PNHP

Health care reform advocates get arrested while protesting

Health care reform advocates get arrested while protesting

By MIKE DENNISON
Gazette State Bureau
Thursday, May 14, 2009.

HELENA – Physicians, nurses and other advocates of a national single-payer health system are protesting their exclusion from high-level reform talks at the committee chaired by Sen. Max Baucus – and getting arrested while doing it.

“If you asked me a few weeks ago if I’d be arrested, I never would have dreamed that,” said Dr. Margaret Flowers of Sparks, Md. “But it became clear that (Baucus and his colleagues) wouldn’t give us a seat at the table, no matter what we did, so we had to have our voice heard somehow.”

Flowers was among eight people arrested last week as they protested before the Senate Finance Committee, which is preparing to craft major health reform legislation.

On Tuesday, five more people were arrested at a Finance Committee meeting in Washington, D.C., as they demanded that a single-payer system be considered as a possible reform.

“We’re advocating on behalf of our patients, and we’re not going to go away,” Flowers said in a telephone interview with the Gazette State Bureau.

Baucus, D-Mont., wouldn’t make himself available for an interview this week. However, his spokesman Ty Matsdorf said Baucus has had meetings with single-payer advocates and that they’ve been involved in other discussions.

“Sen. Baucus feels that everyone should be heard on health care reform, and that is why he invited people to submit comments into the congressional record or organize meetings with the senator and his staff,” Matsdorf said.

At the same time, Baucus has said single-payer will not be considered as a possible reform of America’s health-care system.

Under a single-payer system, the government would act as the primary health insurer, providing health coverage for all citizens, paid for by tax revenue.

Flowers, a pediatrician, heads the Maryland chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, a doctors group pushing for a single-payer system. Since the election of President Barack Obama, the group has been contacting legislators, asking that single-payer be considered alongside other possible health reforms.

“What we’ve been finding is that the harder our movement pushes, the more they try to exclude us,” she said.

Flowers said the group asked Baucus to include its president, Dr. Oliver Fein, at a May 5 round table before the Finance Committee, as it discussed reforms to expand affordable coverage. That request was rejected, she said, while the round table had 15 people representing health insurers, business, retirees and others.

As the meeting began at the Everett Dirksen building in Washington, D.C., Flowers and others shouted from the audience, asking why the round table included no one for a single-payer system.

“The comments from the audience are inappropriate and out of order,” Baucus responded. “Any further disturbance will cause the committee to recess so the police can restore order.”

Capitol Police arrested each person as they spoke out, and they were taken to a Homeland Security Department building nearby, Flowers said.

Flowers said she was charged with unlawful conduct and disruption of Congress and held for seven hours before being released. An arraignment is scheduled May 26.

Baucus later attempted to address some of the protesters, saying he “deeply, deeply respect(s) the views of all members of the audience and all Americans who feel deeply about health-care reform.”

“I hear what you say; I talk to a lot of people in my home state of Montana who have the exact same views,” Baucus said. “But we aren’t going to get the best result here (unless) we can have an orderly discussion as to how we should best reform our health care system.”

Flowers dismissed Baucus’ statement as “political talk that doesn’t mean anything.”

“If he really respected our views, he would allow us to be there and present our views equally with others,” she said.

http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2009/05/14/news/state/20-health.txt?rating=true

Health care's enigma in chief

David Sirota
San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, May 15, 2009

The most stunning and least reported news about President Obama’s press conference with health industry executives this week wasn’t those executives’ willingness to negotiate with a Democrat. It was that Democrat’s eagerness to involve those executives in a discussion about health care reform even as they revealed their previous plans to pilfer $2 trillion from Americans.

That was the little-noticed message from the made-for-TV spectacle administration officials called a health care “game changer”: In saying they can voluntarily slash $200 billion a year from the country’s medical bills over the next decade and still preserve their profits, health care companies implicitly acknowledged they were plotting to fleece consumers, and have been fleecing them for years. With that acknowledgment came the tacit admission that the industry’s business is based not on respectable returns but on grotesque profiteering and waste – the kind that can give up $2 trillion and still guarantee huge margins.

Chief among the profiteers at the White House event were insurance companies, which have raised premiums by 119 percent since 1999, and one obvious question is why – why would Obama engage those particular thieves?

It’s a difficult query to answer, because Obama is a health care mystery, struggling to muster consistent positions on the issue.

Listening to a 2003 Obama speech, it’s hard to believe he has become such an enigma. Back then, he declared himself “a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program” – i.e., one eliminating private insurers and their overhead costs by having government finance health care. Obama’s position was as controversial then as today – which is to say, controversial among political elites, but not among the public. ABC’s 2003 poll showed almost two-thirds of Americans desiring a single-payer system “run by the government and financed by taxpayers,” just as CBS’ 2009 poll shows roughly the same percentage today.

In that speech six years ago, Obama said the only reason single-payer proponents should tolerate delay is “because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

This might explain why when Illinois contemplated a 2004 health care proposal raising insurance lobbyists’ “fears that it would result in a single-payer system,” those lobbyists “found a sympathetic ear in Obama, who amended (read: gutted) the bill more to their liking,” according to the Boston Globe. Maybe Obama didn’t think single payer was achievable without a Democratic Washington. And when, in a 2006 interview, he told me he was “not convinced that (single payer) is the best way to achieve universal health care,” perhaps he was following the same rationale, considering his insistence that he must “take into account what is possible.”

