More than 44 million Americans lack health insurance, the highest number in any industrialized country, and another 38 million are under-insured.
In these bleak surroundings, European-style social safety nets look attractive even to rugged individualists, particularly those affected by the downturn. Even before the present crisis, polls showed growing support for government programs to help those in need. A 2007 Pew survey, for example, showed 69 percent supporting the notion that government should take care of people who can’t care for themselves.
Unfettered capitalism this is not. In the Internet debate prompted by Republican warnings of the impending Europeanization of America, one commentator asked: “Does this mean that the half million Americans losing their jobs each month can count on having health care, public transportation, quality education and a public safety net?”
Today's NY Times piece describing how the Health Care Industry in Talks to Shape Policy, wherein Medicare for All/single Payer is pre-determined to be off the table is but the latest example of "Yes, But-ism...".
Yes, they admit, "Expanded and Improved Medicare for All" is the best policy and makes the most sense economically. Yes, it is the best way to actually get to 100% coverage. Yes, it would mean that nobody would be bankrupted because they or a family member got sick. Yes, it free up both workers and employers from constraining burden they have that their counterparts in the rest of developed world do not have. Yes, it would mean we could actually reduce total and control costs through the benefits of reduced overhead, monospony, global budgeting and planning.
The "but" is always alleged political feasibility. Remember 1994 they say. As if Single Payer was what the Clinton's had proposed. Indeed it was the same "Yes, but" that ruled that day back then, when single payer was not allowed to be at the table as early as the pre-inagural economic summit.
Young adults today aren't any healthier than 10 to 15 years ago, and in some cases — obesity, for one — they are significantly less so, says a federal report on the nation's health released Wednesday
Although the study did not explore the reasons for high unemployment, Dr. de Boer speculated that disability played a leading role. Many survivors, she said, may simply be unable to return to work.
"Divided We Fail" presented itself as a broad coalition of diverse interests that could come together and agree on health care reform. But it isn't a broad coalition. It is a coalition that primarily represents business interests - big business through the Business Roundtable, and small business through the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB).
In the movie, "The Reader," Hannah Schmitz is on trial for her Nazi-era war crimes as an SS officer and prison guard, including the murder of 300 Jewish prisoners kept locked in a burning church. Why, she's asked, didn't you let them out? Her answer, a terrifying one, is that she couldn't. The prisoners might escape. "There would be chaos," she said.
Schmitz's matter-of-fact choice - the death of others before a perceived risk of disorder - shocks the courtroom. Schmitz's act is terrifying, but not because it is a rare moral failure. It's because it is so common. Another Hannah, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, called this sort of evil banal. By that she meant that ordinary people often commit evil acts. They are not sociopaths. They are simply and unquestioningly following the rules of their culture or state.
Isn't this one way to describe the American health care system and the resistance to reform? Don't we keep many locked inside the burning building of a system that denies health care to millions? Don't we coldly guarantee their ill health and death, because reform threatens some sort of ideological disorder?
This brings me back to the awful truth of the banality of evil. What are we to do when confronted with many who resist health care reform because they lack the independence and insight to imagine the consequences of their resistance? It is very easy to demonize (easy because they deserve it) powerful and greedy leaders of the medical/insurance industrial complex. They know what they do.
"As the stimulus package wended its way through Congress this week, a familiar face popped up to get up to some familiar shenanigans. Betsy McCaughey, a Republican former Lieutenant Governor of New York, was suddenly on the Bloomberg website and on TV, issuing dire warnings about the changes that the stimulus package was going to wreak on health care. How? McCaughey claimed that the plan contained health technology language that let the federal government could "monitor" patient care in order to "guide your doctor's decisions." In short, a top-down bureaucracy that would enforce its own set of medical treatment protocols.
Naturally, that would be bad, and naturally, not a word of it was true. That didn't stop the contention from flowing from the Rush/Drudge edges onto cable news, most notably Lou Dobbs' CNN show. Happily, however, the media seems to be gathering to put McCaughey's nonsense back on the dungheap.
