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Struggle for Health Care Making Us Sick |
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There was a time in the not too distant past when the nation’s health care system seemed to work pretty well for a lot of people. That was before, says Caroline, a 61-year-old from California, the private insurance companies became the heart—though certainly not the soul—of health care in America.
Every time I see an insurance high rise building, I become a little livid knowing that they own those buildings with the blood and deaths of the rest of us. There was a time when hospitals were nonprofit…when doctors made a good living without gouging, when doctors had time for their patients instead of filling out insurance forms and waiting for the company to okay the procedure…with denials and delays, the patient now is either broke, sicker or dead.
We are so stressed out that it is making us sick. Insurance companies are too greedy and sanguinely heartless. If the present system is so good, why is the United States 29th in the world in healthcare quality and costs. Something must be done to stop corporate greediness on the health and lives of the rest of us.
We are not asking for too much, just equity.
Caroline, like 95 percent of the nearly 27,000 people who took the AFL-CIO/Working America 2008 Health Care for America Survey, says the nation’s health care system needs fundamental change or to be completely rebuilt. (Read more from the nearly 7,500 people who submitted stories of their personal experiences with the health care system.)
Beginning in April, AFL-CIO central labor councils around the country will focus on health care reform and the 2008 election as part of the AFL-CIO’s efforts to Turn Around America from the eight years of Bush administration failed and flawed policies.
The survey, which took the pulse of union and nonunion workers, the uninsured and uninsured, also is part of that process—also is part of that effort. Through the survey results, we will let candidates at every level know what voters think should be done to fix the broken health system. Health care will be a major issue in the 2008 presidential and congressional campaigns, say 79 percent of respondents, and 97 percent say they do plan to vote this fall.
As part of the 2008 elections, says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, in a letter to local labor leaders:
Our job…is to elect a president and Congress that will vote to Turn Around America. Our Labor 2008 program is the best organized, best equipped and best supported political effort ever mounted by unions. Health care is a key issue for organizing working families to participate.
The Choice between John McCain and either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is clear. McCain wants to hand individuals the burden and the bill for health care. Clinton and Obama want government to enact health reform legislation that would help working families, unions and responsible employers.
For more on the AFL-CIO’s drive for health care reform, click here. Click here to become a health care activist.
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31% of money spent on health care in this country goes to administrative expenses as opposed to only 3% spent on administrative expenses in the Medicare system. Medicare exceeds in providing health care than the private insurance companies do. Administrative costs by the insurance companies are primariy aimed at avoiding insurance payouts, expensive advertising and marketing schemes, excessive corporate salaries, lobbying for legislative protection of the status quo, stockholder profits. Insurance companies are free to deny coverage, avoid covering sick people, earn enormous profits by insuring primarily the young and healthy, while public programs struggle to care for the elderly and sick.
Sadly 18,000 Americans die each year because they can’t afford health care or denied insurance by the insurance companies. Since 2003, 82,600 have died.
A single payer, publicly funded, privately provided health care delivery system that covers everybody, while eliminating administrative waste and duplication of services. HR 676, The United States Health Insurance Act, a bill introduced by congressman Conyers and co-sponsored by 88 of his colleagues in the US House of Representative, is currently stalled in Congress due to the opposition and influence by big insurance and big pharmaceuticals. Supported by Physicians for a National Health Plan (www.PNHP.org) and Healthcare-Now,
(Healthcare-Now.org), alongside a broad grassroots network of activists, faith based organizations, labor; 391 labor organizations, 97 Central Labor Councils and Area Labor Federations, and 33 State AFLCIOs, and professional groups, it offers a plan that provides comprehensive health care coverage to all Americans while saving an estimated $56 billion annually. It does this by cutting out the middle man, eliminating duplication of coverage, improving and expanding the current Medicare system, which operates successfully with a 3% overhead, without excluding preexisting conditions or limiting care, while giving total individual choice of health care provider and leaving all treatment decisions to patient and chosen physician.
It is obvious the Bush Administration has failed to provide for Americans. His obsession with “The Global War of Terrorism” and delusion that billions of our tax dollars are better spent in Iraq shows why Americans must go to the polls in mass this November to avoid McCain continuing the rhetoric for 4 more years.
It is time for Labor to stand up and push for single payer health care. It is time for our labor leaders to sit down with Obama and get a committment from him to initiate a push to get HR 676 on the floor of the House for a vote. It is time for all of us to get our members of Congress to co-cponsor this bill and fight back the lobbyists trying to kill the bill.
Dear TrueDemocrat:
Bingo! You hit the nail on the head again! Your very informative post says it all!
It is time for rank and file union members - and everone else who wants affordable and accessible health care for EVERYONE - to let their voices be heard. We must let Members of Congress know that our votes come with a price: Their support for HR 676!
It is literally a matter of life and death. Where is the war on the terror of health care denial? We know the enemy. It is the health care industry. Why won’t Congress take it on? Because that industry has purchased the allegiance of those who are sworn to repesent us! That’s democracy? Yeah, and pigs fly.
