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Options for Addressing Our Nation’s Health Care Crisis |
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This is the second in a series of occasional articles looking at health care reform proposals and initiatives from a wide range of groups and experts. We take a brief look today at two reports, one from a major health care union and the other by a group of CEOs from five large health plans or systems and a drug company president.
The incoming Obama administration is developing a comprehensive plan to address a broad range of health care concerns. The AFL-CIO has not endorsed a specific plan but has established certain principles that any plan should be built around.
Reform must secure high-quality health care for all; lower the costs that are now crushing working families and businesses and share responsibility among employers, government and individuals among other principles. Click here for more information.
To apply those principles to the debate as it is shaping up in Washington these days, the AFL-CIO has developed a list of key issues based upon extensive discussions with national unions since the election. For example, a key issue for unions today is defending the public insurance plan that President-elect Obama is proposing as an alternative to private insurance and that insurance companies and right-wingers have teamed up to try to kill.
Earlier this week, the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), which backs a single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care reform plan, released a study that says such a plan would not only guarantee health care for all, but would be a major boost to the nation’s staggering economy.
The study, conducted by the Institute of Health and Socio-Economic Policy, says a single-payer plan would provide a major stimulus for the U.S. economy by creating 2.6 million new jobs and infusing $317 billion in new business and public revenues, with another $100 billion in wages into the U.S. economy. CNA/NNOC co-President Geri Jenkins, RN, says:
These dramatic new findings document for the first time that a single-payer system could not only solve our healthcare crisis, but also substantially contribute to putting America back to work and assisting the economic recovery.
Click here to read the full study.
Meanwhile, Health CEOs for Health Reform (HC4HR)—launched by the New American Foundation last month—is saying many of the right things about health care, including the need for major reforms. That’s quite a shift from the health industry’s long-held, “Just Say No,” stance. Says Lloyd Dean, president and CEO of Catholic Healthcare West:
It’s time for hospitals and physicians to address the reality that health care costs too much and that our current ways of financing and delivering health care are outdated and not sustainable. As providers we must be accountable for the quality and affordability of the care we deliver.
Here’s something you likely would not have heard from an insurance executive in the not-too-distant past. Bruce Bodaken, chairman and CEO of Blue Shield of California, says:
It’s time for health industry CEO’s to step up and say what has to be said, that achieving coverage for all will require each of us to change the way we do business. With regard to health plans that means giving the right to pick and choose our customers based on how healthy they are.
Sure sounds good, but the question is will their action follow their words, or are those words just a cover.
Click here to read the HC4HR announcement, here for the AFL-CIO’s response and here for recent reports at the AFL-CIO health care site.
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As a parent, medical social worker and activist I see the American Health Insurance Act (H.R. 676) as the only viable solution to the chaos, discrimination and gross injustice in U.S. healthcare!
The rest of the world adheres to the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that states healthcare is a basic human right (as is the right to organize unions). Here in the U.S. we have been brainwashed into believing that healthcare is a commodity ripe for the profiteering of corporate interests!
It is time for the U.S. to get on par with the rest of the world! Healthcare is a basic human right!! SUPPORT H.R. 676!
Thank you for publicizing the CNA/NNOC study. I think there is a lot more support for the single-payer approach out there than the politicians realize. Properly mobilized, it could overcome insurance industry opposition. (After all, we outnumber them.) How about it?
Go to the website Physicians for a National Health Plan: http://www.pnhp.org They have a lot of information on HR676. On the huge amount of paperwork required by a multitude of HMOs and private insurance plans this comment says it all: “We have 900 billing clerks at Duke (medical system 900 bed hospital). I’m not sure we have a nurse for each bed, but we have a billing clerk per bed - it’s obscene.” Dr. Uwe Reinhardt at the hearing for healthcare reform in the US Senate Finance Committee, November 19, 2008.
There are two kinds of health care reform under discussion in our nation.. There is true reform, and there is BAU reform.
BAU = Business As Usual, perhaps with a bit of tinkering thrown in, in order to give the impression that real health care reform is the objective.
In the article above, you are directed to click “here” to go to a website for more information.
Go ahead. Do the click thing. Take a look at the milk toast “Health Care Fix” being offered up.
One question included in the “Fix” is this: “Do you support the Conyers bill (HR 676)?”