Last night, Keith Olbermann featured a debunking of McCaughey on Countdown:"
Video of Digby speaking at the Gala Dinner at Take Back America 2007 in Washington, DC - June 19, 2007
The TBA Interview: Digby
Jun 19, 2007 at 07:45 PM by Isaiah Poole
A short, unassuming woman blended into the large audience that sat through a panel discussion I moderated on Tuesday, “The Blogosphere: From Ideas to Action.” It was not until the panel ended and I was rushing out of the room that I happened to notice the name on her tag: “Digby.”
Digby had amassed a large following and deep respect in the progressive blogosphere for insightful, passionate writing on political issues, but before Tuesday no one knew the person behind Digby. That night, Digby revealed herself to the world and gave a rousing speech about what progressive bloggers have contributed to the movement as she accepted, on behalf of progressive bloggers, the Paul Wellstone Citizen Leadership Award. Earlier in the day, I was able to spend a few moments chatting with Digby
We are working with Michael Moore and an unprecedented national coalition of activists, nurses, doctor, patients and health care activist groups to ensure SiCKO has a long-term impact on our nation’s healthcare system and politics.
It’s an incredible opportunity for patient advocates and it’s only missing one element: you.
What are you doing the evening of Friday June 29th?
We are working on events with Michael Moore throughout the U.S., and are launching a national campaign to promote single payer as the "cure" for our "Sicko" health system. We need you to join us in taking advantage of this tremendous opportunity.
Please sign up to help today and we'll send you more frequent updates as the campaign unfolds. Go here to sign up:
You don't have to be a nurse or physician to participate!
No date that Friday? Maybe you'll meet a rich nurse or a cute doctor :)
Let' prove we are not just sit on our butts keyboarding-only phony activists!
Let's go do something in the real world!
Michael Moore's SiCKO Movie Premiers Nationwide June 29, 2007, and that evening is our first big national action, we aim to have a registered nurse, doctor, patient, or other patient advocate (one way or the other that means YOU!) at every SiCKO opening night around the country.
We will be there to greet the audience, hand out flyers as they leave, perhaps testify to the tragedies witnessed on the front lines of America’s healthcare meltdown. Most of all, they’ll be there to convince the moviegoers that we can make change happen starting now.
This is a historic opportunity to turn movie audiences into patient advocates and healthcare reformers—but we need your help! We urge activist movie-goers to attend the screenings and distribute information about how we can solve the healthcare crisis by supporting guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model. Sign-up with here, and we’ll send you specifics along with a PDF flyer to hand out soon. Purchase your movie tickets, print and distribute our PDF flyers (when available), and bring friends! Thank you.
This call for 3,000 SiCKO activists for June 29th is the first activity in a national campaign that includes screenings, premiers, marches, protests, legislative briefings, and press conferences around the country. The fun kicks off in California June 12, when Moore will give a special legislative briefing to the California Senate before being escorted by 1,000 registered nurses to an exclusive screening of SiCKO for healthcare providers and activists.
Wear something red, scrubs if you have them, and as the event draws near, we'll send you links to download "red scrub" buttons, fans, and handouts. Once the movie schedule is announced, we’ll send you everything you need. All you have to do is round up a couple buddies and, when possible, buy your tickets online.
Here’s the plan:
Friday night, June 29th, we aim to have a registered nurse, doctor, patient, or other patient advocate at every SiCKO opening night around the country. They’ll be there to greet the audience, hand out flyers as they leave, perhaps testify to the tragedies witnessed on the front lines of America’s healthcare meltdown. Most of all, they’ll be there to convince the moviegoers that we can make change happen starting now. Please go here to sign up.
Why SiCKO? Because it puts on the big screen what nurses see every day: a healthcare industry that has abandoned its caring mission in favor of the pursuit of profit at any cost. For the first time, patients and caregivers have a voice, and we need to use it to demand an end to these abusive healthcare corporations. SiCKO changes everything.
And that’s why we have a chance to change healthcare politics in this nation. The insurance industry and drug companies are already worried. All we need now is for you to help us make SiCKO’s opening night a truly transformative event. There has never been a national moment like these simultaneous 3,000 screenings. This is our chance to change the world. Let's take it.
