Notes on the status of Health Care Reform

[maryf]

This man is one of the most compassionate and passionate doctors around.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/coates050909.html

Notes on the Status of Health Reform
by Andy Coates

The election of Obama raised expectations for sweeping health reform sky high. But in spite of several self-imposed deadlines, Senate and House health reform bills were not ready by the time of the August Congressional recess, when passionate local debate erupted at Congressional home district town hall meetings.

The Onion pierced the din with truth: "After months of committee meetings and hundreds of hours of heated debate, the United States Congress remained deadlocked this week over the best possible way to deny Americans health care."

If the goals are health care for all and reduced costs of care, the measures being prepared in Congress will not reform the health system. Instead they amount to a massive taxpayer subsidy for the private health insurance industry.

In 2007, more than one of five working-age people were uninsured for a year or longer. One of six working people had health insurance insufficient to meet the expenses of a serious illness. And there were 8 million uninsured children in the United States. At least 5 million more people lost their health insurance in 2008 and 2009 thanks to galloping unemployment -- on top of years of progressively unaffordable health insurance, inadequate coverage, and steep out-of-pocket costs. The failing economy further accelerated the crisis in health care through devastating state and local cutbacks in safety net care.

Yet the Congressional bills that have come through committees, whose key provisions would not start until 2013, offer precious little relief for these ills.

Against this background, a nascent mass movement for single-payer national health insurance, plugging away for decades, steadily accumulates new force. Single payer would deliver all necessary care for all individuals, lifelong, with no co-pays and no deductibles, through a system in which health care would be publicly financed but privately delivered. By eliminating private insurance, single payer would save an estimated $400 billion annually in health spending. The single-payer bills in Congress are HR 676 and S 703. HR 676 has 86 co-sponsors and has been endorsed by over 500 labor bodies, including 39 state AFL-CIO federations.

Whether a bill passes or flounders this fall, the details in the proposals that have come through Congressional committees have little connection with the popular expectations and grassroots clamor this summer. If Congress enacts reform, in 2013, individuals will be required to purchase health insurance. This is the centerpiece of the "reform." The proposal has come straight from the insurance industry: criminalize the uninsured and subsidize unaffordable private insurance premiums with public funds.

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Perhaps the idea of a "public option," as a clever market-based scheme, reveals something about popular ideological illusions, for it relies upon a crude kind of "free markets equal low costs plus high quality." Of course this is not the way the market works. The laws of the health insurance market, in particular, dictate that the successful competitor will avoid insuring people who are sick and/or poor while recruiting customers who are healthy and wealthy.

Does it really make sense to believe that a "public option" tossed amid the heavily monopolized insurance market in the U.S. would stand a chance at competing for the healthy and wealthy patients? In the best case scenario, wouldn't such a program instead drive the system toward officially sanctioned disparities in care?

<snip>


At the end of July, as the Energy and Commerce Committee completed deliberations on HR 3200, Representative Anthony Weiner of New York, with six others, put forward an amendment to replace the text of HR 3200 with the text of HR 676. Committee Chair Waxman interrupted to say that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered to allow single payer to be voted on by the entire House of Representatives if the amendment were withdrawn from the Committee. Weiner accepted. Perhaps the prospect of defeating single payer on the floor of the House of Representatives seems, to the Democratic Party leadership, a way to at last get single payer off the table.

Single-payer activists have welcomed this turn of events, however, for it was the direct fruit of grassroots mobilization. The proposals before Congress, with the exception of HR 676 and S 703, will simply not work. Whatever happens in Congress this fall, the system will grow more dysfunctional. And with expectations for fundamental reform now raised even higher, excellent prospects to build a movement for single-payer national health insurance will persist.
Andrew D. Coates, MD is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program.

URL: mrzine.monthlyreview.org/coates050909.html

I strongly recommend that all go to the link for much more information and hyperlinks therein:

[maryf]

1. Shamelessly Kick, nt

[blindpig]

2. Doomed

They will piss on our legs and tell us it is raining.

The motherfuckers will give nothing, we must take what is ours with both hands and little pleasantries.

k&r

[maryf]

7. We have to demand it!

The people have to start speaking and not lie down and take it!

[rurallib]

3. Yet again the Onion nails the truth.

Why are comedians and former sportscasters the only ones telling the truth anymore?

[dgibby]

4. ANYONE not advocating for single payer

is not serious about either economic reform or health care reform, and certainly does not care about the poor or middle class, and that's the sorry truth.

This has been a cluster fuck since day one. Had we started out advocating for single payer, then a public option would have been a fall-back position. By eliminating single payer at the beginning, we shot ourselves in the foot,and now we won't be able to cover the cost of treating our wounds.

It's obvious to me that a strong public option was never really the goal in the first place.

Sadly, whatever "reform" we get won't kick in until 2013. That means that another 144,000 men, women, and children in the US will die due to inadequate or nonexistent coverage.

How do these greedy bastards sleep at night?

[maryf]

8. How do these greedy bastards sleep at night?

They have money and drugs from big Pharma! thanks!

[blindpig]

5. kick n/t

[TBF]

6. K&R n/t

[maryf]

9. Thanks for all the recs here!!

I had to leave for a town hall meeting immediately after posting. I had my single payer sign with me and when I overheard a man saying we have to get our representatives to represent us, I jumped in and agree; he smiled. When he saw my sign, however, he started insulting me as a "democrat" and completely confused single payer with public option. I clarified things, then asked him about the 50 Americans who die everyday due to no healthcare; he never answered, but continued with insults. The rub, he's an unemployed lpn nurse has GHI insurance that he got through applying to social services!

My congressman asked for a hands up survey of 5 different health care strategies. Number one: no government health plans at all: half the hands went up; he then said, even if medicare, medicaid, and the va systems were done away with? Complete confusion, hands dropped. The intentional obfuscation of these poor people is egregious.