Of course, even as a senator aiming for the “possible” in a Republican Congress, Obama promised to never “shy away from a debate about single payer.” And after the 2008 election fulfilled his single-payer precondition of Democratic dominance, it was only logical to expect him to initiate that debate.

That’s why the White House’s current posture is so puzzling. As the Associated Press reports, Obama aides are trying to squelch any single-payer discussion, deploying their health care point-person, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., to announce that “everything is on the table with the single exception of single-payer.”

So it’s back to why – why Obama’s insurance industry-coddling inconsistency? Is it a pol’s payback for campaign cash? Is it an overly cautious lawmaker’s paralysis? Is it a conciliator’s desire to appease powerful interests? Or is it something else?

For a president who spends so much time on camera answering questions, these have become the biggest unanswered questions.

David Sirota is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future. Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

This article appeared on page A – 13 of the San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/14/EDMF17KIVP.DTL

Health-care status quo pushing out single-payer advocates in nation's capital

By Amy Goodman
Syndicated columnist
The Seattle Times
Thursday, May 14, 2009

Barack Obama appeared this week with health-industry bigwigs, proclaiming light at the end of the health-care tunnel. Among those gathered were executives from HMO giants Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Health Net Inc., and the health-insurance lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans; from the American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association; from medical-device companies; and from the pharmaceutical industry, including the president and CEO of Merck and former Rep. Billy Tauzin, now president and CEO of PhRMA, the massive industry lobbying group. They have pledged to voluntarily shave some $2 trillion off U.S. health-care costs over 10 years. But these groups, which are heavily invested in the U.S. health-care status quo, have little incentive to actually make good on their promises.

This is beginning to look like a replay of the failed 1993 health-care reform efforts led by then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Back then, the business interests took a hard line and waged a PR campaign, headlined by a fictitious middle-class couple, Harry and Louise, who feared a government-run health-care bureaucracy.

Still absent from the debate are advocates for single-payer, often referred to as “Canadian-style” health care. Single-payer health care is not “socialized medicine.” According to Physicians for a National Health Program, single-payer means “the government pays for care that is delivered in the private (mostly not-for-profit) sector.”

A February CBS News poll found that 59 percent in the U.S. say the government should provide national health insurance.

Single-payer advocates have been protesting in Senate Finance Committee hearings, chaired by Democratic Montana Sen. Max Baucus. Last week, at a committee hearing with 15 industry speakers, not one represented the single-payer perspective. A group of single-payer advocates, including doctors and lawyers, filled the hearing room and, one by one, interrupted the proceedings.

Protester Adam Schneider yelled: “We need to have single-payer at the table. I have friends who have died, who don’t have health care, whose health care did not withstand their personal health emergencies. … Single-payer now!”

Baucus gaveled for order, guffawing, “We need more police.” The single-payer movement has taken his words as a rallying cry. At a hearing Tuesday, five more were arrested. They call themselves the “Baucus 13.”

One of the Baucus 13, Kevin Zeese, recently summarized Baucus’ career campaign contributions:

“… from the insurance industry, $1,170,313; from health professionals, $1,016,276; pharmaceuticals/health-products industry, $734,605; hospitals/nursing homes, $541,891; health services/HMOs, $439,700.”

That’s almost $4 million from the very industries that have the most to gain or lose from health-care reform.

Another of the Baucus 13, Russell Mokhiber, co-founder of SinglePayerAction.org, has been charged with “disruption of Congress.”

He was quick to respond: “I charge Baucus with disrupting Congress. It once was a democratic institution; now it’s corrupt, because of people like him. He takes money from the industry and does their bidding. He won’t even diffuse the situation by seating a single-payer advocate at the table.”

As I traveled through Montana recently, from Missoula to Helena to Bozeman, health-care activists kept referring to Baucus as the “money man.” Montana state Sen. Christine Kaufmann sponsored an amendment to the Montana Constitution, granting everyone in Montana “the right to quality health care regardless of ability to pay,” or health care as a human right. It died in committee.

Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, a single-payer advocate, said his position will not likely prevail in Washington: “I don’t think there’s any possibility that that will come out of this Congress.” That’s if things remain business as usual.

Mario Savio led the Free Speech Movement on the UC Berkeley campus. In 1964, he said: “There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

“Unless you’re free,” the Baucus 13 might add, “to speak.” The current official debate has locked single-payer options out of the discussion, but also escalated the movement — from Healthcare-NOW! to Single Payer Action — to shut down the orderly functioning of the debate, until single-payer gets a seat at the table.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 750 stations in North America. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Single-payer health insurance is way to go

By Don Terry
Chicago Sun-Times
May 14, 2009

An army of lawyers and lobbyists is gathering along the Potomac.

The upcoming battle in Washington over national health care reform is going to be fierce.

Billions of dollars are at stake.

There will be blood.

So, I called a doctor.

About 70 percent of the patients who Dr. Claudia Fegan treats at her South Side clinic don’t have health insurance — like the housekeeper whose breasts were purple and rock-hard from cancer.

“She was just waiting at home to die,” Fegan says. “She didn’t have insurance. She didn’t know what to do. Her daughter finally brought her in.”

Fegan, past president of Physicians for a National Health Program, has seen cases like that again and again. A parade of preventable misery. That’s why she supports a single-payer system that would essentially expand Medicare coverage to include every American, regardless of age.

Under such a plan, the government would pay the health-care bills of all Americans. Advocates say the somewhat higher taxes that result would be offset by massive savings in administrative costs rung up by the scores of private insurance companies that dominate the current system.

