Much of the excessive cost and inefficiency can be attributed directly to the uniquely American approach of using private insurance as the “middleman” or connection between consumers and providers. Publicly administered systems in the United States and in other industrial nations have demonstrated the ability to better meet the needs of more people for less money. This fact should be a primary consideration in enacting much needed major health care reform.

Glen Peterson is a professor of rehabilitation counseling at Minnesota State University. He is an active member of the Minnesota chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program and of the Minnesota Universal Health Care Coalition, with whom he is a member of the Steering Committee and chair of the Community Organizing Committee.

http://www.mankatofreepress.com/letters/local_story_237225053.html

A simple solution

Bangor Daily News
Letter to the Editor
August 26, 2009

Let’s build on what works!

America invented Medicare; it is uniquely American. It is a proven, well-liked and efficient system. So why not just expand it so the rest of us can enjoy it?

If seniors feel they need to supplement what Medicare doesn’t cover, they go out and buy it from private insurance companies. So why can’t the rest of us do the same? Why do we have to create a whole new unproven system like a “health care exchange” or “public option”?

The old saying, “KISS — Keep It Simple Stupid,” is what is missing in the current health care reform debate.

We don’t need an incomprehensible 1,017-page health care reform plan like Congress’ HR 3200, which they can’t even ex-plain to their constituents.

I think most people would agree that if Medicare is good enough for our parents and grandparents, it’s good enough for us. So, I propose the follow-ing health care reform bill, which will meet the primary objectives for reform — affordable, universal, sustainable and equitable.

The KISS Healthcare Reform Act: Change every reference to the “age 65” in Medicare to read “age 0”; change the 2.8 percent Medicare funding in FICA to 9.9 percent; changes take effect January 2011.

Medicare is not perfect, but it’s a great place to start. We can work on improving it later as a separate issue.

Jerry Call
South Thomaston

Expand Medicare to cover the uninsured.

By Jack Bernard and Dr. Daniel Blumenthal

Atlanta Journal Constitution
Tuesday, August 25, 200

A Harvard study recently found that, despite the intense disinformation effort by those against change, Americans still view health care as one of their highest public priorities. Insurance premiums are going up four times as fast as workers’ wages, but only 28 percent of Americans rate our existing health care system as good or excellent. Our per capita health care spending is double that of any other developed country, while our health care system ranks 37th in the world, behind Costa Rica.

Yet, every day we view outrageous images of protestors disrupting town hall meetings called to discuss health care reform.

This campaign of disinformation is confusing our citizens and causing frightened members of Congress to kowtow to a shrill minority. The result is likely to be inaction, or a bill that makes only marginal adjustments to the current system. This will neither control costs (the top concern of most Americans) nor provide health care access for all (Americans’ second most important concern). What can be done?

The solution is clear: expand Medicare to cover everybody.

It is hard to attack a program almost everyone understands and that outperforms private insurance in satisfaction surveys. With universal Medicare, costs can be controlled, quality improved and access assured.

Almost every other developed country covers all its citizens with a program that resembles our Medicare, sometimes with supplemental private insurance.

In the U.S., we spend $6,714 per capita on health care annually, as compared to $3,040 in France, $3,371 in Germany, $3,678 in Canada and $2,999 in Australia. Yet all these countries have better morbidity and mortality statistics than we do.

We hear tales of foreigners who come here for medical care because of treatment delays in their home countries. Yet we rarely hear about the 750,000 Americans who went abroad for health care in 2007.

There are those who complain that the U.S. government cannot effectively run anything. Yet this is the government that put a man on the moon and operates the strongest military in the world. This is also the government that runs a health insurance program — Medicare — far more efficiently than does the private sector. Private insurance companies spend 20 to 25 percent of the premium dollar on marketing, administration, shareholder dividends and exorbitant CEO salaries. Medicare operates on an overhead of about 3 percent. The savings generated by changing to universal Medicare would literally be sufficient to cover all the uninsured.

Adding to the inefficiency of our system are the billing costs incurred by health care providers. Every hospital and medical practice must maintain massive billing departments to submit (and resubmit) claims to dozens of insurance companies with hundreds of different insurance plans. Providers in other countries typically need no more than a handful of billing staff.

Our system of providing very expensive private insurance through our employers has a deleterious effect on U.S. industry. American automobile manufacturers, struggling to survive, must pay insurance premiums for their employees. Their Japanese competitors do not have this burden. General Motors pays more for health care than for steel.

