Forbes Magazine, which has never been called a liberal rag by the Right, recently published a 2009 national survey by the United Health Foundation entitled: "The Healthiest And Unhealthiest States". The funder for this foundation is none other than insurer UnitedHealth Group. In their most recent quarterly earnings report (October 2009) UnitedHealth Group cited revenues of $21.7 Billion, an 8% Year-Over-Year increase, and healthy profits. So no one can rationally accuse this health survey of being a hit job on the insurance industry. In truth it is chock full of interesting and useful health data, and worthy of close study, but what jumped out for me immediately are some bold political implications that it also documents. They are far from friendly to opponents of health care legislation currently before Congress.
Put yourself in Ian Pearl's position. You were diagnosed with muscular dystrophy shortly after your birth and have been confined to a wheelchair since you were six years old. Even though you were physically disabled, your brain is fully functional and you are striving to be the best you can be.
But then it happens. At 19 years old, you have a life-threatening complication that leaves you with one option: If you are to live, you must breathe with the help of a ventilator.
And through it all, through the life-threatening complications you had to endure along the way and through everything you have been through since you were born, who would have thought that it was a health insurance company that could be the thing that kills you.
Ian's story is better told by him, but here's the summary: Guardian decided that they were sick of covering Ian. At first, they pulled the health care plan that covered everyone in his dad's company in New York. That could be seen as a general move not targeted at Ian, but with some digging, Ian found that it was because of him and others with serious medical issues that Guardian made this decision. According to Ian's account on Huffington Post, Guardian created a "hit list" of their insured customers who were costing them the most to cover. These members were referred to by Guardian's top officials as "dogs" and "trainwrecks" because of their health conditions and their cost to insure. Ian was one of many targeted by Guardian, a process that included certain members like Ian having private investigators look for anything to cancel the plan so Guardian could save money.
It's not like Guardian couldn't afford to cover Ian and others in similar situations (from Ian's post):
While all this was going on, Guardian reported $7.5 billion revenue, net income of $437 million, and available capital of $4.3 billion in 2008. Unlike small businesses, Guardian's financial strength remained unscathed by the economic downturn.
What Guardian did was remove a plan they offered from an entire state all because of a select few of their insured who were seen as too costly.
Enter Senator Eric Schneiderman, who introduced S6263 or "Ian's Law" in the New York State Senate. The bill "provides enhanced consumer protections in the event of an insurer's discontinuance of coverage, including requiring approval of the superintendent and notice to policyholders." Specifically, it would prohibit insurance companies from doing what Guardian did: Canceling a whole class of a policy they were offering. With Ian's Law, the insurance company could not cancel this plan unless they received approval from the state Insurance Department.
How is this law different from current law? Currently, it is illegal to cancel someone's insurance because they have chronic health problems like muscular dystrophy. Thus, it would have been (or perhaps IS) illegal for Guardian to cancel Ian's policy. But nothing prevents them from pulling a whole class of insurance. Of course, if they did so because of those who they insure that have chronic health conditions, that IS illegal and should be dealt with and the individuals responsible should not just be held liable via civil action, they should also face criminal charges. Because in the case of Ian Pearl, this is life and death. And when insurance companies are playing games with people's lives, they should face serious punishment.
For more on this story, watch the video below from yesterday's press conference introducing Ian's Law. The full text of the bill is below the fold.
This bill would prevent health insurance companies from doing what Guardian did: Pulling coverage in the name of profit. That was the motive in the case of Ian and others. They were seen as "dogs" and "trainwrecks" because they were actually in need of their insurance and thus costing Guardian. Not that Guardian was hurting for the money. They still have their billions. But they wanted more. So they put Ian in a situation where he is now fighting for his life.
Ian's Law is important and while it would only apply to New York, it should be a law that every state introduces and passes and should become a federal law so that we can prevent insurance companies from deciding who they want to cover and who will be the cheapest to cover.
In the middle of heated policy debates, projections of cost to industry and government fly thick and fast. If costs to citizens are mentioned, it's usually in their capacity as taxpayers, as though they weren't otherwise part of the economy. A couple examples from the global warming policy arena put this into sharp relief in a way that emphasizes the urgency of providing affordable health coverage to every American.