Yet health-care services would remain private. People would still get their choice of doctors and hospitals — which isn’t always permitted under some of today’s insurance plans.

A single-payer system is not socialism, as its wackier opponents contend. But the S-word has become the far right’s boogey- man of the moment.

No wonder. Big money is at stake. America spends more on health care than any country in the world, about $7,200 a year for every man, woman and child.

France, Germany and Switzerland rank higher than the U.S. in overall health care yet spend only about $3,400 per capita. Like most of the developed world, those countries have single-payer health-care systems.

Under a single-payer system, the private insurance industry would be largely out of the health-care business. That’s what’s keeping them up at night — and at the White House just the other day, when they made sketchy promises to help cut costs.

A single-payer system would do it for them. Fegan says the program would save the country $400 billion a year in administrative costs and other waste. That’s a lot of foreclosed homes and jobs that could be saved.

“The current system,” she says, “allows insurance companies to dictate who gets care and what kind of care they get. We shouldn’t allow the insurance companies to practice medicine without a license.”

Before Barack Obama went to Washington, he supported a single-payer system. He has since backed off that position.

He has proposed a somewhat vague public/private system that would keep the insurance companies in the game — and in the money. That’s the most politically feasible option, he contends.

He barely gives single-payer advocates the time of day and begrudgingly included them at a recent White House health-care reform conference.

“I’m sorry to say, like many before him, Obama is worried about the awesome clout of the insurance industry,” says Dr. Quentin Young, a Hyde Park neighbor of Obama and a physician for more than 50 years. “The fix is in.”

“The economy can’t tolerate this market-based system. There’s a growing awareness that single-payer is the way to go,” says Young, national coordinator for Physicians for a National Health Program.

Fegan says more pressure has to be put on Obama and other officials to support a single-payer plan. “We have to create a movement. . . . He’s still making politically feasible arguments instead of doing what he knows to be right. Issues of social justice are never politically feasible.”

Fegan makes a lot of sense.

Remember, electing a black man from the South Side of Chicago president wasn’t politically feasible, either.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/terry/1573936,CST-EDT-terry14.article

Middle Class Healthcare Reform? Bend Over…

by Donna Smith
CommonDreams.org
Sunday, May 17, 2009

It’s coming. You and me and every middle class, working person in this nation is about to start handing over more and more of their hard earned cash to the private insurance industry, courtesy of our own elected members of Congress and our very popular President. Fire up those Treasury Department presses. We’re going to be printing and providing money for insurance companies like no bail-out we’ve seen yet this economic crisis cycle.

The healthcare legislation under design and so far under wraps for the American people is slowly being leaked via carefully staged forum and meetings and a few well-timed hearings and grand press announcements. Much of the work is still going on behind closed doors in private meetings attended by those who are deemed appropriate participants and industry friends.

Remember how open these proceedings were to be following all the Clinton plan debacles of the early 90s? Well, today’s stagings are far more sophisticated and planned out. So learning did occur by the industry giants and their political friends over these last 17 years, I will give them that.

And what do we know so far about what middle class Americans can expect from the legislation being privately crafted?

First, no matter what percentage of your take home pay it takes, you will be legally required to buy private health insurance. Second, if all you can afford is a policy that leaves you financially exposed to bankruptcy and foreclosure, then you will still be legally required to purchase that private insurance product. Third, should you fail to buy a policy, you will pay a fine.

Like it so far? Feeling free and protected? Like the choices so far? It gets better.

The private, for-profit insurance industry has made concessions we are asked to celebrate. First, they’ll issue every one of us a policy provided every one of us is legally forced to buy coverage. Second, they stop discriminating against women because they have uteruses and child-bearing capacity, provided we all have to buy their product. And third, and this was a real coup according to our leaders, the insurance companies, medical equipment folks and providers will slow the rate of increase in charging for their products to charge just a bit less in terms of percentages of overall costs than they had planned to do and as is predicted. Laughable concessions sold as real compromise.

It’s as if we’ve been beaten a few times every month by an abuser whose violence and anger is increasing over time, and we know by calculating the trend that we’ll be beaten daily within a very short time. Up steps the abuser to say, “Wait. I will still have to beat you more than I do now, but I think I can hold it to 25 times a month instead of every day.” That’s the sort of promises we’re supposed to see as victories with the healthcare industry involvement in crafting the legislation that will determine our families’ financial well-being and matters of life and death.

Let me spell this out for families like mine. You’ve been getting overcharged for underinsurance for many years and you’ve seen the costs out of your own pocket rise to the point where it is truly driving whether or not you even try to seek care when ill. You’ve seen premiums rise and coverage shrink in employer based coverage, and 14,000 of you a day are losing those employer based benefits in this stinking economy.

And most importantly to me and millions of other middle class folks, when you do get sick and need care, you are forced to see only those doctors and providers your insurance company says you can and those providers can only give you the insurance company says they can give you. That’s the way our insurance companies want it now and forevermore, and that’s what they are going to get.

Feeling free? Your choices broadening? Your costs lowering?

Wait. There’s more. In order to make sure every single American buys the private products from insurance companies and knowing some families won’t make enough to afford what is offered, we’ll all chip in and pay our taxes to subsidize those who cannot afford to buy the pricey plans. So, when each of us calculates our own monthly costs for healthcare, we’ll need to factor in not only our own health insurance premium, our co-pays and deductibles, our medications and other out-of-pocket costs, but also the percentage of our payroll taxes dedicated to pay for the subsidies for low-income folks, the agencies to collect the fines paid by health-insurance-mandate-evaders, and the agency envisioned to be our clearing house for selling us the private product we’re all forced to buy. If our real costs are added up, there will be a substantial increase for most middle class families.