The answer? BAU! “The Conyers bill is one bill that is in line with our vision for secure, high-quality health care for all Americans. Rather than wedding ourselves to one bill at this time, we are building grassroots support for health care reform and plan to work with a working family-friendly president and Congress to enact meaningful reform after 2008”.
Who, pray tell are the “we”? What is the “we’s” definition of “grassroots support”?
HR 676 has been endorsed by 39 state AFL-CIO federations, 100 Central Labor Councils, and more than 400 local unions. The bill has 92 co-sponsors in Congress, more than any other health care reform bill. Many Change to Win unions have also endorsed HR 676.
There is overwhelming rank and file support for HR 676. Millions of folks representing a huge majority of union members in the US support HR 676. Is anyone in the AFL-CIO or CtW hierarchy listening?
One lame, revisionist excuse we hear is that “HR 676 is not politically feasible”. Not politically feasible? Who says? Poll after credible poll show that 66% of the people in our nation support a single-payer health care program. 66%! Wow! And that number rises when HR 676 is explained to people!
We are sure to lose if we allow the parameters of a debate to be limited to what is or is not “politically feasible”.
Economist Lester Thurow, PhD remarked, “Health care costs are being treated as if they were largely an economic problem, but they are not. To be solved they will have to be treated as an ethical problem”
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane”.
The parameters of the discussion must be expanded to include these questions: “Are lawmakers willing and prepared to govern in an ethical and humane manner?” “Are lawmakers willing and prepared to represent the overwhelming majority of their constituents who support a national single-payer health care program?”
When those questions are asked, the dynamics of the health care debate will shift. We the people must thereafter insist that Members of Congress answer those questions. The same holds true for labor’s hierarchy. They all must challenged!
Decades of “free-market” health insurance has gotten us into this fix. Everyday people are dying for want of needed medical care or prescription drugs. One point of light is our Medicare system. It, of course, is not “free-market”. It is publicly financed, privately delivered health care. The only thing wrong with Medicare is Congress. Devotees to the “free market” want to starve or privatize Medicare so that stakeholders in the medical-industry complex will be able to further pick our pockets. Other than that, Medicare is a phenomenal success! HR 676 would essentially improve and expand Medicare coverage to every resident in our nation and would cover everybody for all medically-necessary care including in-patient, out-patient, drugs, dental, mental health, vision, hearing, durable equipment, nursing care, and long term care. People would choose their own doctors…anytime, anywhere. There would be no deductibles or co-payments! (For more information go to Healthcare-NOW.org.)
Pioneers of the labor movement were not hindered by claims that something might not be “politically feasible”. Instead, they fought for what working people needed! Their actions gave life to labor’s mottos: “An injury to one is an injury to all”, and “To help any worker in distress”. We need to rekindle that spirit.
A combination of public/free market baloney is what we now have, and we’re in a fix! We have decades of examples wherein the price-gouging “free market” medical-industry complex was allowed to partner with public health care, and we’re in a fix. Will we ever learn?
The solution is HR 676. It tosses for-profit insurers out on their butts, and reigns in the wretched excesses of for-profit hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies.
HR 676 assures publicly funded, privately delivered health care to all 300 million of us! It is the solution.
Tell your union leaders and your Members of Congress that you demand the solution; that you demand health care justice in the US! Tell them you demand HR 676!
And if needed, be prepared to take your message into the streets by picketing the offices of recalcitrant lawmakers. Be prepared to move recalcitrant labor leaders aside too. Lawmakers and union officials have a responsibility to us. We’re expected to act responsibly. Why shouldn’t we have the same expectations of them?
No more BAU! We demand the solution! We demand ethical, humane governance! We demand HR 676!
My own doctor has had to increase his office staff just to handle the bureaucratic paperwork of the insurance companies, yet he cannot accept new patients; he’s too busy making sure his patients get the necessary referrals they need to see specialists or get tests done. These insurance companies are changing names, numbers and status on a weekly basis, and I can’t even keep up with my own. I have been moved to 8 different insurance plans since I retired a few years ago. It has been an absolute nightmare! Now, I am in an HMO, as secondary to Medicare, and I need referrals for everything. The paperwork is overwhelming and should not be something I have to deal with on a regular basis. Being disabled is enough!
To put in a word for my doctor; he does a fantastic job on my behalf, and I am very fortunate to have him. I get so angry when I see the statements from my insurance provider and see how little he gets paid for his services, like 35% or something like that. That 65% goes to the insurance bureaucrats. What a waste!