Health Care For America Reform Has A Long Record Of Failure

[Better Believe It]

Why is Health Care for America Now giving up on real reform?
By Rose Ann DeMoro
President
California Nurses Association
Daily Kos Blog
July 9, 2008

The big splash of news and internet coverage for the new Health Care for America Now coalition of labor, progressive and liberal groups is a reminder of the critical importance of health care reform. And a reminder that partial solutions, such as those proposed by the coalition, will only perpetuate, not end the health care crisis.

The groups behind the new coalition are working in concert with the Obama campaign and Democratic leaders in Congress to build "consensus" around a plan that would presumably be introduced in the first days of the next administration, and pushed through to a quick vote before opponents can mount a "Harry and Louse"-style counter attack.

But, in search of a supposedly politically viable plan, the advocates of this approach have surrendered in advance on the only overhaul that will actually cure the disease, a single-payer, expanded and improved Medicare for all reform.

Their good intentions will leave the same failed system in place, and will not even blunt the political opposition from those on the right and corporate interests who will continue to challenge anything that looks like even modest reform.

Please read the entire article at:
http://www.calnurses.org/media-center/in-the-news/2008/july/why-is-health-care-for-america-now-giving-up-on-real-reform.html

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A Policy Response to Health Care for America Now
Posted by David Himmelstein, MD on Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Health Care for America Now (HCAN) is pushing a superficially attractive health reform model that has a long record of failure – akin to prescribing a placebo for a serious illness when effective treatment is available. They would offer Americans a new public insurance plan and a menu of private ones, with subsidies for coverage for low income families.

This approach reprises the format of Medicare’s ongoing privatization. Despite promises of strict regulation and a level playing field that would allow the public plan to flourish, private insurers would (as they have done in Medicare) predictably overwhelm regulatory efforts through crafty schemes to selectively recruit profitable, lower-cost patients, and avoid the expensively ill. Like the Medicare Advantage program, originally touted as a market-based strategy to improve Medicare’s efficiency, the HCAN plan would evolve into a multibillion dollar subsidy for private insurers whose massive financial power (amassed largely at government expense) would prove a political roadblock to terminating the failed experiment.

Unfortunately, proposals like HCAN’s that cede a central role to private insurers can only add coverage by adding costs. They promise savings from computerization and chronic disease care management. Yet the Congressional Budget Office has warned that there is little or no evidence for such savings.

The HCAN proposal forgoes most of the $350 billion annually in administrative savings possible under single payer national health insurance (NHI). Administrative waste is a natural byproduct of the private insurance firms that would retain a central role under HCAN’s plan. Private plans’ overhead is 12-fold higher than under NHI; the excess is squandered on marketing, underwriting, utilization reviewers and profits, and for the billions paid to executives. And the multiplicity of insurers envisioned in the plan precludes paying hospitals a global, lump sum budget; such budgets would save additional billions by obviating the need for most hospital billing and much of the internal accounting needed to attribute hospital costs to individual patients and payers.

Please read the entire article at:

http://www.pnhp.org/blog/2008/07/09/a-policy-response-to-health-care-for-america-now/

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WE DON'T NEED INSURANCE, WE NEED GUARANTEED HEALTHCARE!

Please visit the single payer guaranteed healthcare website at:

http://www.guaranteedhealthcare.org/