These folks are really hoping you will not do the math. They think middle class folks are too dumb to figure it out.

Let me repeat. This Congress and this President are about to give us healthcare reform that will make the middle class burden for payment higher and will even more deeply restrict personal choices in medical care. And they are about to do it all with great fanfare claiming just the opposite.

No doubt many of you have feared really looking at a single payer approach as something scary and restrictive of your personal freedoms. I can promise you that nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, your freedom to choose would be greatly enhanced under a publicly funded, privately delivered national program. Greatly enhanced freedom. Lowered costs as we each pay the percentage we can afford from our income. Greatly enhanced choice of providers – no more being told who is in-network or out. No more risk of financial ruin if medical care is not approved by a profit-driven entity. And no more being told a service we already received isn’t covered after all – the great bait and switch the health insurance industry is allowed to do all the time, leaving so many people with bills they never even knew they were accepting responsibility to pay.

I like being free to choose. And if this healthcare reform plan restricts my freedom, takes my hard-earned money and makes my life more difficult, I won’t have any problem at all assigning blame to the folks who forced it on me.

Look, what’s the old saying about excrement rolling downhill? This president is very popular. He won’t get blamed when middle class folks figure out the ruse. And the Senate is pretty safe, as they get to sit for six years before answering to the people – and they get oodles of cash from the industry to make sure they are comfy, cozy. It’s the U.S. House of Representatives – the people’s house, they say – that will take the hit when the moms and dads of this nation figure it out that they didn’t get healthcare reform at all. The middle class will get a huge burden to bail-out the health insurance and healthcare industry under the plan moving so carefully but swiftly through the process.

The kicker? When it’s finally unveiled in all its bi-partisan glory, it’ll be sold as a human rights victory. And on that day, 60 more American families will bury a loved one denied care. And on the day after that, 60 more will die. And the day after that, they’ll be a big damn party paid for by you and by me for all of those who helped craft the monstrosity. And the insurance industry CEO salaries will be enhanced by your money paid to them. Bail-out bonanza for Karen Ignagni and America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry very fond of its government entitlements.

Costs will be successfully shifted even more heavily onto the backs of America’s middle class workers. I mean, middle class chumps. And then, my fellow worker-bees, it will be mid-term election time again.

Donna Smith is a community organizer for the California Nurses Association and National Co-Chair for the Progressive Democrats of America Healthcare Not Warfare campaign.

Taming Runaway Health Care Costs

Letters
New York Times
May 16, 2009

To the Editor:

David Leonhardt, in his May 13 column (“Health Care, a Lesson in Pain,” Economic Scene), is quite right that “the only way to have a sustainable universal health care system is to control costs.” But in analyzing the experts’ testimony before the Senate Finance Committee on how to pay for health care, he did not mention a solution that neither the experts nor the committee wants to consider: major reform of the system.

Runaway costs are due largely to high overhead expenses throughout the system, and to the excessive use of expensive technology. Both of these result from a health care system that is organized like a profit-seeking industry instead of a social service.

If we want health care to be a universal entitlement, it cannot be controlled by market forces and the financial interests of insurers and providers (and the investors who own such a large part of the system).

Some kind of government-regulated single-payer insurance plan and a reorganized nonprofit medical care delivery system may be “off the table” for policy makers right now, but we will never achieve affordable universal coverage without major reform that deals with the real causes of medical inflation.

We don’t need more money; we need a new system.

Arnold S. Relman
Marcia Angell
Cambridge, Mass., May 14, 2009

The writers, medical doctors, are former editors in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Universal health care: Private enterprise can't fix our ailing system

By PAUL DeMARCO
Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald-Journal
Sunday, May 17, 2009

I live in a town with a population of 7,000. I own a pair of shotguns, and I know how to use them — a wood duck and a turkey are mounted on my office wall. I drive a 2001 Dodge Dakota pickup with 150,000 miles on it.

I wear a coat and tie every day to work. I’m in church each Sunday and am not embarrassed to tell you that Jesus is my Savior. I believe in chivalry; I open doors for women and expect my teenage daughter’s dates to come into the house when they visit.

My usual TV-watching dilemma is “The Andy Griffith Show” or “M*A*S*H.” I’m about as old-fashioned, square and conservative as they come.

So where do I get off backing a single-payer national health plan, a plan where everybody’s covered in one big risk pool and health care is publicly financed (but privately delivered)? Shouldn’t I be a rugged individualist, telling people that if they want good health insurance they can pay attention in class, go to college and get a good job with full benefits just like I did?

Well, part of me could do that. No country can survive unless individual responsibility is at the core of its ethos.

But to the other part of me, the go-it-alone attitude just sounds downright mean.

That puts me in about the same mind-set as a Midwestern farmer in the mid-19th century. Farmers then and now are often independent, self-sufficient

and hesitant to incur a debt. But when a neighboring family needed a barn raised, that was a different story. No matter how hearty the farmer, he couldn’t raise a barn alone. And there was a healthy dose of self-interest in the proposition. If I help raise your barn, then when mine needs repairs, I’ll have your help.