First, there's David Roberts' explanation (... with puppies!) of how the Congressional Budget Office undercounts the benefits of lower energy costs from efficiency. Their method counts the promotion of energy efficiency as a cost to the taxpayer, but not a savings to the ratepayer, as though you can make an absolute separation between people who pay taxes and people who pay utility bills.
That may make sense from the CBO's perspective, but not from the perspective of electricity-using members of the public trying to figure out whether new energy legislation benefits them.
Chuck Schumer is Wall Street's favorite politician, having taken over the position previously held by Rahm Emanuel. Which is just a simple way of saying that Schumer is the bag man for the Democratic Party for Wall Street. He collects the money paid by Wall Street to the Democrats as a kick-back for the Democrats letting Wall Street continue to loot our country, and refusing to prosecute these criminals.
Harry Reid is the man who isn't there. He was put into position by the Democrats as a mild-mannered guy designed to deflect Republican attacks that the Democrats are left-wing anarchists. But Harry has no power inside the Democratic Party.
The people who run the Democratic Party are the people who raise the most money in bribes. People like Bill Clinton who still directs much of the money given to the Democrats, and still controls much of what goes on inside the Democratic Party. Schumer, as mentioned. Rahm Emanuel. Diane Feinstein, that pro-war disgrace, demanding more war, more war. And of course the major corporations pool their funds to buy the ultimate control of the Democrats.
Notice that since they took control of the national government, none of the Democrats have said a word about the need for campaign finance reform. The only "Change" they wanted was to have the bribes go to them instead of being paid to the Republicans.
For example, despite the circus and the nonsense, the only thing the Democrats have to do to provide the citizens with a national healthcare program is to vote for a program where everyone belongs to Medicare, if they choose, tax people to offset their reduction in their own expenses, tax employers for the same, and tax the scumbucket criminals on Wall Street to pay for the rest of it. If they really object to the $100 million bonuses, why not pass a law taxing the bonuses at 99%. That would pay for it.
Yesterday we heard Schumer and Reid "threaten" to take control of all health insurance companies in this country at the national level, to take away the anti-trust exemption. Be very careful. Do not support this. They're pretending it's a "threat," but I think it's something the insurance companies want.
Here's what's really going on. Blue Cross, for example, can do anything they want in some state like Mississippi where the citizens have no rights and the government just takes corporate bribes and does nothing for the people. But in California, for example, a big state and big market, Blue Cross has to follow the laws of the State of California which give consumers a whole lot more rights in this field. If Blue Cross threatens to just stop writing insurance in the state, California would say go suck an egg, because it's such a big market nobody wants to walk away from it.
If the federal government takes over regulating the health insurance industry, they will "preempt" state laws. That means states will have no ability to regulate health insurance companies. It also means the Democrats can demand more and more bribes from the health insurance industry in exchange for allowing them to raise premiums even more than they already have, provide less coverage, make it affordable for even fewer people to have healthcare.
Don't trust Schumer, Reid, or anyone in the Democratic party when they propose more federal regulation in this or any other field. So far, they have only used their power in D.C. to enrich themselves. We're better off leaving control at the state level, because then we at least have a chance.
Albuquerque, a fairly Democratic town, just elected a Republican mayor because of low Democratic voter turnout. Democrats are in danger in both of the big gubernatorial races coming up in New Jersey and Virginia. The generic congressional polling numbers are in a statistical dead heat, and Democratic base voter enthusiasm is trending down.
There is no reason for Democrats to panic, as demographics are still trending in our favor and the Republican brand is still in tatters, but the warning signs for my party are out there and should not be ignored. What Democrats need to be extremely well focused on is short term deliverables for real people. On health care, on jobs, on banking legislation, on immigration reform, on climate legislation - on all of these major initiatives and more, they of course should be thinking about what's best in the long term, but better damn well be focused on delivering real and tangible benefits to voters before the next election, or Democrats will suffer a bruising defeat in November 2010.
Let's start with health care. When you are working to re-structure 17% of the American economy - and probably the most byzantinely-structured 17% there is - there are a lot of complications, and it is obviously going to take some time. Some of the features of the plan will need time to phase in, which is understandable. But some of the benefits need to be apparent to Americans right away too. If we spend a year and a trillion dollars passing health care reform, and no one sees any benefits to them by November 2010, we Democrats have a really big problem in the next election.
