By Malinda Markowitz
San Jose Mercury News
10/25/2007

It’s time to wave the warning flag on the steamroller demanding action on health care this year – no matter what it is. Rather than resulting in sound policy, the drumbeat could just as easily produce a hastily designed “compromise” that perpetuates our state’s health care crisis while stalling real reform for years to come.

Consider Massachusetts, whose mandatory health insurance law is the model for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal and which provided much of the inspiration for a similar legislative proposal vetoed by Schwarzenegger earlier this month.

The Massachusetts law was hurriedly rushed through its Legislature last year amid clamor for passage of a law that its advocates could claim solved their health care morass while burnishing the credentials of politicians such as Gov. Mitt Romney, then in the final stages of preparing his candidacy for president.

Today the law remains a mess. Despite tax penalties for failure to buy insurance, only 20 percent of the uninsured have purchased the mandatory plans – and 94 percent of those who have enrolled received full or partial public subsidies.

One reason so many are willing to accept the fines is the law’s failure to control costs.

Even the cheapest plans have high deductibles and co-pays, and huge gaps in coverage have eroded existing benefits for many families with modest incomes.

Massachusetts officials admit 18 percent of the uninsured cannot afford insurance, notes a report by the Santa Monica-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. As Ben Day, director of Mass-Care, a vocal critic of the law, points out, “many of those who supported it are now saying the law will never work.”

Why does Massachusetts matter? Because both the latest Schwarzenegger proposal, and the alternative favored by Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez and some of his allies, repeat the mistakes of the Massachusetts law.

Neither approach constrains skyrocketing premiums, deductibles, co-pays, drug costs or hospital charges. That’s a fatal flaw. Millions of Californians are likely to end up with junk insurance that increases their health insecurity with policies that will jeopardize their financial health if they use medical care or encourage them to self-ration and not use the care they still have to pay for.

Proponents of the two versions say they are cracking down on insurers by requiring them to provide coverage to everyone, but massive loopholes make that promise illusory.

The governor’s latest plan, for example, allows health plans to require information on a patient’s health status or history and permits them to raise rates further for “risk adjustment.” The Núñez bill permitted insurers to dump people with “serious medical conditions” into a public pool that would probably be bankrupted by having to pay for the sickest patients.

Two issues, both ominous for California working families, appear to be holding up the final back-room deal.

The first is a Massachusetts-style mandate forcing all uninsured individuals to buy insurance. As in Massachusetts, the price tag for the cheapest plans in the governor’s proposal is enormous deductibles and other high out-of-pocket costs, and a required minimum that a family must spend on its health plan which together could financially devastate many California families.

While Núñez and his allies have opposed the individual mandate, it seems likely a deal will be cut providing financial offsets for some middle-income families. But, as the Massachusetts experience proves, without effective cost controls, any offsets on an individual mandate are meaningless.

A second point of contention is how much tax will be levied on employers who don’t provide health coverage for workers. But both the amount favored by the governor, and the one in the Núñez bill that was vetoed, are substantially less than what the average California business offering health plans now pays, a clear incentive for businesses to reduce coverage or drop benefits entirely and just pay the tax.

Sadly, the main beneficiaries of a rushed “compromise” will be the same insurance companies that created the present crisis. They would harvest millions of new customers, with the government using its power and the public purse to further an insurance industry that will continue to be able to profiteer and deny care.

We don’t have to turn just to Massachusetts to see an example of how this can lead to disastrous public policy. A decade ago, the same “consensus” pushed the hurried passage of energy deregulation. That was followed by blackouts, skyrocketing energy costs for consumers, financial calamity for the state, and open thievery by Enron and other energy corporations.

Californians should demand that legislators pull the plug before we plunge into another disaster.

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MALINDA MARKOWITZ is a member of the Council of Presidents of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee and a registered nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose. She wrote this article for the Mercury News.

Press Associates, Inc. (PAI)
10/22/2007

ALBANY, N.Y. (PAI)–A big New York state union, the 58,000-member Public Employees Federation, has joined the growing group that backs government-run single-payer health care. And former Vice President Al Gore does, too.

A 2-sentence endorsement PEF delegates added at their recent convention said it “supports the expansion of Medicare described in bill HR676–the United States National Health Insurance Act. This legislation would provide not-for-profit, single-payer health care to all Americans.”

That adds single-payer health care to a detailed PEF federal agenda that includes preservation of Social Security, transportation funding, and other issues.

Meanwhile, the California Nurses Association, one of at least six AFL-CIO unions that back single-payer, reported Gore’s statement, aired on cable television.

Gore, who won the 2000 presidential election against GOP nominee George W. Bush, but who was deprived of the job by GOP theft, called the present health care system “incredibly ridiculous.” Gore just shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on alerting the world to the dangers of global warming. That gives him added credibility.

“I strongly support universal, single-payer, government-provided-for, government-funded health care,” Gore said. “It doesn’t mean the government runs it, it has competition among different providers. But I just think that we’ve long since reached the stage that it’s immoral to put people in a situation where they cannot get the medical care they need because their incomes aren’t high enough.