So I look at single-payer health care in that conservative light. I recognize that a significant portion of America’s chronic disease burden is self-induced (e.g., some people eat, drink or smoke too much and make themselves sick). But I also know that much of your health is beyond your control — it’s either in your genes or not significantly altered by lifestyle. Think breast cancer and many other malignancies, flu and many other infectious diseases, Alzheimer’s dementia or rheumatoid arthritis.

I don’t suspect that farmers of yore did any research on the family who they helped. Whether the family was industrious or lazy, a barn was built because everyone needed a barn. Without a place to store hay and protect animals in the upcoming winter, livestock would die and the family would soon follow. No farmer, no matter how stoic, would consign his neighbor to that fate.

I support single-payer health care in this tradition. A single-payer program, which would expand Medicare to all Americans (rather than just those 65 and over), would create one large barn-raising community, 300-million strong. We would all chip in our share so that all families could have health care. Almost all of us would end up paying less than we do now (there would be no co-pays or deductibles), and we could choose any doctor or hospital we wanted.

Under our present setup, it’s hit and miss. Money typically dictates who gets care and who doesn’t.

A carpenter who works for a big company with insurance may get care; another who works for a small one can only dream about it.

A woman with lupus loses her job and her insurance and then becomes uninsurable because of her pre-existing condition.

A 60-year-old man with a bad knee is laid off when a plant closes in his rural hometown. Lame and unskilled in a region with rising unemployment, he will limp for five years until he qualifies for Medicare and can have his knee replaced.

Barn-raising worked because it is was a nonprofit enterprise. A farming community bound itself in a social contract. Many countries have single-payer social contracts, including our neighbor Canada, to ensure the health of all their citizens. There are many ways to inject a profit motive into the process, but they all taint it. Until the 1960s, medicine was also primarily a nonprofit endeavor. In recent decades, the huge profits available to for-profit insurance companies and hospitals have often elevated shareholders above patients, resulting in higher costs and inferior care.

All my instincts call for problems to be solved by individuals operating in a free-market economy. But private enterprise cannot solve this one. We have 40 years of evidence of the free market’s failure to control costs or cover everyone.

The plain truth is that the public single-payer systems we already have (Medicare, Medicaid and the VA) provide better coverage with less overhead than private companies. I know that statement is hard for many, including me, to swallow, but it’s true.

Medicare for all will not be a perfect system, but it will be far better than the fragmented, profit-warped system we have.

When America was younger, we knew not to turn our backs on new neighbors in need of a barn. In this older — and I hope wiser — America, we should not turn our backs on those who need health care. Tell your representative and senators to put single payer on the table in Washington.

Paul DeMarco, MD is a general internist who lives in Marion. He is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org).

Health: a fight for rights

By Margaret Flowers
Baltimore Sun
May 17, 2009

Health care must become the civil rights movement of our time. And it is becoming clear that achieving guaranteed health care for every American will require all the tools that helped win earlier civil rights fights.

Earlier this month, eight health care advocates, including me and two other Maryland physicians, stood up to Sen. Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and the Senate Finance Committee during a “public roundtable discussion” with a simple question: Will you allow an advocate for a single-payer national health plan to have a seat at the table? The answer was a loud, “Get more police!”

Single-payer is a system of public financing that will guarantee everyone, without exception, all medically necessary care with no co-pays or deductibles. You would go to the doctor (most of whom would remain in private practice) and hospital of your choice.

By replacing today’s wasteful, fragmented, for-profit private health insurance industry with a single, streamlined system of paying medical bills, similar to how traditional Medicare works, we would save more than $400 billion annually, enough to assure comprehensive, quality care to all.

Single payer is supported by the majority of the public, as well as most doctors and nurses. It would end the tens of thousands of preventable deaths and more than 1 million cases of medical bankruptcy that occur in the United States every year. But none of that seems to matter to Mr. Baucus.

As the May 5 meeting approached, we applied the standard tools of advocacy, organizing call-in days and faxes to committee members, requesting the presence of one single-payer advocate at the table of 15. The only reply – received on the day before the event – was, “Sorry, but no more invitations will be issued.”

The next day, we donned our suits and traveled to Washington. As the meeting started, one of us, Russell Mokhiber, stood up to say that we were here and we were ready to take a seat. He was promptly removed from the room. I stood up next and spoke out for single payer. I was also arrested, as were the six others who spoke out in turn.

In that moment, it became clear: We could write letters, call staffers, and fax until the machines fell apart, but the Senate Finance Committee had no intention of allowing single-payer experts to have a voice in the process.

Instead, the people seated at the table represented the corporate interests: private health insurers, big business and those who support their agenda. These same players paid more than $13 million to the members of the Finance Committee in the 2008 election cycle alone. They profit greatly from the current arrangements and do not want changes that will hurt their pocketbooks.

For decades, doctors and nurses have tried to deliver quality health care in an environment that makes it increasingly difficult to do so. We all have stories that break our hearts. The time has come to tell our stories so that we can create a health care system that focuses on care, not corporate profit.

And so, we have entered a new phase in the movement for health care as a human right: acts of nonviolent, civil disobedience. At the most recent roundtable in the Senate Finance Committee, on Tuesday, 30 nurses silently stood up and turned their backs to the committee with the message: “Nurses say: Patients first. No to AHIP [America’s Health Insurance Plans]. Pass single payer.” After a few minutes they walked out. Then five more people were arrested as they spoke out for single payer.

The opportunity to make health care a civil rights issue is here. If calling our legislators isn’t enough to get the job done, we must use the tools that have achieved civil rights victories in the past.

