Bush Sold His Soul to Insurance in 1995 for $10million a Year to GOP Coffers

[McCamy Taylor]

In 1996, something notable happened to insurance lobby campaign donations. After years of near equal giving to Democrats and Republicans, the industry began giving almost twice as much---$10 million a year more a year--to the GOP. What happened in 1995? Not the defeat of Hillary-care. That came before. Not Newt's Republican Revolution. That was 1994.

1995 was a watershed year for the health insurance industry, because an up and coming Republican political star took a bold stance, one that made him very, very unpopular. That was the year Gov. George W. Bush of Texas vetoed the Patient Protection Act of Texas.

In Texas in 1995, HMOs were coming to power and they were guilty of some terrible abuses. They would fire doctors without reason---actually they had a reason. The doctors were the ones who were providing decent quality medical care---care that cost insurers too much money. They would deny payment for emergency room visits after the fact when it turned out that chest pain was not cardiac after all--as if patients could tell at 3 am in the morning without access to lab and xray facilities at home. They would routinely say "no" to state of the art medical care, insisting upon substandard, cheaper alternatives. I know. I was practicing back then. I had pediatric patients told they had to see adult specialists (who refused to take kids) even though there were pediatric specialists in town. I had patients denied necessary surgery. I was told that I practiced excellent quality medicine and that my expenses were right on target considering how sick my patients were (which was very) but since I was costing the HMO too much money I either had to spend a lot less or I would be fired, but the HMO was not going to tell me how to save money, because I was doing such an excellent job taking care of my patients (in other words, I was being told to dump my sick patients).

In this climate, the Texas Legislature, hardly known for its trail blazing politics, crafted the "Patient Protection Act," legislation that was supposed to be a model for the rest of the country in cracking down on health insurance industry abuses. Rather than "as goes Calfironia, so goes the nation" it was going to be "as goes Texas, so goes the Nation." The insurance industry was understandably alarmed.

http://www.rchusid.addr.com/three%20faces.htm

The bills would have created rules stopping HMOs from 1) failing to pay for emergency room visits or new treatments, 2) firing doctors without reason or 3) encouraging doctors to deny patients expensive treatment. The bills would also have given HMO customers the right to pay for coverage that allowed them to choose their own doctors.

The bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. The insurance industry hated it. W. vetoed it in the most effective way possible. He waited until the Texas Legislature was out of session, killing health insurance reform for two years in Texas.

He got a lot of grief for that veto---and by that I mean the only grief he ever got as governor of Texas--- which might be why, the next time around, he let the Legislature's attempt at health insurance reform go into law (though without his signature). However, just as soon as he was president, he had his attorney general kill that bill before the Supreme Court. All the while claiming credit for Texas' patient protection legislation in his debate with Al Gore.

Now, I am not saying that the $10 million a year is just for Bush's service's rendered. The entire Republican Party has been very, very good for the health insurance industry. But they have no dearer friend than W. No one is more willing to stick his neck out and subject himself to derision than our Resident-in-Chief---which is why he is planning to veto another incredibly popular health care bill, with bipartisan support.

To Bush's way of thinking, legislation like SCHIP deprives health insurance companies of their god given right to collect money from any American family which can scrounge up a few thousand dollars every other month. Think of it as a tithe. A cost of living in the land of the almighty buck. W. wants to make sure that we do without health care or we do without other basic necessities in order to pay for costly health insurance.

Just how costly is health insurance to the average working class family? Here is an example. Go to the Center for Public Policy Priorities web site at

http://www.cppp.org/fbe /

Punch in a family size (I chose two parents, 2 kids) and a city (I chose Fort Worth-Arlington because I live there) and choose no employer sponsored health insurance. Turns out that the family will pay $1000 a month for their health insurance. They will pay $4,252.47 for total monthly expenses---if they spend nothing on anything but the basics--and they will need to make $56,000 a year to get by. That is 273% of the poverty level. Look at those numbers long and hard. To buy insurance, the family will have to spend over one fifth of its pre-tax income. And that does not count deductibles, copays, and it does not take into account the possibility that a child may have a pre-existing condition like asthma that will prevent the family from getting insurance.

George W. Bush wants to make sure that all the families who make $50,000 a year give their $12,000 a year to United Health or Blue Cross, Blue Shield, so that these companies can turn around and give a cut of that money to his political buddies. George W. Bush says that he does not want any of these families to get any sort of help with their health care crisis until all the families making less than 200% of the poverty level have health insurance. This is as good as saying that no one will get any SCHIP money, because a lot of southern states like Texas treat SCHIP like a nuisance. They have a proven record of failing in their obligation to inform and enroll citizens who qualify for available services. This is no accident. It is not a choice on the part of the poor. It reflects the mind set of those who govern Texas and many southern states. They would rather see the poor suffer than give them something "for free" even if the funds are federal. Check out these numbers.

http://www.cppp.org/fbe/hc.pdf

Texas has 1.3 million uninsured children, two thirds of whom live in families with income less than 200% of the poverty level. Therefore, they should qualify for CHIP or Medicaid. However, the state makes no effort to enroll them. Texas has, in essence, told its poorest citizens "you do not count", "you are not important in the scheme of things", "go live somewhere else, California likes your type."

