Hospitals & Fire Departments

Mark Harris at OpEd News writes an entertaining column on Fox News on "just how strained the conservative argument has become" on corporatized health care. Harris concludes:

"A CNN poll earlier this year found 64 percent of Americans thought it was the responsibility of the federal government to make sure the public has health coverage. Unfortunately, even the leading Democratic candidates favor keeping the insurance industry in the health-care loop. But this loop has become a noose hold for strangling the potential of the U.S. health care system. Paying for health care through competing private insurers, no matter how regulated, is just a bad system.










"If the local fire department belongs to the community, as Michael Moore asks in SiCKO, then why shouldn't the local hospital? It's a great question."

p.s. That's a photo of the face transplant operation done in France earlier this year. Another first for innovation and technology in a country with universal health care — tell me it isn't true, Laura!

Shame on Ohio Guv

The Akron West Side Leader has this letter to the editor:

To the editor:

It is bewildering to me that Gov. [Ted] Strickland will not allow Single Payer Healthcare proponents a seat at the table of the Ohio’s State Coverage Initiative (SCI) team. Colorado and California have both done model comparisons of health care options, using research collected by the Lewin Group, which submitted technical analysis of four health care plans, including Single Payer. The research determined that a single-payer health care system “could cover more people, for more services, for less money.”

The overwhelming need for health care reform is present in all 88 Ohio counties, none more so than in Gov. Strickland’s previous 6th District, where the unemployment average is higher than the national and state levels. The two counties with the highest unemployment rates in the state are in the 6th District. Unemployment and poverty have taken a huge toll on this area of the state, and Gov. Strickland has first-hand knowledge of this.

I heard the governor speak on WCPN this past year and he said he supported the single payer idea but it was not politically realistic that this plan would pass the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature. The Ohio House Committee on Healthcare Access and Affordability is chaired by James Raussen of the 28th District, an insurance analyst with Great American Insurance.

The Single Payer plan is currently before the Ohio Legislature in the form of House Bill 186 and Senate Bill 168, the Health Care For All Ohioans Act. These bills give the Legislature an opportunity to create a system of financing comprehensive lifetime access and comprehensive care for everyone in Ohio. Tens of thousands of people have signed initiative petitions for the Health Care for All Ohioans Act.

Please contact your Ohio legislators to request their support for these bills. Also call Janetta King, policy director for Gov. Strickland at (614) 466-3555 to request that these bills be evaluated by the State Coverage Initiative alongside those plans submitted by private insurance representatives.

Ohio citizens have a right to know all the possibilities being explored by the SCI team. To exclude Single Payer from this group is nothing short of criminal negligence on the part of the governor.

Mary Smith, Cuyahoga Falls

Headed In The Right Direction?

My mother was dirt poor growing up growing up in North Florida. She got out as fast as she could. Like many other poor Southerners in the 1940s, she headed to Chicago, where she graduated from Mount Sinai Hospital's nursing program.

Not too long ago she mused aloud how her life might have been different if her family hadn't been so poor when she was growing up. The casual observer might think that she'd done OK, poor childhood or not. Indeed, all the Joiner kids were part of the karmic reward of the American dream lifting all boats after World War II. All five siblings made it to the middle class, all but one, in fact, to the upper middle class. My mother and her younger sister married doctors; her older sister became a nurse and married a teacher, and the youngest sister married a city planner. My uncle became an engineer. My own mother never worked outside the home after her first child was born. She lived in a sprawling suburb of big houses on oversize lots and took a nap every afternoon.

But the naps, rather than giving insight into some innate laziness on her part (and there is some of that — in a never-ending rebuke to her own, driven mother), are more a legacy of the malignant effects of poverty. Debilitating, health sapping poverty. The Southern variety. My mother's health was never good, her stamina nonexistent.

The Public Library of Science's journal of Neglected Tropical Diseases has a piece on current U.S. health disparities. It's a reminder of how close the connection is between health and success.

During the early 20th century hookworm was a highly endemic soil-transmitted helminth infection in the American South, and a major cause of severe anemia and malnutrition in the region. Together with malaria, niacin deficiency (pellagra), typhoid fever, ascariasis, trichuriasis, and other conditions common to areas of tropical and subtropical poverty, hookworm helped to foster the concept of the “sick man of the South” or the “lazy Southerner.” The poverty-promoting aspects of these diseases are powerfully illustrated by the recent work of the economist Hoyt Bleakley, who has estimated that because of its impact on child growth and development, school performance, and school attendance, chronic hookworm infection in the American South was responsible for a 43% reduction in future wage-earning.

The writer's conclusion? "There are no excuses for allowing such glaring health disparities to persist in one of the world's wealthiest countries."

Except that, of course, there are plenty of excuses. A couple trillion dollars worth of excuses. Ask a progressive. They'll explain why real health care reform — that is, the proven reform that universal, single-payer health care brings, just isn't feasible.

