The health insurance companies have to go

[IndianaGreen]

9 December 2009 • 12:43 pm

The health insurance companies have to go

In a wonderful article entitled Why Obama’s Public Option Is Defective, and Why We Need Single-Payer, Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein detailed the reasons why the “public option” was really not a very good step. Their position, which I agree with, is that “Decades of experience teach that private insurers cannot control costs or provide families with the coverage they need. And a government-run clone of private insurers cannot fix these flaws.”

Given the existing HR676 Single Payer health legislation, which had massive support going into the struggle for health care “reform”, what happened?

In union work, and probably any other negotiating situation, you learn not to negotiate against yourself. Democrats, and even more progressive forces, negotiated against ourselves. We bought into a dream of “gradual change” – first we’d win a public option and then we’d sneak along with whittling away at the insurance companies until we had a rational system. Like the insurance companies and business interests are stupid or wouldn’t notice!!! The gradualist approach meant that real reforms like single payer had to fight for a place at the table, the Obama “public option” became the left most position at the start of negotiations rather than ending up as the compromise position, and the working people are getting shafted.

At the end of the day, we as a nation lost sight of the real issue: our society’s responsibility to provide quality healthcare to everyone regardless of ability to pay or legal status. We have to stop undermining ourselves with fantasies of avoiding conflict with those who benefit from the status quo, set aside the myth that we’re all in it together to create a better society, and take on the negative forces that cripple our ability to meet our concrete needs for health care, housing, education, healthy foods, energy, and a positive culture that supports efforts to develop ourselves over the course of our lives rather than being distorted by the need to make a profit.

The weakness of the health care bill is a reflection of mistakes in tactics by people’s forces, in part, along with the vicious lies and manipulations by lobbyists for big pharma and insurance companies. Lessons I’ve learned:

a) Always fight for the underlying need; in this case for quality health care for all regardless of ability to pay or legal status.

b) As a people’s movement, it may be more helpful to see our Congress and Administration as implementation mechanisms, not leaders. The President and Congress can only do what the political landscape allows or pressures them to do, and nothing else. In a society crippled by capitalism, crippled by the democracy of the dollar, people’s movement can’t track legislation, we need to continually fight for the material and concrete need. Support for specific legislation can be a tactic as part of that larger struggle, but it can’t become the main point. The public option was never going to meet the need, and should not in my view have become the focal point of the progressive struggle, especially as it is a meaningless concept defined only after the fact. No one knew what a “public option” would include or how it would be structured. Everyone knows what “Quality Health Care for All Regardless of Ability to Pay or Legal Status” means.

c) Gradualism is a myth; the idea that we’ll win a little here and then a little more later, until over time we get where we need to go. We are not and were not going to win the “public option” and then push along to a more complete or radical solution over time. Society deals with questions in democratic struggle and then puts them aside, generally, to deal with other questions. In my view, we, as working people, would have done better to be fighting for what we really need. If we ended up with an intermediate step because we didn’t have the strength to win all that is needed, so be it. We would have educated our communities and strengthened the base in order to continue the struggle.

http://digitalexplorations.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/the-health-insurance-companies-have-to-go/

[drm604]

1. So... they have to go...

How do we get them gone?

[DemReadingDU]

2. by not having a job

As the economy deteriorates into the new year, more and more people will become jobless without health benefits. I suppose the health insurance companies can raise rates on few people who would still have a job. But the rates would be so expensive, that few would be able to afford the price. Possibly that would force health insurance companies to be gone.
:shrug:

[drm604]

4. I do think that it may take some kind of actual crisis before some real reform occurs -

more and more people without insurance, insurance that becomes more and more unaffordable or less and less willing to pay claims, or perhaps some sort of insurance industry crisis similar to the banking crisis.

Our system just doesn't seem to be able to be proactive, thus forestalling crises, but instead is reactive. In the real world this means rebuilding cities rather than maintaining dikes, or bailing out banks rather than regulating them. This is a horribly inefficient, and inhumane, way of doing things but it seems to be what we're stuck with.

Without major reform our health care "system" (I don't really consider it a system) is liable to fail spectacularly, either by itself, or by dragging down the economy it depends on and parasitizes.

A rational system would make the necessary changes before this occurs, but we don't seem to have a rational system. Instead we have large numbers of people who seem to have the idea that the system will magically repair itself through a "hidden hand". They believe this in spite of being repeatedly shown to be wrong.

This mean that large (larger than currently) numbers of people will have to suffer, and perhaps die, as we go through some major crisis before finally doing the right thing out of sheer necessity.

[Waiting For Everyman]

3. K&R

[yurbud]

5. If I was only trial for murder, I wouldn't want the Democratic Party as my defense lawyer

they deal they'd negotiate would be to get me shot with five bullets instead of six or hung with a shorter rope.

[tuvor]

6. "In 2004, U.S. health insurers directly employed almost 470,000 people at an average salary of $61K"

For what it's worth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance#United_States

[yurbud]

8. two response: 1) tobacco industry probably employs a lot too 2) hire the midlevel people and below

to administer a public plan, so long as they were never invovled in deny claims or recission.

[yurbud]

7. gradualism is the siren song of the DLC corporatists to put us to sleep with minimual change

that will be repealed rather than built on.

[meow2u3]

9. All health care organizations should be non-profit

if they want to remain privately run. All surpluses should have to put into savings accounts until they're needed to pay claims; in addition, we should criminalize the attempted investment of health care surpluses. Make it a first-degree felony for any non-profit organization to invest surpluses, jailing their executive directors for 10-30 years, depending on the amount speculated.