What exactly is wrong with the bipartisan expansion of SCHIP that W. is threatening to veto? Some would say that it does not go far enough.

http://www.star-telegram.com/national_news/story/251206.html

Analysts say the legislation would allow about 4 million of the estimated 9 million uninsured children gain coverage.

However, from the health insurance industry's point of view, I guess that this is one billion dollars in potential premiums that will never be collected. Worse, it is 4 million more working families who have a chance to experience the benefits of government sponsored health insurance. It is four million more kids who grow up to become voters who believe that health insurance is an entitlement, not a luxury.

Does having SCHIP actually improve access to care? Of course it does, but just to be thorough here is a link to a collection of studies that show that SCHIP improves access for adolescents, asthmatics, special needs children and reduces health disparities based upon race.

http://lib.bioinfo.pl/auth:Shone,LP

How many private insurance companies with $1000-$2000 deductibles could make the same claim?

Regarding W.'s assertion that children on SCHIP could pay for private insurance if they wanted

http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/26/2/529

Among children who were newly enrolled in SCHIP in 2002 in ten states, about 14 percent had private coverage that they could have retained as an alternative to SCHIP. Of this 14 percent, about half of parents reported that the private coverage was unaffordable compared with SCHIP. This suggests that relatively few SCHIP enrollees could have retained private coverage and that even fewer had parents who felt that the option was affordable.

And it get worse. According to an article in this week's American Medical News, health insurance is getting even harder for the average American to afford. While inflation is up 2.6% and wages are up 3.7%, health insurance is up 6.1% . And the number of companies with less than 200 employees offering insurance has dropped to 59% ( it was 68% in 2001), this according to a "Survey of Employer Benefits 2007" by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Education Trust.

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2007/10/01/gvl11001.htm

If this trend continues (the article expects it to worsen), more people will find their employer dropping insurance or demanding that they pay a greater percentage for a higher priced product, which will make the problem even more wide spread for middle class families who are already struggling to get by in the sluggish economy. Faced with the choice of paying the mortgage or the health insurance premium, health insurance will be dropped, and the number of uninsured in the US, including children, is going to grow. All the "you must buy health insurance or create a health savings account" legislation in the world is not going to fix this problem unless the government sponsors sensible non profit health care.


Now, here is something really ironic. While Scrooge W. was telling the nation's children "Are the poor houses full?" First Lady Laura was speaking at the global health and literacy luncheon in New York. That is because she knows how important things like literacy and preventive health care are---in other countries.

http://blog.al.com/bn/2007/09/mrs_bushs_speech_at_the_g...

Through your governments, foundations, businesses, and faith congregations, you've improving education and health for millions of people. Your individual energy and compassion are touching millions of lives -- including Alice Mwale.

Mrs. Mwanwasa and I met Alice at Zambia's Regiment Basic School. Alice, who is 15, was orphaned by AIDS at the age of seven. Today, she lives with her brother, who sells charcoal on the local market. Her sister braids hair to make money for the family. With a scholarship from the African Education Initiative, Alice can go to school. This AIDS orphan plans to become a doctor, so she can care for Zambians who are infected with HIV. Someday, she hopes to find a cure for AIDS. With her education, Alice said, "I want to save my people."

I'll bet you did not know that developing nations---the Third World--is considered the big growth market for the insurance companies of America, Japan and other industrialized nations. They are in India already. They are just waiting for the folks in Africa to get educated enough and healthy enough to start working for Exxon and Shell, then Blue Cross and the others can move in, along with US and Japanese tobacco firms, taking a slice off the top of the people's health care expenditures for the chronic diseases they will get from smoking and pollution while insurance execs write pay off checks to politicians to keep them from ever even considering a Western European style universal single payer health insurance plan. Don't believe me? Check out this presentation by Blue Cross Blue shield as a conference on Private Health Insurance in Developing Nations in 2005.

http://hc.wharton.upenn.edu/impactconference/Danao%20031505.pdf

http://hc.wharton.upenn.edu/impactconference/presentations.html

I'll bet the insurance industry loves Saint Laura almost as much as they do her husband. Maybe she is responsible for a few hundred thousand of that $10 million a year.

[flordehinojos]

1. just the name bush and the association of any of the faces and/or individuals that go with it are

enough to send anyone into a sort of vertiginous malaise.

[Time for change]

2. I had a very similar experience with my insurance company

I took my daughter in to the ER for abdominal pain which seemed identical to appendicitis. But the tests proved negative, and our insurance company denied the claim because they claimed that there was nothing seriously wrong with my daughter.

I vigorously complained, and they paid up, possibly because I'm an MD, and they knew that they didn't have a case. But the vast majority of people don't have enough medical knowledge to know when they're getting screwed.