“I think it ought to be a matter of right and our current system just doesn’t work. It’s way too expensive. The quality of health care is excellent for those who have enough money to buy the very best, but lower-income and low middle-income Americans are not getting good health care and so many now can’t afford the private health insurance that they’re going without insurance,” Gore explained.

PEF is a joint affiliate of AFT and the Service Employees, neither of which has endorsed the government-run single-payer health care proposal. That legislation, by veteran Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) would abolish any role for the private insurance companies, as well as their co-pays, deductibles, denial of care and deaths caused by refusal to pay for patient care.

In other news from the New York unionists’ convention, the delegates endorsed home-state Sen. Hillary Clinton (D) for the Democratic presidential nomination. New York’s primary, like 24 others nationwide, is on Feb. 5. AFT has also endorsed Clinton, but SEIU left endorsement decisions up to its locals.

By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 23, 2007

I was making small talk with Dan and Sharon Brodrick in a waiting area filled with anxious-looking patients on the first floor of St. Thomas Hospital. Mrs. Brodrick seemed tired, but she managed a smile. Her husband, a former truck driver who is now an ordained minister, was the talkative one.

“We found out five days after her 56th birthday,” he said. “How’s that for a happy birthday?”

While maintaining a pleasant facade for the outside world, the Brodricks, married 37 years and still deeply in love, are spinning toward the abyss.

“We’re in big trouble,” said Mr. Brodrick.

Mrs. Brodrick learned last May that she had cancer of the duodenum, and it had already spread to her liver and pancreas. Not only is the prognosis grim, but the medical expenses will soon leave the couple destitute. Mrs. Brodrick has no health insurance.

The emotional toll has been nearly as devastating as the physical. Mrs. Brodrick told her husband that she wasn’t ready to leave him. “I don’t want to die,” she said. When he told her they had to cling to their faith in God, she replied, “I know that God can take care of this. But how’s he going to do it?”

The American Cancer Society has been campaigning to raise awareness of the desperate plight of people trying to deal with cancer without health insurance. I offer Dan and Sharon Brodrick as Exhibit A.

The Brodricks never had much money, but they raised two boys and managed to buy a modest home in Gainesboro, a rural town about 90 miles east of here. Dan Brodrick severely damaged his back in an accident at work several years ago and is disabled. His wife has suffered from a variety of illnesses.

But by carefully managing their meager income, they have lived in reasonable comfort. “With a little bit of savings,” said Mr. Brodrick, “and with what I’ve been drawing in disability, we figured we’d be all right.”

But the absence of health insurance for Mrs. Brodrick left a gaping hole in their financial plan, and they knew it. She had been covered by her husband’s health insurance while he was driving a truck. But that coverage ended when he was forced to retire.

“We tried to buy insurance for her,” said Mr. Brodrick. “We applied to dozens of companies. But they wouldn’t touch her because she already had health problems.”

Without insurance, Mrs. Brodrick received treatment for her various ailments under a special program for uninsured patients at St. Thomas. But the cancer diagnosis was an entirely different story, a step for the Brodricks into a realm of dizzying, unrelieved horror.

First came the biopsy, accompanied by reassuring comments from doctors. Then came word that the tumor was indeed malignant. That was followed by surgery.

“They opened her up, and then they closed her right up again,” said Mr. Brodrick.

Not only had the cancer metastasized, it was moving very aggressively. Various estimates were given, each one shorter than the last, about how long Mrs. Brodrick might live.

While his wife was being prepped for chemo, Mr. Brodrick sat in the corner of another room and spoke about what it was like to have one’s life all but literally blown apart.

“It tears you down,” he said. “You’d like to fight this with your bare hands, but you can’t. We’ve been married 37 years Sept. 2, and when I think about it, it was the quickest 37 years I’ve ever seen go by in my life. It went by in a flash. And we have leaned on each other that whole time.”

The hospital is not billing the Brodricks for its costs. “But,” said Mr. Brodrick, “I’ve still got to pay the doctors’ bills and pay for the drugs. And the drugs are very expensive.”

He reeled off a long list of charges that are coming at him like machine-gun fire, bills that he cannot afford to pay.

“So we’re selling the house,” he said. He sat quiet for a moment, then added in a soft voice, “You shouldn’t have to go live in a tent somewhere just because you don’t have insurance.”

He said he wanted to tell his story publicly because he knew there were millions of others without health insurance, and that there are many families, like his own, facing the long, dark night of devastating illness.

“Something has to be done,” he said.

Mr. Brodrick was able to get his wife into a renowned cancer center in the Midwest to get another opinion on the course of treatment she was receiving.

“They said it was the perfect treatment for her and they wouldn’t change a thing,” he said. “They said the success rate with that treatment was 5 percent or less.”

He looked at me. “We’ve got faith in God,” he said. “Without that you might as well throw yourself off a cliff, because there’s nothing else left.”

By Peter Phillips and Bridget Thornton
MinutemanMedia.org
Published Friday, October 19, 2007

Health and disability insurance companies are systematically cheating the American public. Michael Moore’s top-grossing movie Sicko is one example of the growing concern surrounding health care in the US.