And as long as that's the progressives' line, it's true. And as long as that's true, our nation will continue heading in the wrong direction, towards a developing world status in health care, education, and the chasm of disparity between rich and poor.

McCain's short circuit

John McCain's column on U.S. health care begins so well:

WE HAVE AN approaching perfect storm in health care, and no one seems to be watching the clouds gather.

More families are without health insurance as premiums increase beyond the affordability of our citizens and their employers. Our safety net programs of Medicare and Medicaid are headed to financial meltdown and draining dollars from critical programs such as education. Our companies cannot continue to compete outside the country because health care costs are so much higher in the United States.

Leave out that bit about Medicare and Medicaid, and you've got some truths (and of course, with the Big Pharma giveaway that is Medicare Part D — no negotiating with pharmaceutical companies over the cost of drugs for Medicare recipients — the Republicans did manage to make Medicare unsustainable). McCain then attacks the Democratic candidates for their "same old" solution of universal coverage, which really means, he writes, "massive tax increases, mandates and government regulation, and no solution to rising costs."

Fair enough, since that is indeed the truth to mandates — unless mandates are a back-door route to single-payer. That seems unlikely, given the dominance of the organized money behind insurance. What he calls instead is almost unintelligible. If I hadn't heard McCain's policy guy in D.C. earlier this month I would come away wondering if McCain might not be the Nixon to China conservative on single-payer.

Here's why. McCain writes:

I offer a genuinely conservative vision for health care reform, which preserves the most essential value of American lives -- freedom.

We should not attempt to substitute government coercion for the right of individuals to decide what is best for them. Our citizens should not pay for the collective sins of a failed health care system. We must use the tools that have served us so well in the past -- competition, American ingenuity and personal responsibility.

Exactly what we in the single-payer movement are calling for, and exactly what Canadians, the Japanese, French, Greeks, Brits, etc. all have: freedom (aka choice of physician and hospital; and the freedom to be treated for medical ailments), which leads to competition amongst the docs and hospitals, with a strong element of personal responsibility injected. We are each responsible for our health. It's our government's role to empower us to do that better, however, not to punish us for not doing it well enough.

What kind of society do we want to be, an empowering one or a punitive one?

McCain also sings the single-payer tune when he notes that we should all have to "pay for the collective sins of a failed health care system." So well put.

Unfortunately, he then turns to gobbledygook, advocating tax credits so that more people can pay premiums to the insurance industry protection racket. Too bad. Ideology and a long career in Washington have blinded McCain to the real way forward — the conservative solition, since it fosters freedom, competition and fiscal sanity.

p.s. McCain has taken a page from Bush, whose image guys have long stood him in front of graphics that make it appear as though he has a halo. McCain's is more like a victorious Roman general's armored head-dress. Appropriate — he's not depending on the Christian fundamentalists hoping for end-times.

Americans like paying more for health care

Or at least they don't mind their work paying more for it. It's almost as if they don't think that savings would be passed along to them, almost as if the social contract were broken, as if people thought the basic standards of decency no longer are in effect in the U.S. — as if the Republican value of greed had taken over.
Odd.
Here's the article.

Where will reform come first?

A physician who sometimes speaks for Health Care for All Colorado returned from the Physicians for a National Health Program's national conference a couple weeks ago with the observation that he did think reform would come first at the state level — as it did in Canada — but that it wouldn't be Colorado.

I guessed he would bet on Vermont being the first — it's a liberal state and they've been doing education for a long time, and also their people know that the system works better in Canada than in the U.S.

He thought Kentucky.

Crazy, I know, but the next thing I knew I was talking with Walter and Kay Tillow, who head Unions for Single-Payer, and have long worked out of Louisville. The Kentucky Legislature actually endorsed HR 676, Reps. Conyers' and Kucinich's single-payer bill before the Vermont legislature did.

And before you write off the South, with its historic greater acceptance of inequality, take a look at this article on "Can You Say Single-Payer?" from, of all places, South Carolina.

This bit in the middle reminded me of Colorado's Independence Institute and its allies:

But the operative word to describe the health care plans put forward by the major, viable candidates is “timid.”
“Single-payer” is definitely not that — at least, not within an American context. Seen from the perspective of most advanced nations — which accept medical care as just another part of a nation’s infrastructure, like roads and post offices — it’s no big deal.
Not here, though — not by a long shot. Here, we have too many people preprogrammed to go ballistic at the mention of “single-payer.” That’s because of the identity of that payer.
It’s... well, it’s the government!
This column will now take a short break while libertarians run around shrieking until they turn blue and fall over... da-da-dum-dum, hmmm... readers might want to go look at the Sunday comics until we resume... da-dee-da-dahhh... Still screaming, so let’s get another cup of coffee... Ah, that’s good stuff...
OK, we’re back, and they’re still screaming, but we’ll just have to accept that they’re going to do that, and proceed.
“Government,” in America, is a word that we use for a free people banding together to do something that we can do far better working together than working separately. Some people don’t accept that fact. They seem to believe that “government” is some scary thing that intrudes on their lives from out there somewhere, like a spaceship full of aliens with ray guns that will turn us all into toads or something.