Another key point on this issue: if a public option doesn't go into effect for a while, say until 2013, insurance companies better not be free to raise their rates at will until they finally have competition, when the public option enters the scene. There is nothing that will guarantee voters turning away quickly from health reform, and the politicians who voted for it, more than letting insurance companies hike up their insurance costs over the next four years, and we know they would have because they already promised to do it.
Health care reform needs to have immediate benefits - no pre-existing conditions, no lifetime caps, all of those insurance regulations we've been hearing about need to kick in immediately. But even more importantly, if a public option gets delayed, there has to be a short term way to keep insurance company greed and power in check. To leave the public utterly at the mercy of the arrogant insurers who have already promised they would raise their rates after this is passed - like consumers were left at the mercy of credit card companies for many months after the consumer protection bill passed - is not only unfair to people but is truly terrible politics. If you think these insurers won't jack rates through the roof, and then blame the rate increases on reform, you are truly naïve. Don't make voters feel like it was a bad idea to pass health reform because they are seeing only the downside in the short term.
On the economy, the macro-economists in the administration like Larry Summers love to say that, "jobs are a lagging indicator", that eventually in the long run, that jobs will start getting created. Even if they are right (and I tend to be skeptical when economists tell me that in the long run, things will eventually trickle down to working people), neither the economy nor the Democratic Party can afford for there to be another year where no jobs are being produced. To have that many people in trouble exacerbates the foreclosure crisis, weakens the housing market, forces more cuts in the state and local budgets, and a higher federal deficit: and it is a complete political disaster for Democrats. Jobs need to be created ASAP, lots of jobs, not a few here and there, and should not be seen as the lagging indicator that will take care of itself someday. In the long run, as John Maynard Keynes liked to say, we are all dead, but the Democrats will be dead in the short term unless we start producing lots of jobs quickly. The stimulus is certainly helping, and Obama deserves credit for that, but it is not enough. Democrats need to think bigger on creating jobs.
On financial reform, as with health care, much of what needs to be reformed will take a long time to kick in, and in fact much of the goal will be to keep disaster from happening in the future - a harder thing to get credit for. (Which by the way, is the main thing the Obama White House is claiming about the economy - that we would have had a disaster if not for the US. It's a hard thing to win votes on.) But a strong policy of consumer safety in financial products will be noticed by people who went through the outrages of being ripped off over the last few years, and there are other things that could be done that voters would notice and cheer. How about a tax on financial transactions, structure to cost the most for the biggest traders, where the proceeds would go to new job creation? Based on private polling I was shown recently, that would get about 85% support. How about anti-trust actions against the biggest banks? How about throwing some of the worst violators of the financial system in jail, and returning their ill-gotten gains to the people they ripped off? There are plenty of things to do in the financial sector that would get voter attention and would be seen as an immediate benefit.
On climate change, the first item of business should be dramatically expanding green jobs. On immigration, families ought to be reunited right away. On issue after issue, we need to get things done, and make sure that what we get done has immediate benefits to regular people.
George W. Bush was a disastrous President, rated by many historians as the worst President of all time, and he handed Democrats a terrible mess that we will be digging our way out of for years. But blaming the other guys for bad times doesn't cut it in American politics, and it shouldn't: we need to deliver real things to real people. Trying to convince voters that it would have been so much worse if it wasn't for us, and that our policies will help them someday in the long run, is not a winning strategy. We need to deliver things that make a difference in voters' lives now.
The insurance industry inadvertently gave health reformers the best argument we ever could have had to pass a public option and the strongest possible regulations on insurers. Declaring that rates will go up dramatically if reform passes, insurers launched a full-scale open assault on the idea of any reform at all yesterday, except I guess a reform plan especially tailored to them and their profitability. What they left out of their little study is that they are the ones who decide when rates go up because the biggest companies have very little competition in most of the markets they are in. There is no federal rate regulation, there is no anti-trust enforcement in insurance (they are specifically exempted from it in the McCarran-Ferguson Act), and unless there is a public option, there will be little competition. They will be the ones who decide if the rates go up, and they have just guaranteed they would raise those rates if we don't stop them from doing it.