In his brilliant new documentary Sicko, Michael Moore gets it completely right. The problem is not enough insurance or even making insurance "affordable." It’s the insurance industry itself. Until we can pry our health out of the cold, cruel hands of the insurers, the system will never fundamentally change, and millions of Americans will continue to be abandoned and mistreated. Moore explains with heart wrenching profiles of people with insurance who are nonetheless denied the care they need. None of those individuals need more insurance, they need more care. He then deconstructs the insurance based system to show us how it works, and how the industry maintains its power through the buying and selling of Congress. And, Moore contrasts our healthcare debacle with other industrialized countries where enriching the private insurance industry is not the first focus of healthcare policy.
For more information on this action, see why "We Don't Need Insurance, We Need Guaranteed Health Care"
Deamonte, died at the age of 12, Prince Georges County, Maryland:
Deamonte, a seventh grader in Prince George’s County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., died because he didn’t have health insurance to cover an $80 tooth extraction. The inexcusable loss of this 12-year-old’s life started when he complained of a toothache. His mother, Alyce, who works at low-paying jobs, didn’t have employer health insurance, and had been focused on finding a dentist to see Deamonte’s brother, who had six rotting teeth. Their Medicaid insurance coverage had been cut off, and Alyce’s efforts to renew the coverage were ensnarled in red tape and bureaucratic delays.
Here is Devante's tragic story.
Devante, died at the age of 14, Houston, Texas: Devante was a 13-year-old boy with advanced cancer of the kidneys who went without any health coverage for four months while his mother attempted to renew his Medicaid coverage. Although his mother, Tamika, submitted at least three renewal applications beginning in February 2006—one through the financial counselor at Texas Children's Hospital—and called the CHIP/Medicaid hotline dozens of times, there was no record of Devante's case in the system when advocates contacted the call center on his behalf in August 2006. Because of a state staffing shortage, officials say his application went unprocessed.
Meanwhile, Devante went without any health insurance and had to depend on clinical trials for care as his tumors continued to grow.
Jessica Bath claims Blue Shield scoured for reasons to drop her and her son because he needed costly care; the firm says mom left out medical issue on application
Four months after her first son, Jack, was born, Jessica Bath received a letter from her health insurance company, Blue Shield of California, saying she and Jack were no longer covered. Jack was born at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center on April 8, 2003, with a hole in his heart. Bath was counting on Blue Shield to pay for a scheduled surgery to repair it.
Suddenly, both she and Jack were uninsured.
"It was absolutely devastating for us," Bath said. "How were we going to pay for his heart surgery?"
To understand the challenges of insuring the health of the nation’s work force, consider Varney’s Book Store.
A Portrait of the Working Insured After a long bout with emphysema an employee at Varney’s, a family-owned business in Manhattan, Kan., died several years ago. But for Varney’s health insurer, her legacy lived on.
The next year, 2002, the insurer raised Varney’s premiums by 28 percent — even though most of the other three dozen employees were significantly younger and healthier than their departed colleague, who had been in her mid-70’s. And Varney’s premiums continued to climb.
. . .Such are the challenges for smaller businesses in Kansas and the many other states where laws permit insurers to raise health premiums substantially for small employers when one worker incurs significant medical bills.
And it is why, as state legislatures, Congress and presidential candidates of all stripes debate the growing problem of Americans without health insurance, the struggles of small businesses — which employ about 40 percent of the nation’s work force — are likely to become a central issue. Small-business employees are one of the fastest-growing segments of the nation’s 44 million uninsured; they now represent at least 20 percent of the total, according to federal census data. And even modest-size employers like Varney’s that say they remain committed to providing benefits find themselves wondering how long they can continue.
WASHINGTON — Tamika Scott lost her 14-year-old son to cancer on March 1, less than a year after he lost his health insurance and was forced to go on clinical trials.
Within a month of his death, Scott was in the nation's capital telling her story to members of Congress. It was too late to help her son, Devante Johnson, but not the nation's 47 million uninsured, including 9 million children.
"When it touches home, everything changes," says Scott, 34, of Houston. "Then you're ready to change the world."