Walmart & Healthcare

Walmart Watch has a piece up on a Walmart employee who was hit by a semi and left brain damaged. The store paid out half a million in healthcare costs, and the family sued the trucking company so she could get nursing home care. The family won about $400,000, which Walmart promptly sued them for, since they had a subrogation clause in her health insurance policy.

What? You don't know what subrogation means?

I'm pretty sure that's part of the point. You're not supposed to know.

Walmart is cast as the bad guy in most of the blogging on this, but in fact they're not alone. Obviously we're the bad guys too, if we can't rid ourselves of a healthcare system that ruins people but protects big business and profits.

Oh, but it's not feasible according to MoveOn, ProgressNow, and the Dems.

So, taking a page from ol' Mitt Romney's playbook, the so-called progressives turn to mandates — which force people to buy junk insurance from an industry that has proven itself to be incapable of providing healthcare at a fair cost but very good at making profits.

How would Deborah Shank's family have fared under mandates? No difference. None at all. The Shanks' had insurance. They're still ruined.

Mandates are a sham. Subsidization of a corrupt private, for-profit industry.

Fascism, in fact.

Shining Ithaca

Tim Joseph, chair of the Tompkins County Legislature, writes in the Ithaca Journal that a single-payer system would benefit Tompkins County.

The Pueblo County Commissioners said the same thing earlier this year when they offered testimony to the Colorado Blue Ribbon Commission for Health Care Reform.

The benefits of a single-payer system used to be a topic upon which reasonable, informed people could disagree, but that is no longer the case. At this point it's a no brainer that single-payer is the way to go.

Joseph gives a long list of cost savings from single-payer that aren't usually included in modeling or discussions:

* Our county, like every county, has an Office for the Aging. We have a 10-person staff, and the largest part of their work consists of helping seniors to navigate the health care system, find the programs that are available to help them and plan how they will manage health care costs now and in the future.

* We have a full-time benefits manager who is mostly occupied with assisting employees in dealing with the health insurance program. Those employees also lose productive work time consulting with the benefits manager and fighting insurance company denials, which can take hours from the workday.

* When we negotiate with our employee unions, health care is always the biggest topic. We have a health care consultant on retainer to help us examine and cost out plan changes that we present to our unions in an attempt to control costs. At least two-thirds of the staff time devoted to collective bargaining is spent on health care issues.

* We devoted hundreds of hours of staff time to developing and publicizing a discount prescription drug card available to all county residents to reduce drug costs for those without insurance.

* We have a $400,000 grant from the state to form a health insurance consortium among local governments so that we can purchase employee health care as a larger group. We will be hiring a consultant to help us through the process of forming that consortium and then finding a suitable plan. Various county staffers are devoting substantial time to moving this project forward.

* We have staff in our Mental Health Department, Public Health Department and Department of Social Services devoted to collecting fees from private insurers to reduce the public cost of programs that deliver various health services.

* We have people waiting in jail that judges are prepared to release to drug or alcohol treatment programs as soon as we can assure payment to the treatment center. Staff in local agencies and our Department of Social Services work on getting these inmates into health care programs, mainly Medicaid, that will cover treatment. Meantime, we pay the cost of incarceration.

* Our economic development staff encounters aspiring entrepreneurs who would like to start their own business but are tied to a job by the health insurance benefits. Young businesses that do get started often have trouble attracting the employees they need because they cannot yet offer a health plan.

Joseph evidently recently testified before a task force put together by Gov. Eliot Spitzer examining universal health care.

Good luck to them.

Howie's rant!

Funny how these things work — Howie Wolf, MD, a longtime board member of Health Care for All Colorado, says he's not a writer, and I'm pretty sure he wrote this in a flush of annoyance (or rage!) last weekend, never expecting to get it published.

The Daily Camera, the publication of record for what the rest of Colorado calls the People's Republic of Boulder, did well to print it. He writes:

Thank you, President Bush.... As a family doctor with more than 45 years of experience working in our disjointed, unjust and inhumane health system, your endorsement of the status quo will surely help the efforts of those of us who are activists eager for major reform. The polls indicating that 65 percent to 70 percent of Americans favor a government-funded health-care system, plus the latest ABC News poll revealing diminished support for your leadership at a mere 20 percent gives me hope that again you are on the wrong side of an issue.

Bravo Howie! Keep writing!

Krugman and excuses

Paul Krugman looks at healthcare excuses by the reigning kings of unaccountability, defenders of the U.S. healthcare system.

In it, he points out that in fact one in three Americans under the age of 65 was uninsured at some time in 2006 or 2007.