Dr. Margaret Flowers is co-chair of the Maryland chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program. Her e-mail is nose1@aol.com. Her statement was co-signed by representatives of Labor Campaign for Single Payer; Single Payer Action; Healthcare-NOW!; B’more Housing for All; and ProsperityAgenda.us.

Health care reform supporters arrested for protest

By MIKE DENNISON
Helena (Mont.) Independent Record
May 15, 2009

Physicians, nurses and other advocates of a national, single-payer health system are vocally protesting their exclusion from high-level reform talks at the committee chaired by Sen. Max Baucus – and getting arrested while doing it.

“If you asked me a few weeks ago if I’d be arrested, I never would have dreamed that,” said Dr. Margaret Flowers of Sparks, Md. “But it became clear that (Baucus and his colleagues) wouldn’t give us a seat at the table, no matter what we did, so we had to have our voice heard somehow.”

Flowers was among eight people arrested last week as they protested before the Senate Finance Committee, which is preparing to craft major health-reform legislation.

On Tuesday, five more people were arrested at a Finance Committee meeting in Washington, D.C., as they demanded that a single-payer system be considered as a possible reform.

“We’re advocating on behalf of our patients, and we’re not going to go away,” Flowers said in a telephone interview with the Lee Newspapers State Bureau.

Baucus, D-Mont., wouldn’t make himself available for an interview this week. However, his spokesman Ty Matsdorf said Baucus has had meetings with single-payer advocates, and that they’ve been involved in other discussions.

“Senator Baucus feels that everyone should be heard on health care reform, and that is why he invited people to submit comments into the congressional record or organize meetings with the senator and his staff,” Matsdorf said.

At the same time, Baucus has said single-payer will not be considered as a possible reform of America’s health care system.

Under a single-payer system, the government would act as the primary health insurer, providing health coverage for all citizens, paid for by tax revenue.

Flowers, a pediatrician, head the Maryland chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, a doctors’ group pushing for a single-payer system.

Since the election of President Barack Obama, the group has been contacting legislators, asking that single-payer be considered alongside other possible health reforms.

“What we’ve been finding is that the harder our movement pushes, the more they try to exclude us,” she said.

Flowers said the group asked Baucus to include its president, Dr. Oliver Fein, at a May 5 roundtable before the Finance Committee, as it discussed reforms to expand affordable coverage.

That request was rejected, she said, while the roundtable had 15 people representing health insurers, business, retirees and others.

As the meeting began at the Everett Dirksen building in Washington, D.C., Flowers and others shouted from the audience, asking why the roundtable included no one for a single-payer system.

“The comments from the audience are inappropriate and out of order,” Baucus responded. “Any further disturbance will cause the committee to recess so the police can restore order.”

Capitol Police arrested each person as they spoke out, and they were taken to a Homeland Security Department building nearby, Flowers said.

Flowers said she was charged with unlawful conduct and disruption of Congress and held for seven hours before being released. An arraignment is scheduled May 26.

Baucus later attempted to address some of the protesters, saying he “deeply, deeply respect(s) the views of all members of the audience and all Americans who feel deeply about health care reform.”

“I hear what you say; I talk to a lot of people in my home state of Montana who have the exact same views,” Baucus said. “But we aren’t going to get the best result here (unless) we can have an orderly discussion as to how we should best reform our health care system.”

Flowers dismissed Baucus’ statement as “political talk that doesn’t mean anything.”

“If he really respected our views, he would allow us to be there and present our views equally with others,” she said.

Springfield doctor arrested at D.C. protest

By Kathleen O’Dell
Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader
May 13, 2009

A Springfield physician was among five health care advocates arrested Tuesday at the U.S. Capitol for disrupting a Senate Finance Committee hearing on health care reform, run by Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana.

Dr. Judy Dasovich, volunteer medical director at The Kitchen Clinic in Springfield, told the News-Leader she engaged in “an act of civil disobedience” with other members of Physicians for a National Health Program. She’s been a member since 2004.

Dasovich said she and the others protested because the committee convened a panel of 15 health care experts but excluded anyone supporting a single-payer/ Medicare-for-all national health plan. She was the only Missouri participant, she said.

“We’ve asked, we’ve faxed, e-mailed, called, wrote letters, and the only response has been ‘Everyone is at the table,’ ” Dasovich said. “But single-payer won’t be, so this is the only way we can be heard — civil disobedience.”

Last week, about eight members of the California Nurses Association were arrested for a silent protest that disrupted a similar Baucus hearing.

Both protests were organized by Physicians for a National Health Program as well as Healthcare Now and Single Payer Action. All of them support a single-payer, government-run health care system. A group from the California Nurses Association also participated in Tuesday’s protest and were arrested, she said.

During the hearing, the physician said she stood up and said, “I’m Dr. Judy Dasovich. We request a single-payer advocate be allowed at the table because health care should be for patients, not for profit.”

As happened each time a protester spoke, she said she was led away by the “respectful” Capitol Hill police, arrested and handcuffed. She and the others were put in a police vehicle and taken to the prisoner processing area on the grounds.

She was searched, fingerprinted and spent about four hours in a handcuff chained to the wall before being released.

After a single-payer rally today in Washington, Dasovich plans to return to Springfield and The Kitchen Clinic. She has volunteered there 10 years.

The medical/dental clinic provides free care and medicines for the indigent and working poor.

“(Baucus) talks about how all the players are at the table,” Dasovich said, “except for months and weeks, single-payer people. We have been asking for one single-payer person to be at the table and he has refused.”