It's sort of like the sheriff in Blazing Saddles holding the gun to his own head, and saying "back off or I'll shoot." The insurance industry is saying that if they don't like what's in the bill, they will just decide to arbitrarily raise the rates. But we can stop those rates from going up by checking the insurers' power. That's why a public option, real competition for an arrogant out-of-control, way-too-powerful industry, is so essential. Without it, we are left to their whims, and anytime, for my reason, they will just jack up their rates. If their stocks go down, if they just want more profits, if some regulation they don't like is passed, they will just raise their rates. With a strong, robust, nationwide public option, we can force insurers to the table, and give them real competition.
Personally, I think we ought to repeal McCarran-Ferguson and impose tough rate regulation as well. That would really open up competition and guarantee lower prices. But at the very minimum, we have to have a strong national public option. The insurance industry has just reminded us as to why that is. Thanks for the help in making our case, friends.
By the way, it's not just me who thinks this. Voters do not support being forced to buy health insurance unless there is a public option- at that point, as the polling clearly documents, voters are fine with an insurance mandate. As long as there is real competition with a public option, voters are fine with being asked to buy insurance. Sometimes I think regular voters are smarter than the politicians they elect to govern them.
Certain portions of the blogosphere are all atwitter over Alan Grayson's powerful rhetoric on health care insurance reform -- and don't get me wrong, I'm all for effective rhetoric.* Grayson said:
44,789 Americans die every year according to the Harvard study. and you can see it by going to our website at grayson.house.gov. That is 10 times more than the number of Americans who have died in Iraq and who died in 9/11. but that was just once. this is every single year. That's right. every single year.
Take a look at this. Read it and weep. And I mean that, read it and weep, because of all these Americans who are dying because they don't have health insurance. Now, I think we should do something about that and the democratic health care plan does do something about that. It makes health care affordable for those who can't afford insurance and it saves these peoples' lives. ... I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven't voted sooner to end this holocaust in America
Grayson's wrong** on one very obvious and important fact:
There are so many naive assumptions in this post by Jacob Heilbrunn I don't even know where to start, but the real thing that has me thinking is his assertion that a compromise bill (assumedly without a public option) will pass, and that Obama and Congressional Democrats will ride a tidal wave of public love for the bill into success in next year's midterms.
It seems foregone that if some kind of legislation does pass, it will include a bunch of good provisions on which there seems to be broad support in Congress: banning insurance discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions, for example. Or banning an annual cap on insurance coverage payouts. These are real and tangible things that a member of Congress can campaign on, that means something to voters. But the problem is that providing competition in the form of a strong public option seems to be the keystone to a system that will, in combination with those other reforms that have broad support, actually improve things. Without it, things could actually get worse. Consider:
If you ban discrimination for customers who have pre-existing conditions, but don't place any caps on deductibles or do any type of rate regulation, all you get is a lot of companies who are forced to offer insurance to sick people, but no one is buying it. You still have 49-year-old diabetics who want to purchase individual insurance, but face deductibles and premiums that are unaffordable, so not much changes.
Premiums for everyone else could go up. Forcing companies which seek to make as enormous profits as possible to pay beyond a level at which they would have previously stopped paying (e.g., enforcing a ban on annual or lifetime caps), or forcing them to accept new patients they would have previously denied that will consume a lot of care, will reduce profits. Since health insurance companies, as Anthony Weiner put it, operate to make profits by giving away as little as possible and collecting as much as possible, I would not be surprised if premiums for everyone go up in the absence of a public option providing competition to keep that from happening.
Adverse selection causes things to get worse for the healthiest among us. Following the last point, if premiums go up for the healthiest (imagine a 25-year-old male with no bad family medical history who doesn't see himself getting sick), they will drop their coverage. This leaves a higher risk pool, e.g. the sickest, for insurance companies to cover, meaning higher costs and higher premiums for those staying in the market. So they raise premiums again and force people out of the market, etc. This is what my boyfriend Perry, who teaches health economics at Syracuse University, calls "the insurance death spiral". It causes things to unravel for everyone else.So things for people like me (who is indeed a 25-year-old male and so far happy with his insurance) could get bad really quickly.
It will not make insurance any more affordable. For those who can't afford insurance now- be they healthy, sick or likely to become sick- one of the points of providing a competitive public option is to provide competition to the insurance industry, forcing down rates, etc. Without it, there will still be a lot of people who can't purchase an individual plan, a lot of businesses who are suffering under high costs of providing insurance, and so forth.