The number of Americans without health insurance reached forty-seven million at last count, or sixteen percent of the population. The cost is rising two to three times faster than inflation and is the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the country. We pay more and get less medical care than the rest of the industrialized world. The total per capita health care cost in the US exceeds the expense per person in all other full care countries.

The Institute of Medicine estimates that as many as eighteen thousand Americans die prematurely each year because they do not have health insurance. This figure does not include those who die prematurely each year because their insurers delay, diminish, or deny payment for promised benefits. Reports about people who die unnecessarily from withheld services seldom receive broad coverage in the corporate media. Lack of media coverage has led to a nation of people uninformed about how national health and disability policies are controlled by the private insurance industry and how government regulators are powerless to do anything about it.

If industrialized countries around the world offer health care as a basic right, why is it not happening in the US? Private insurance companies are motivated to make as much money as possible and do so by systematically delaying, diminishing, and denying payment for promised services, and blaming individuals for their own misfortune.

On the boards of directors of the nine largest insurance companies are one hundred thirteen people. These directors are some of the richest in the world. They hold one hundred fifty past and/or present positions with major financial or investment institutions in the US, including such major firms as J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Lord Abbett, Bank of America, and Merrill-Lynch. Additionally, these board members have connections to some of the largest corporations in the world including General Motors, IBM, Ford, Microsoft, and Coca Cola. The combined affiliations among the one hundred thirteen health insurance directors represent revenue of over 2.5 trillion dollars 2006.

As some of the richest most powerful citizens in America, health care executives dominate health policy with their campaign donations and active lobbying. They spend millions to keep themselves in the insurance business despite overwhelming evidence that we would all be better off without them. They use these profits to propagandize the American public and influence voters through scare tactics of “socialized medicine” and long delays of service that supposedly occur in single-payer systems.

The single-payer advocacy group, Physicians for a National Health Program, reports that private insurance corporations spend an enormous amount of money on business-oriented expenses rather than health-related investments. A 2003 study in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that spending for administrative costs associated with health care amount to over $320 billion per year or about thirty-one percent of health care costs in the US overall. The administrative costs in the Canadian national healthcare system amount to 16.7 percent, or about half of the overhead in the US.

Countries with common pool or single-payer systems provide similar levels of service to every person. In such countries, it is the responsibility of society as a whole to provide health care for each individual.

Americans have a choice. We can continue with a high-cost profit-driven private insurance system leaving millions to languish without care, and millions more to face the frustrations of systematic delays, diminished care, and denials of promised benefits. Alternatively, we can build a common pool health care system that provides necessary care to everyone — for less than what we are now paying.

Let’s find and support politicians who will provide universal health care outside of corporate fat-cat control.

Read Practices in Health Care and Disability Insurance: Delay, Diminish, Deny, and Blame by Peter Phillips and Bridget Thornton

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Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored. Bridget Thornton is a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program. All statements above are fully documented in their new study “Practices in Health Care and Disability Insurance: Delay, Diminish Deny and Blame — www.projectcensored.org.

Gore’s New Statement Is Clear: It’s Time for Universal, Single-Payer Healthcare

The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee thanks Al Gore for his forceful new words in support of the kind of universal, non-profit, single-payer healthcare that this country desperately needs–and that is succeeding in nearly every other industrialized democracy.

The statement reflects a growing national consensus that a national, non-profit insurance system would clearly out-perform the private insurance corporations that spend up to one-third of their overhead on overhead and profits…and that it is long past time to put an end to the nation’s healthcare crisis.

On this issue, however, the public is far ahead of most of the political class. A March New York Times/CBS poll found that the vast majority of Americans want a total restructuring of the healthcare system, and preferred a single-payer system to the current private insurance system 47% to 38%. Unfortunately, many politicians continue to accept money from health insurance corporations, and push plans that mandate Americans to purchase expensive and inefficient private insurance products.

“Al Gore has long been a champion of the environment–and now he’s a champion of America’s patients. There is only one solution to our healthcare crisis, and that is the kind of guaranteed, non-profit, single-payer health insurance that we know works,” said Zenei Cortez, RN, a member of CNA/NNOC’s Council of Presidents.

Called “Healthcare Is A Right,” Gore released the following statement on his Current television channel:

I strongly support universal, single-payer, government-provided–or, government-funded–healthcare. It doesn’t mean the government runs it, it has competition among the different providers. But I just think that we’ve long since reached the stage that its immoral to put people in a situation where they cannot get the medical care they need because their incomes aren’t high enough. I think it ought to be a matter of right and our current system just doesn’t work, its way too expensive. The quality of healthcare is excellent for those who have enough money to buy the very best, but lower-income and low middle-income Americans are not getting good healthcare and so many now can’t afford the private health insurance that they’re going without insurance, millions and millions of people. And I think that to eliminate the incredibly ridiculous cost of all this unnecessary paperwork and different standards for different companies, it is time to have universal health insurance.