Medicare is an insurance program and all insurance programs, private or public, ration care to contain costs. The big difference is that Medicare must be responsive to the citizens because it is a public program. For example, because of public demand, Medicare added a prescription drug reimbursement benefit two years ago.

If we want to catch up with the rest of the world regarding quality, cost and access, let’s hope that more senators and representatives wake up before we are left with the status quo and our children have to deal with disaster.

Jack Bernard is a retired health care executive from Monticello. Dr. Daniel Blumenthal is associate dean at Morehouse School of Medicine.

Let's get back to what health care reform should be about

by Rose Ann DeMoro
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Wednesday August 26, 2009, 5:00 AM

From the fabricated “death panels” scares to the traumatized seniors urging legislators to keep the government’s hands “off my Medicare,” it’s apparent that the health care debate has lurched off the rails.

We’ve lost sight of families like Nathan Wilkes’ who, introducing President Barack Obama at a Colorado town hall meeting last week, described their frantic search for new health coverage after losing protection for their 6-year-old son, Thomas, who has hemophilia.

Or Janet Stephens, an emergency room nurse from Anaheim, Calif., with bladder disease who is facing the loss of her home because of monthly out-of-pocket costs of over $1,100 from her insurer.

Or the tens of thousands of other Americans callously and routinely refused needed medical care because their insurer doesn’t want to pay for it — a nightmare scenario Mike Madden of Salon wrote last week are the “death panels [that are] already here.”

Or the half of Americans who are already skipping needed medical care because of the cost. A Commonwealth Fund report Aug. 20 predicts that without reform, insurance premiums will increase another 94 percent by 2010.

How did such a critical reform, and our debate over it, go so badly astray?

In an MSNBC interview last week, Democratic Party consultant Lawrence O’Donnell said the White House erred from the start by paying too much heed to convention wisdom and compromising with themselves.

“They didn’t go for the best bill,” he said, which would have been a single-payer system, essentially expanding Medicare to cover everyone.

The system which even the fiercest critics of Obama’s plan strongly defend, when they demand protection for Medicare.

There’s a reason Americans love Medicare — and probably would love its universal expansion. A Commonwealth Fund study in May found that Medicare enrollees have greater access to care, fewer problems with medical bills and greater satisfaction with their health plans and the quality of care they receive than do customers of private plans.

Further, “elderly Medicare beneficiaries were also significantly more likely to report being very confident that they could get high quality and safe medical care when needed, and very confident that they would be able to afford the care they need.”

Even after all the attacks by Fox News, right-wing policy groups and the insurance industry, a Kaiser Foundation poll released Aug. 19 shows that by a margin of 75 percent to 22 percent, Americans favor expanding Medicare to cover people from age 55 to 64 who do not have health coverage.

Similar national systems, of course, exist in every other industrialized country, the reason the United States lags so far behind most of them in every crucial health care barometer from life span to health disparities to access, to even the much-debated issue of waiting times for care.

O’Donnell, who worked on President Bill Clinton’s failed health plan in 1994, said that his party failed to learn a crucial lesson from the 1994 debacle, that they should have spent the past 15 years preparing for this moment and pressing for the best plan of all — Medicare for all.

Instead, the administration and their allies in Congress chose to negotiate downward from the start, and ended up making concession after concession to conservative opponents likely to oppose any reform plan.

What they ended up with is a muddled message. That’s no surprise for a plan whose central element is a requirement that everyone buy private insurance products, with some subsidies offered to help low income people. This amounts to pass-throughs to the big insurers, and begins to look like another massive corporate bailout to another highly unpopular, wasteful industry.

With last November’s mandate, and sizable majorities in the House and Senate, there’s still time for the administration and Congress to salvage badly needed reform that will be genuinely universal, bring rising costs under control and improve quality.

The House has already committed to a floor vote in September on the option of expanding Medicare to cover everyone. That’s the public option that a majority of the nation’s registered nurses and doctors, those with the most daily experience with our fractured health care system, have long supported as the best way to achieve the promise of reform that started this debate.

Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of the 86,000-member California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, the largest U.S. union of nurses, and a vice president of the AFL-CIO.

Trumka Tells Netroots Nation: “My Preference Is Single Payer”

Kay Tillow
All Unions Committee For Single Payer Health Care–HR 676

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — In a wide ranging speech to the annual Netroots Nation Convention, Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer, said, “My preference, and the feeling of many in the labor movement, is that we should have a single payer health care system.” Netroots Nation is the largest annual assembly of progressive bloggers and web journalists.