Looking at the political effects, it will be difficult for someone like me, who has insurance I am so far happy with, to find anything useful to me in the bill aside from feeling good that some provisions have been passed. It will be difficult for someone who has had to fight with insurance companies over tens of thousands of dollars in bills to find anything good in the bill either, because it offers no alternative to doing anything other than fighting with them again down the road, rather than switching to a public plan. So it's hard to imagine people who already have insurance they are happy with (so far) to be find anything good about the bill.
My point here is that while many Congressional Democrats and President Obama think that if they pass some bill, any bill, it will bring them lots of love in the punditry for coming to the table, and that the public will send their approval ratings soarings and award them in the 2010 midterms. That may be the conventional wisdom way of looking at it, but it ignores the policy effects, and it's completely wrong. You can't just agree on lots of smaller provisions that ostensibly do some good on paper, but don't cause any real positive change in voters' lives- and in fact, could make things worse absent competition. Without real competition, things could unravel even faster than they are now. A strong public option is the linchpin that makes all these things work together.
Lying about healthcare, indeed, fear mongering about healthcare has ramped up as insurance companies attempt to keep their profits. Those profits are created by having the US spend 5% more of its economy on healthcare while receiving worse results than other western nations.. To insurance company executives, their profits, their executive salaries and their bonuses, are worth not just lying about, but killing for.
Shona Holmes is the current poster girl for the lying liars slandering Canadian health care in an attempt to discredit reform. Ms. Holmes alleges she was horribly endangered by Canada's healthcare system:
Both CNN and McConnell made a big deal out of Shona Holmes, an Ontario woman who claims she was forced by Ontario's health system to go to the United States for life-saving surgery for a brain tumour. She claims that in 2005 delays in access to treatment at home made it necessary to go to the Mayo Clinic in Arizona and pay $97,000 for her care.
Sounds bad, doesn't it? Except, of course, it's a lie:
On the Mayo Clinic's website, Shona Holmes is a success story. But it's somewhat different story than all the headlines might have implied. Holmes' "brain tumour" was actually a Rathke's Cleft Cyst on her pituitary gland. To quote an American source, the John Wayne Cancer Center, "Rathke's Cleft Cysts are not true tumors or neoplasms; instead they are benign cysts."
There's no doubt Holmes had a problem that needed treatment, and she was given appointments with the appropriate specialists in Ontario. She chose not to wait the few months to see them. But it's a far cry from the life-or-death picture portrayed by Holmes on the TV ads or by McConnell in his attacks.
In other words, she didn't want to wait behind people who needed care more than she did. Her condition was not immediately life threatening, and it was prioritized as such.
Here's the deal: both the US and Canada prioritize patients, and both engage in health care rationing. In Canada health care is prioritized by how urgently a patient requires treatment. In America, to a much greater extent, access to medical care is prioritized by how much money the patient has. Someone in the US who was sicker than Ms. Holmes got pushed back because she was rich enough to pay $97,000.
I should add that I have first hand experience with how the Canadian system prioritizes treatment. In 1993, at the age of 25, I became very ill with ulcerative colitis. I was hospitalized, and put on very expensive drugs. About a week after being hospitalized, on Sunday, the nurse watching me called in my doctors, because I was deteriorating fast—pain killers were no longer having any effect (i.e., high doses of morphine were no longer working), I wouldn't let anyone touch me and I was becoming delirious. At about midnight, they wheeled me into the operating chamber and took out my large intestine. While they were digging around, they found out I had appendicitis, and they took that out too. It would have burst within 2 days, and in my weakened state, it would have killed me.
Unfortunately, one of the ways they treat ulcerative colitis is by using immune suppressing drugs. My immune system basically shut down, my liver almost shut down, and I spent almost another 3 months in the hospital, riddled with extremely painful and crippling infections and other problems. At one point I was on 9 drugs. One of them was an antibiotic so expensive that only a single doctor in the hospital could approve it. My gastroenterologist called it the equivalent of "pouring gold dust into your veins". I wasted away, and at one point was under 90 lbs. I often joke that I was old young: I've used a walker, crutches and cane.