We Have Seen the Enemy - And Surrendered
By Barbara Ehrenreich
BarbaraEhrenreich.com
Thursday 20 September 2007
Bow your heads and raise the white flags. After facing down the Third Reich, the Japanese Empire, the U.S.S.R., Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, the United States has met an enemy it dares not confront - the American private health insurance industry.
With the courageous exception of Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic candidates have all rolled out health “reform” plans that represent total, Chamberlain-like, appeasement. Edwards and Obama propose universal health insurance plans that would in no way ease the death grip of Aetna, Unicare, MetLife, and the rest of the evil-doers. Clinton - why are we not surprised? - has gone even further, borrowing the Republican idea of actually feeding the private insurers by making it mandatory to buy their product. Will I be arrested if I resist paying $10,000 a year for a private policy laden with killer co-pays and deductibles?
It’s not only the Democratic candidates who are capitulating. The surrender-buzz is everywhere. I heard it from a notable liberal political scientist on a panel in August: We can’t just leap to a single payer system, he said in so many words, because it would be too disruptive, given the size of the private health insurance industry. Then I heard it yesterday from a Chicago woman who leads a nonprofit agency serving the poor: How can we go to a Canadian-style system when the private industry has gotten so “big”?
Yes, it is big. Leighton Ku, at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, gave me the figure of $776 billion in expenditures on private health insurance for this year. It’s also a big-time employer, paying what economist Paul Krugman has estimated two to three million people just turn down claims.
This in turn generates ever more employment in doctors’ offices to battle the insurance companies. Dr. Atul Gawande, a practicing physician, wrote in The New Yorker that “a well-run office can get the insurer’s rejection rate down from 30 percent to, say, 15 percent. That’s how a doctor makes money. It’s a war with insurance, every step of the way.” And that’s another thing your insurance premium has to pay for: the ongoing “war” between doctors and insurers.
Note: The private health insurance industry is not big because it relentlessly seeks out new customers. Unlike any other industry, this one grows by rejecting customers. No matter how shabby you look, Cartier, Lexus, or Nordstrom’s will happily take your money. Not Aetna. If you have a prior conviction - excuse me, a pre-existing condition - it doesn’t want your business. Private health insurance is only for people who aren’t likely to ever get sick. In fact, why call it “insurance,” which normally embodies the notion of risk-sharing? This is extortion.
Think of the damage. An estimated 18,000 Americans die every year because they can’t afford or can’t qualify for health insurance. That’s the 9/11 carnage multiplied by three - every year. Not to mention all the people who are stuck in jobs they hate because they don’t dare lose their current insurance.
Saddam Hussein never killed 18,000 Americans or anything close; nor did the U.S.S.R. Yet we faced down those “enemies” with huge patriotic bluster, vast military expenditures, and, in the case of Saddam, armed intervention. So why does the U.S. soil its pants and cower in fear when confronted with the insurance industry?
Here’s a plan: First, locate the major companies. No major intelligence effort will be required, since Google should suffice. Second, estimate their armed strength. No doubt there are legions of security guards involved in protecting the company headquarters from irate consumers, but these should be manageable with a few brigades. Next, consider an air strike, followed by an infantry assault.
And what about the two to three million insurance industry employees whose sole job it is to turn down claims? Well, I have a plan for them: It’s called unemployment. What country in its right mind would pay millions of people to deny other people health care?
I’m not mean, though. If we had the kind of universal, single-payer, health insurance Kucinich is advocating, private health insurance workers would continue to be covered even after they are laid off. As for the health insurance company executives, there should be an adequate job training program for them ñ perhaps as home health aides.
Fellow citizens, where is the old macho spirit that has sustained us through countless conflicts against enemies both real and imagined? In the case of health care, we have identified the enemy, and the time has come to crush it.
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Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller “Nickel and Dimed.” A frequent contributor to The New York Times, Harpers, and The Progressive, she is a contributing writer to Time magazine. She lives in Florida.
Only Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney advocate the single payer solution to the health insurance disaster. The Democrats are beholden to the same financiers as the Republicans and neither Obama nor Clinton’s plan is truly universal or affordable.
Single payer health care is possible, practical, affordable and …. crucial to the survival of our nation. If our politicians don’t get it, then they are seeking jobs in the wrong country. It’s all about economics, and we know McCain doesn’t get it. Clinton and Obama don’t understand it, which is why their proposals don’t go far enough to help the uninsured, and Bush just doesn’t give a damn, but ask any hard working American citizen who has constantly had to juggle their own finances and handle the most difficult of budgets how to solve some of the problems we face. I guarantee you will not only get some very good ideas, but practical, common sense solutions to the problems we face. Who knows more about what Americans need than Americans. It makes me sick that all the talk about health care still revolves around money and profits, and not about people and the care they need, as well as the good health they are entitled to. Who is paying whose salary here. I want more from my government, and on top of the list is for it to stop playing with our lives.