As Congress weighs legislation to provide universal health care in the U.S., correspondents from NOW on PBS, Tavis Smiley, Nightly Business Report, and SoCal connected provide analysis, discussion, and insight. Watch the video here.
Russell Mokhiber: Something is Rotten at PBS:
Last year, former Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid made a great documentary for the PBS show Frontline titled Sick Around the World.
Reid traveled to five countries that deliver health care for all – UK, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Taiwan – to learn about how they do it.
Reid found that the one thing these five countries had in common – none allowed for-profit health insurance companies to sell basic medical coverage.
They can sell for-profit insurance for extras – breast enlargements, botox, hair transplants.
But not for the basic health needs of the American people.
Instead, the film that aired Monday pushed the view that Americans be required to purchase health insurance from for-profit companies.
And the film had a deceptive segment that totally got wrong the lesson of Reid's previous documentary – Sick Around the World.
During that segment, about halfway through Sick Around America, the moderator introduces Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, the lead health insurance lobby in the United States.
Moderator: Other developed countries guarantee coverage for everyone. We asked Karen Ignagni why it can't work here.
Karen Ignagni: Well, it would work if we did what other countries do, which is have a mandate that everybody participate. And if everybody is in, it's quite reasonable to ask our industry to do guarantee issue, to get everybody in. So, the answer to your question is we can, and the public here will have to agree to do what the public in other countries have done, which is a consensus that everybody should be in.
Moderator: That's what other developed countries do. They make insurers cover everyone, and they make all citizens buy insurance. And the poor are subsidized.
But the hard reality, as presented by Reid in Sick Around the World, is quite different than Ignagni and the moderator claim.
Other countries do not require citizens buy health insurance from for-profit health insurance companies – the kind that Karen Ignagni represents.
In some countries like Germany and Japan, citizens are required to buy health insurance, but from non-profit, heavily regulated insurance companies.
And other countries, like the UK and Canada, don't require citizens to buy insurance. Instead, citizens are covered as a birthright – by a single government payer in Canada, or by a national health system in the UK.
The producers of the Frontline piece had a point of view – they wanted to keep the for-profit health insurance companies in the game.
TR Reid wants them out.
"We spent months shooting that film," Reid explains. "I was the correspondent. We did our last interview on January 6. The producers went to Boston and made the documentary. About late February I saw it for the first time. And I told them I disagreed with it. They listened to me, but they didn't want to change it."
Reid has a book coming out this summer titled The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care (Penguin Press, August 2009.)
"I said to them -- mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world," Reid said. “I said I'm not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book. They said – I had to be in the film because I was under contract. I insisted that I couldn't be. And we parted ways.”
"Doctors, hospitals, nurses, labs can all be for-profit," Reid said. "But the payment system has to be non-profit. All the other countries have agreed on that. We are the only one that allows health insurance companies to make a profit. You can't allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance."
"I don't think they deliberately got it wrong, but they got it wrong,"' Reid said.
Reid said that he now wants to make other documentaries, but not for Frontline.
“Frontline will never touch me a again – they are done with me,” Reid said.
Reid says that "it's perfectly reasonable for people to disagree about health policy."
"We disagreed, and we parted ways," Reid says.
It might be perfectly reasonable for people to disagree about health policy.
But it's not perfectly reasonable to mislead the American people on national television in the middle of a health care crises when Congress is shaping legislation that will mean life or death for the for-profit health insurance industry.
By: Scarecrow
"This post is to urge you to watch PBS Frontline's Sick Around America, on the outrageous practices of America's health insurance conpanies. But first . . .
I just saw a TV commercial that starts off sympathizing with a person who had an unexpected illness, with thousands in medical bills that her health insurance provider would not cover. A calm voice then tells us the solution is put your medical bills on your Citi, Capital One and other credit cards. And they're serious." On Frontline's Sick Around America, we follow the outrageous practices of America's health insurance companies. The wonder is that we tolerate their criminal abuse. An academic first explains the obvious: that health insurers make money by talking premiums but denying claims, which are called "losses." We then see this perverse incentive structure played out with several patients, who wind up with companies refusing to provide coverage or, having supposedly offered coverge, refusing to cover claims on spurious grounds. Other Americans are shown desperately failing to find affordable coverage after losing their jobs or their marriages. We follow a patient who dies from lack of health coverage; she is one of 20,000 who do so every year in America. Only in America. We just witnessed public outrage at $160 million in bonuses to AIGPF employees, but did you know that a major health insurance company just settled with the NY AG on claims that it unlawfully/fraudulently rescinded insurance claims of over $300 million? Tip of the iceberg. In another case, insurance employees were paid large bonuses based on their success in rescinding insurance coverage for those who thought they were covered. So your premiums are going to pay bonuses to people whose job is to screw you. These are the same companies who, having bought themselves out of criminal indictments and multimillion dollar civil actions, think they deserve a seat at the negotiating table over health reform. Now they arrogantly tell us they'd be willing to consider dropping prior-illness exclusions and differential rates if only the government will require that everyone buy their insurance policies. All they want is a guaranteed piece of the action, at twice the cost of every other industrialized nation. What's the word for a protection racket?
And the condition for this "bargain" is that the US not create another public health plan that people could join and that would -- heaven forbid -- force the private plans to compete with an entity whose mission was to provide health care and wasn't trying to make a profit by denying them health care. More background on the public plan here.
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