The ultimate point of this is simple: I got the care I needed, when I needed it, and I never paid a single red cent. Which is good, because I couldn't have afforded it. I was young, and had very little money. Care such as that, even back then, would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the US. What that would have meant is that my parents would have either had to pay, or I would have died. I would have urged them not to pay, since they were both old, and it would have wiped out their savings entirely and thrown them into bankruptcy, and frankly, I don't know how they could have supported themselves. My life, at that cost, would have had too high a price. I wonder how many Americans have had to make that calculation?
But I survived, and neither I, nor my parents, was bankrupted. In similar circumstances I doubt all of those things would be true if for an American 25-year old trying to survive the same medical condition in America's health care industry.
Ms. Holmes is the poster-woman for people who take 5% more out of GDP to run an inferior health care system which bankrupts people and which produces medical results that are no better, and in most cases worse, than every other Western country.
I have had two American friends die in the last 5 years who would have survived if they had had fully covered health care.
One of the biggest concerns with having a public option is the possibility that the sickest people will wind up on it, while the healthiest will be in private insurance. The House plan does what it can to make sure this doesn't happen: companies can't refuse to take people because of their medical history, and they can't rescind policies because of medical history.
But that still leaves a simple way to reduce the amount of money you have to pay out as an insurer. Deny care when you can. Drag your feet when you can't. Make it hard for sick people to get the money they need.
So what happens if there's a public option which doesn't engage in this type of behavior? People sign up, on the exchanges, for private plans. When they get sick, the insurance company starts giving them the runaround. Pretty soon they get sick of it, and they cancel that plan and go on the public plan, which they know won't give them the runaround.
Voila! Mission accomplished. Sick, expensive person, now that they cost more than they bring in, shifted from private plan to public plan!
Anyone who thinks that private insurers won't do this systematically if they think they can get away with it hasn't been paying attention. And odds are pretty high they'll think they can get away with it.
I'm beginning to feel that we have a real problem in talking about health care. Sometime in the last couple weeks, I read a comment about how what we were arguing about had little to do with health care and everything to do with financing.
... [A]ccording to the AMA 94% of all insurance markets in the United States are highly concentrated
... Between 2000 and 2007 the top ten publically traded insurance companies saw profits increase 428%! Let that sink in, in a little over seven years they saw a 428% increase in profit, all the while passing on double digit increases in premiums to their customers!
... There is also a need for new legislation limiting the size of health care companies ...
I was with them up to that point, but the size of clinics and hospitals isn't the problem and talking about insurance companies as if they were your GP plays right into the hands of the 'we have the best health care in the world' crowd.
Because your doctor or physicians' assistant or nurse provides health care. Your dentist or psychiatrist provides health care. If you're like me and one of these fine medical professionals has cured something that ailed you, the term health care probably calls up some warm and fuzzy thoughts towards them.
But United Healthcare provides medical financing. As with the rest of the finance industry, health care financing is driven by unrestrained greed, unsustainable profits, and a sickening disregard for the public good.
Medical expense financing isn't health care any more than car insurance is a ride to work, and helping its purveyors hide behind our goodwill towards doctors is like confusing Geico with Ford Motors. So call the public option health insurance reform, or medical finance reform, but please (I say, with a sternly wagging finger pointed selfwards,) don't call it health care reform.
During a press conference yesterday, President Obama voiced support for government-administered health insurance for all who need it (aka the "public option"), as a key component of healthcare reform. Though Obama stopped short of threatening to veto a bill that didn't contain such an option, he said that a public option is needed to enforce market discipline. If the system is going to reform, the health insurance companies can't just keep selling the same bad coverage with bigger public subsidies for their monopolies. Essentially, Obama isn't about to force taxpayers to buy overpriced insurance from private companies.
"The public plan, I think, is an important tool to discipline insurance companies," Obama said during yesterday's White House news conference. "I think there is going to be some healthy debate about the shape that this takes." He outlined three options: Get insurance through your employer, buy insurance on your own, or buy insurance from a marketplace where public and private insurance providers compete for business.
Not so very long ago, mortgage cramdown legislation failed. I was angry about that and I thought, 'Great. Congress likes the lying thieves who almost destroyed the world economy better than homeowners. *ssholes.'