The physicians group has proposed two nominees who are experts in medicine and health care policy.

Baucus would not explain Tuesday why he has not invited single-payer advocates to join discussions with advocates of other health-care sectors, she said.

The insurance and pharmaceutical industries are among major contributors to Baucus, according to news reports.

Among other things, a single-payer program would reduce those industries’ profits, Dasovich said.

Asked why it was so important that single-payer advocates be at the table during early health care reform talks, Dasovich replied, “…People understand single-payer/improved Medicare for all is more efficient, provides freedom of choice of hospital and doctor and most of all …it will save $350 billion on money that goes for profits, the health insurance industry, for advertising, for shareholders,” she said. “That’s $350 billion that could immediately be put into the system that could be used for care.”

Baucus closes door on single-payer in national health care debate

By JOHN S. ADAMS
Great Falls Tribune
May 17, 2009

HELENA — Last week lawmakers on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee wrapped up a series of hearings aimed at laying the groundwork for reforming the nation’s ailing health care system.

That committee will play a crucial role in any health care reform forwarded by Congress, and its chairman, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., could be the most important player of all.

Representatives from the health insurance industry, the business community, retiree groups and others were invited to take part in the May 5 and May 12 roundtable discussions, but missing from the panels were advocates for single-payer health insurance. That fact led to a pair of dramatic protests on the hearing floor that disrupted the proceedings and ended in 13 arrests.

Supporters of single-payer insurance — in which the federal government provides health insurance for all Americans and pays doctor, hospital and other health care bills, replacing the private for-profit insurance industry — say it is the only option for fixing the broken and expensive health care system. They say they repeatedly tried to meet with Baucus to urge him to allow a single-payer advocate to take part in the hearings, but the senator refused.

Baucus, who sets the Finance Committee’s agenda, has consistently stated that single-payer is off the table.

“We’ve got to reform our system fairly quickly, and to be candid with you, very few members of the House and Senate advocate single-pay. The vast, vast majority do not,” Baucus said in an interview Friday. “It tells me that if I go down that road, it’s not going to be successful — it’s not going to pass the Congress.”

Though no single-payer bills have been introduced in the Senate, Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, has introduced a universal health care measure in the House, House Resolution 676, entitled “The United States National Health Care Act.” The bill has 75 sponsors in the House and is endorsed by more than 500 unions in 49 states, including the Montana AFL-CIO and the state teacher’s union, MEA-MFT.

“There are 50 million people without insurance in this country. That’s equivalent to 24 state populations. If we had 24 states where nobody had insurance they would be out in the streets raising all kinds of hell,” said Phil Campbell, spokesman for the group Montanans for Single-Payer and the former political director of the Montana Education Association before it merged with the Montana Federation of teachers. “We’re just frustrated with Baucus because all the players are at the table, all the insurance companies and other folks, except advocates for single-payer. We think it’s the solution to the problem. It’s a system that will pay for itself rather than figure out how we’re going to pay for the system.”

With some polls showing approximately 60 percent of Americans in support of single-payer health insurance, advocates say Congress is excluding the majority of Americans from a critical national debate. Single-payer supporters say politicians are unfairly criticizing the idea as politically unfeasible without even having an open and public dialogue on its merits.

“If you have a policy debate on the merits, that’s going to serve the ultimate purpose, which is to come up with the best health care reform plan possible,” said Michael Lighty, director of public policy for the California Nurses Association, one of the groups that staged a protest at Tuesday’s hearing. “If you let political feasibility truncate the policy debate then you haven’t done service to the debate.”

Protesters showed up at the two Senate hearings this month to urge Baucus to give single-payer advocates a seat at the table. In both cases, protesters were escorted out of the room by police and arrested. In all, 13 protesters — dubbed “The Baucus 13” by some — were charged with unlawful conduct for disruption of Congress.

The protests were organized so that as one protester was escorted out of the room, another would stand and demand the panel consider single-payer.

Dr. Judy Dasovich, a volunteer medical director of a free clinic in Springfield, Mo., was arrested at Tuesday’s hearing. As the hearing got under way, Dasovich stood up and said, “We request that single-payer advocates be allowed at the table. Health care should be for patients, not for profit.”

Dasovich said she was promptly escorted out of the Dirksen Senate Office Building by police. She spent the next five hours in jail.

“I don’t understand how a country that is as rich as ours can allow 20,000 of its citizens to die for lack of health care and allow others to be financially ruined by exorbitant costs. Callous neglect is not an American value,” Dasovich said in an interview from her home Friday.

According to federal estimates, 46 million Americans are without health insurance and another 25 million are underinsured, or more than 20 percent of the United States population. Additionally, those numbers are increasing as more workers lose their jobs in the ongoing recession.

Meanwhile, the cost of health care continues to skyrocket, making it more difficult for those who do have insurance to pay for it.

According to the National Coalition on Health Care, in 2008 total national health expenditures rose 6.9 percent from the previous year, or twice the rate of inflation. Meanwhile, health care spending topped $2.4 trillion in 2007, or $7,900 per person. Currently, total health care spending represents about 17 percent of the gross domestic product.

So what would single-payer advocates have told the Senate Finance Committee if given the chance?

“In terms of having a health care system that’s sustainable and we can afford, it is the only realistic option,” said Marcia Angell, a prominent critic of America’s health care system and the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Angell also is a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard medical school and author of the book, “The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.”

Many single-payer supporters publically urged Baucus to let Angell take part in the hearings.