Trumka’s speech followed an impassioned appeal for single payer by Pennsylvania State Senator Jim Ferlo who presented the Paul Wellstone Award to Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY). Massa is a co-sponsor and one of the most outspoken supporters of HR 676, single payer healthcare legislation introduced by Congressman John Conyers (D-MI).

Trumka will return to Pittsburgh in mid September for the AFL-CIO Convention where he is expected to be elected President. More than fifty resolutions calling for the endorsement of HR 676 have been submitted to the convention.

Trumka’s remarks can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnNolT275Yw

HR 676 would institute a single payer health care system by expanding a greatly improved Medicare system to everyone residing in the U. S.

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, mental health, home health, physical therapy, rehabilitation (including for substance abuse), vision care, hearing services including hearing aids, chiropractic, durable medical equipment, palliative 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 86 co-sponsors in addition to Conyers. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced SB 703, a single payer bill in the Senate.

HR 676 has been endorsed by 556 union organizations in 49 states including 130 Central Labor Councils and Area Labor Federations and 39 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, NY, NV & MA).

Let’s get back to what health care reform should be about

by Rose Ann DeMoro
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Wednesday August 26, 2009, 5:00 AM

From the fabricated “death panels” scares to the traumatized seniors urging legislators to keep the government’s hands “off my Medicare,” it’s apparent that the health care debate has lurched off the rails.

We’ve lost sight of families like Nathan Wilkes’ who, introducing President Barack Obama at a Colorado town hall meeting last week, described their frantic search for new health coverage after losing protection for their 6-year-old son, Thomas, who has hemophilia.

Or Janet Stephens, an emergency room nurse from Anaheim, Calif., with bladder disease who is facing the loss of her home because of monthly out-of-pocket costs of over $1,100 from her insurer.

Or the tens of thousands of other Americans callously and routinely refused needed medical care because their insurer doesn’t want to pay for it — a nightmare scenario Mike Madden of Salon wrote last week are the “death panels [that are] already here.”

Or the half of Americans who are already skipping needed medical care because of the cost. A Commonwealth Fund report Aug. 20 predicts that without reform, insurance premiums will increase another 94 percent by 2010.

How did such a critical reform, and our debate over it, go so badly astray?

In an MSNBC interview last week, Democratic Party consultant Lawrence O’Donnell said the White House erred from the start by paying too much heed to convention wisdom and compromising with themselves.

“They didn’t go for the best bill,” he said, which would have been a single-payer system, essentially expanding Medicare to cover everyone.

The system which even the fiercest critics of Obama’s plan strongly defend, when they demand protection for Medicare.

There’s a reason Americans love Medicare — and probably would love its universal expansion. A Commonwealth Fund study in May found that Medicare enrollees have greater access to care, fewer problems with medical bills and greater satisfaction with their health plans and the quality of care they receive than do customers of private plans.

Further, “elderly Medicare beneficiaries were also significantly more likely to report being very confident that they could get high quality and safe medical care when needed, and very confident that they would be able to afford the care they need.”

Even after all the attacks by Fox News, right-wing policy groups and the insurance industry, a Kaiser Foundation poll released Aug. 19 shows that by a margin of 75 percent to 22 percent, Americans favor expanding Medicare to cover people from age 55 to 64 who do not have health coverage.

Similar national systems, of course, exist in every other industrialized country, the reason the United States lags so far behind most of them in every crucial health care barometer from life span to health disparities to access, to even the much-debated issue of waiting times for care.

O’Donnell, who worked on President Bill Clinton’s failed health plan in 1994, said that his party failed to learn a crucial lesson from the 1994 debacle, that they should have spent the past 15 years preparing for this moment and pressing for the best plan of all — Medicare for all.

Instead, the administration and their allies in Congress chose to negotiate downward from the start, and ended up making concession after concession to conservative opponents likely to oppose any reform plan.

What they ended up with is a muddled message. That’s no surprise for a plan whose central element is a requirement that everyone buy private insurance products, with some subsidies offered to help low income people. This amounts to pass-throughs to the big insurers, and begins to look like another massive corporate bailout to another highly unpopular, wasteful industry.

With last November’s mandate, and sizable majorities in the House and Senate, there’s still time for the administration and Congress to salvage badly needed reform that will be genuinely universal, bring rising costs under control and improve quality.

The House has already committed to a floor vote in September on the option of expanding Medicare to cover everyone. That’s the public option that a majority of the nation’s registered nurses and doctors, those with the most daily experience with our fractured health care system, have long supported as the best way to achieve the promise of reform that started this debate.

Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of the 86,000-member California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, the largest U.S. union of nurses, and a vice president of the AFL-CIO.