As Congress and state legislatures grapple this year with how to help the uninsured, lawmakers are increasingly hearing not only from lobbyists and health care advocates but from people who have suffered without insurance.
They are people like Alyce Driver of Maryland, whose 12-year-old son Deamonte died in February from an infection that spread from his tooth to his brain. People like Camilla Tecsy of New York, also 12, who lost health insurance for several months while battling cystic fibrosis. People like Mekeal Cusic of Mississippi, who couldn't get coverage for her 10-year-old daughter Keyonna because of intestinal problems suffered three years ago.
All have been to Washington this spring to personalize an otherwise complex financial issue. "There are heart-wrenching stories that really do rip your heart out," says Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del.
As a surgeon, I’ve seen some pretty large tumors. I’ve excised fist-size thyroid cancers from people’s necks and abdominal masses bigger than your head. When I do, this is what almost invariably happens: the anesthesiologist puts the patient to sleep, the nurse unsnaps the gown, everyone takes a sharp breath, and someone blurts out, "How could someone let that thing get so huge?"
I try to describe how slowly and imperceptibly it grew. But staring at the beast it has become, no one buys the explanation. Even the patients are mystified. One day they looked in the mirror, they’ll say, and the mass seemed to have ballooned overnight. It hadn’t, of course. Usually, it’s been growing — and, worse, sometimes spreading — for years.
. . .It’s as true of societies as of individuals. We did not muster the will to reform our long-broken banking system, for example, until it actually collapsed in the Great Depression.
This is, in a nutshell, the trouble with our health care crisis. Our health care system has eroded badly, but it has not collapsed. So we do nothing.
Stock analyst Jim Jubak, focusing on the effects of private-equity buyout funds, explains, "the last time Wall Street applied its best minds to the electric power industry, they brought us Enron, brownouts and wholesale-price-gouging in California, not to mention higher electric bills." Jubak points out that Wall Street investors raised $189 billion in 2006, and are headed for more than $250 billion this year, and with these funds, are buying out and privatizing public companies which supply energy to local communities. Companies like First Data, HCA, TXU Corp have all been privatized with this trend. Mirant, owner of 24 U.S. power generating plants is currently for sale and being targeted by the privatizers.
Jubak points to some likely results of this process.
And buyout funds are kicking the tires on other utilities. The buyout funds have lots of money to put to work, and utilities have the kind of big predictable cash flow that these funds like to see. This is bad, bad news for your utility bill in the short run. In the long run, it's even worse.
In the short run, making a profit on one of these buyout deals depends, first, on "restructuring" the company so that it's more profitable than it was before the buyout. Most of the time, restructuring involves spinning off money-losing operations and outsourcing some part of operations -- and it always involves cutting jobs.
That would be bad enough in the case of a utility, since job cuts are likely to mean a decline in utility service.
But you'll wind up paying more for less service because, second, turning those small gains in corporate profits into big profits for buyout investors rests on building the buyout deal so that borrowed money, known as leverage, multiplies those relatively modest improvements in corporate earnings.
In funding such privatizing investments, investors put up some cash, but borrow the rest by issuing debt backed by the assets of the acquired company. Jubak explains that, "in essence, the purchased company buys itself, but the buyout fund (and its investors) gets 100% of all future profits when the company is eventually sold back to the public." This is a shell game on a grand scale, but with an unwitting public as the dupes.
The debt load of these purchases also results in a reduced investment in new power lines and new power plants, all of which could benefit the consumer.
AP reporter Ryan Keith pointed out in his story that deregulation has not been successful in any of the 16 states, plus the District of Columbia, that have put it into place since the late 1990s. In fact, consumers in deregulated states pay more for electricity than those who stayed with regulating their power industries - about 30 percent more in 2006. And the gap continues to grow.
Consumers in all states are paying considerably more for electricity than a decade ago, primarily because of increases in the cost of fuel, primarily natural gas.
But that doesn't explain why deregulated states pay more for electricity than those in regulated states. What does seem to explain the situation is the lack of a competitive market.
:: ::
One thing is clear, however: Deregulation of electric utilities isn't working, and consumers are paying for it. That's a problem which needs a solution.