“What I would have said is that the underlying problem with our health care system, the thing that makes it such a mess, is that it is based on seeking profits and not on providing health care,” Angell said. “It entrusts the financing of health care in the private sector to hundreds of investor-owned insurance companies who maximize profits by avoiding covering high-risk patients, and stinting on the services of people that they do cover.”

Baucus said he believes there is a dire need to reform health care, but that a majority of Americans are mostly happy with their current health insurance coverage.

“I think to be successful here, we have to somewhat work with what we have. Work with changing the system we Americans know and are comfortable with rather than some major change that would disrupt Americans in a way that most Americans don’t want to be disrupted,” Baucus said.

Some conservative critics of single-payer say it is “socialized medicine,” adding that it puts the government in a position of choosing which doctors patients see and imposes a massive bureaucracy on the health care system.

Angell says that’s hogwash.

“The notion that the private sector is efficient is total mythology,” Angell said.

According to Angell, private health insurers take 10 to 20 percent of premiums patients pay just to cover administrative overhead costs. She said some smaller insurance companies take up to 30 to 40 percent of premiums.

“Medicare pays only 3 percent in overhead. Right there you see a much more efficient system,” Angell said.

Baucus favors a program similar to what Massachusetts implemented in 2006, in which everyone is required to be covered by some sort of health insurance, either through their employer or out of their own pocket. If a resident can’t afford to buy his or her own coverage, the state helps that person pay for it. Baucus outlined the main points of his proposals in a report last November.

“Massachusetts is being held up as some sort of a model. I live in Massachusetts, and I can tell you it’s not a model you would want to follow,” Angell said. “Most people in Massachusetts are now insured, but the costs are going up so rapidly that they are having to shrink benefits and increase co-payments, and it cannot last in the form intended. The state is broke.”

Angell said the federal government could face the same fate if it adopts that model of reform.

Though Baucus refuses to include single-payer advocates in the heath care reform hearings, he said he cares about their ideas and is listening.

“In fact, I’m meeting with advocates of the single-pay system. I have in Washington, and I’m in Montana right now (and) will soon be meeting with them in Montana,” Baucus said Friday.

He also is considering the idea of offering a publicly run insurance plan that would compete with private plans.

“We have a public option on the table,” Baucus said. “It’s one of the so-called coverage options, and it’s similar to single-pay and that’s being discussed, that’s being debated.”

A single-payer plan would take greed out of the health-care business

By Wayne Madsen
Arizona Daily Star
05.11.2009

Americans finally are starting to realize what citizens in other advanced democracies took for granted decades ago: Private health insurance is a shopworn relic from a bygone era when few people could afford quality medical care.

In an ideal world, Congress would have passed a government-administered universal health-care system when it was first introduced by Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., in 1945. When the congressman died in 1954, his son John D. Dingell Jr. won his seat in a special election and has introduced his father’s National Health Insurance legislation at the start of each new Congress.

Unfortunately, the Dingells’ clear vision thus far has been the victim of powerful interests — physicians organized under the banner of the American Medical Association, the pharmaceutical industry and, of course, the nation’s private health insurers.

All profit immensely from the present system, which has ratcheted up costs to the point where the United States now spends twice as much on health care as other industrialized countries — $7,129 for every man, woman and child.

While the other advanced nations provide excellent medical coverage for all of their citizens, our nation falls shamefully short. More than 47 million Americans — including 9 million children — have no health-care insurance.

The two major reasons for this gaping disparity between consumer spending and actual services are the inefficiencies inherent in a system that involves thousands of delivery agents and, sadly, outright greed.

The vast private insurance bureaucracy and the forests of paperwork they produce vociferously consume 31 cents of every health-care dollar consumers shell out, according to the advocacy group Physicians for a National Health Program.

Funneling that money into a single system run by the federal government would save more than $350 billion per year — more than enough to provide comprehensive health care of the highest quality for all Americans.
Some experts believe that the savings from eliminating the pervasive greed in the current system might double that amount although they acknowledge there’s no way to calculate that.

One of the major problems with private insurers is their desire for ever-rising profits means they have little incentive to insure people with prior health conditions — those that are already sick or have had a bout with a serious illness like cancer.

A friend of mine — some eight years cancer-free after breast surgery — constantly receives letters from her insurer asking her to fill out a comprehensive survey on her overall medical condition. She wisely declines each opportunity because she believes the insurers are trolling cancer survivors looking for any excuse to cancel current policies and deny applications for new ones.

Ironically, it appears that President Obama and congressional health-care leader Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., may be about to give the insurers the type of reform they have spent millions of dollars lobbying for — despite their posturing as champions of rational change.

The proposal by America’s Health Insurance Plans would mandate that the federal government force everyone to purchase private health insurance. All Americans would be covered under this scheme, but the feds would step in and subsidize those with health risks that are extremely costly to treat.

The idea is to continue to let private health insurers reap obscene profits and continue to make large campaign contributions to compliant candidates.

It reminds one of the classic line from “The Leopard,” Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel about the unification of Italy in the 1860s: “If we want things to stay as they are, they will have to change.”

Rather than retaining the notorious Capitol Hill sleight-of-hand that delivers cash-filled envelopes, Americans should push for a single-payer system like the ones currently enjoyed by Canadians and most Europeans.

Under such a system, all Americans would be covered for virtually every medical expense and regain the once cherished right of freely choosing their doctors and hospitals.

That, indeed, would be revolutionary reform: one that marches under the banner of “Patients before Profits.”