BushWatch: Eight Years of Health Care Failure

by Mike Hall, Jan 14, 2009

With the reauthorization of the nation’s health care program for 11 million low-income children (State Children’s Health Insurance Program), today’s look back at BushWatch examines the president’s record on health care. It’s not pretty—especially his two vetoes of the children’s health program.

(Click here and here for first two parts of our BushWatch review.)

After eight years of chronicling President Bush’s actions, it’s clear the common thread in his health care decisions, policy initiatives, legislation and regulations is this: preserving and protecting the private, for-profit health care industry—especially the massive health insurance industry and pharmaceutical giants.

The corporate health care cult has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying expenses and campaign contributions to influence health care policy in Washington. It’s paid off. The children’s health care program is a great example.

In 2007, bipartisan majorities in Congress were fighting to bring health insurance to the nation’s millions of uninsured kids from low-income and working families who couldn’t afford the soaring costs of health insurance.

What was Bush’s stance? He said such a bill would hurt the private, for-profit health insurance industry. Never mind that the reason these kids didn’t have health insurance coverage was because their parents couldn’t afford to buy it from private insurers. Congress voted twice to try and get through such compassionate conservatism.

In addition, the Bush administration issued new rules to prevent states from expanding the children’s health program on their own. When states tried to bring health insurance to more poor kids through Medicaid last year, Bush refused to approve their plans.

That wasn’t the first time he took aim at the children’s health care program. In October 2001, he tried to strip $11 billion from children’s health care funding to pay for another part of the proposed stimulus bill.

That same year, Bush not only vowed to veto a Patients’ Bill of Rights because it allowed patients to hold private health maintenance organizations (HMOs) legally accountable for medical decisions, but he delayed regulations that would have granted HMO patients several other rights, including access to emergency care and the right to be able to appeal denied claims.

Always on guard to protect the private health care industry, the Bush administration allowed private health plans in a pilot project on Medicare privatization to limit seniors’ choices of doctors, nursing homes and home care agencies.

Staying with Bush’s love of turning over health care to private, for-profit providers, Bush vetoed a bill this past summer that allows some 60 percent of the nation’s doctors to continue treating Medicare patients. The bill restored Bush-backed cuts in reimbursements to the doctors treating the nation’s older and disabled patients by trimming some of the subsidies the big insurance companies receive for operating the private Medicare programs in his privatization project. Congress overrode the veto.

Along with the kids, older folks, people with disabilities, and low-income people who felt the sting of Bush’s health care policies, we can’t forget the lack of action. As Bush leaves office, 45.7 million people in the United States have no health insurance, according to the latest figures. In 2000, the year he was elected, that number stood at 38.4 million.

For more on Bush and health care, go to BushWatch and click on Health Care in the top box.

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