Even Republicans were appalled when "[e]xecutives of three of the nation's largest health insurers told federal lawmakers in Washington on Tuesday that they would continue canceling medical coverage for some sick policyholders, despite withering criticism from Republican and Democratic members of Congress who decried the practice as unfair and abusive."
This is exactly why we need a public option. A real one. A good one. A plan that's as good as our legislators get, and that would even let their chicken* behinds off the hook for negotiating partner benefits for same-sex couples, because everyone would have access to it.
We need good healthcare, not to be forced into buying a crappy product that kills people by denying them the coverage they've paid for as soon as they get sick enough that their care would bankrupt the typical US household.
Why is Congress protecting these evil bastiches? I'd guess it's because they're bad people who recognize and protect their own kind. But I could be wrong. What do you think?
Though our current system also has a significant cost, it's just that the public pays it, as Chris wrote last month. And when they're not paying it in dollars, it's coming out of their health, their time and their independence.
"I gathered a group of young farmers and farm workers together a few months ago and guess what the number one issue was: HEALTHCARE. One mishap on the farm and you are in debt for LIFE. Not to mention pre-existing conditions ... forget finding any insurance company to cover you then.
"Why do so many farmers work two jobs? Answer: health care. Why can't we get more people to farm? Answer: who wants to work two jobs their whole life!"
The rural employment situation poses other problems.
I saw a CNN cover piece on the new healthcare reform bill last night, heavily featuring negative quotes from Sen. Mitch McConnell and the breathless worry that the bill wasn't paid for.
McConnell was very worried about the health of the insurance companies. I'm more worried that there are Americans who have to divorce to get treatment for life-threatening conditions. I'm more worried that with the onslaught of job losses and high long-term unemployment, a lot more of us are going to wake up in Indonesia one day:
Since 1948, when Congress defeated one of the best chances had at a universal health care bill, the issue has not diminished in its importance to the country or its influence in all aspects of our economy. Right now we are facing what I think is best opportunity of my lifetime to reshape the health care system to insure the uninsured, control costs, and remove health care coverage from its linkage to employment.
ACORN, through its partnership with Health Care for America Now (HCAN), is heavily involved in pushing out elected representatives to take advantage of this moment and enacting lasting, comprehensive health care reform. While we may not end up with the perfect system, from a progressive point of view, whatever we do get will be a vast improvement over what we have now. Today, in a direct shot at the insurance industry fighting the changes, HCAN and its partners, including ACORN, released a study on the consolidation of the industry and its near monopolistic practices in many states. Below I've written more about this, through the prism of Tamecka Pierce, one of Florida ACORN's strongest leaders. We can win real health care reform this year. But we need to fight for it. --Bertha
When Florida ACORN member Tamecka Pierce first got her employer-provided health insurance, she was ecstatic. No more dealing with the limitations and bureaucracy of the Medicaid system, which had been her sole option as an unemployed single mother with three children.
That joy was short lived. Just after she was accepted into the Blue Cross/Blue Shield program, she was diagnosed with lupus, an auto-immune disease in which the body slowly eats away at itself. The treatment is complex, ever-shifting, and life-long as there is no cure.
Predictably, Blue Cross/Blue Shield spent months fighting not to cover Tamecka. When she finally won, her problems didn't end. As the sole breadwinner, money is always an issue. On a monthly basis, Tamecka found herself choosing between medications and visits to specialist, or between health care and other bills.
But it doesn't have to be this way. Follow me on the flip to find out how.
This week, the White House teamed up with healthcare industry giants for a two-day PR blitz on health reform. A coalition of industry leaders sent a letter to president Obama over the weekend, pledging to help contain healthcare costs. The signatories include PhRMA (drug makers), Advamed (device manufacturers), the AMA (doctors), the AHA (hospitals), AHIP (health insurance), and SEIU's Health Care project. The corporate signatories are the very same interest groups that have fought U.S. healthcare reform for generations. AHIP, America's Health Insurance Plans, helped torpedo the Clinton plan in the 1990s with the infamous "Harry and Louise" TV spots.
Last Thursday, the House and Senate passed budgets for fiscal year 2010. The House version of the budget includes critical language that could open the door for healthcare reform in 2009--and not a moment too soon. Unemployment is skyrocketing, increasing numbers of Americans are going without health insurance, and Democrats are looking to pass healthcare fast.
This week, President Obama made headlines by reversing George W. Bush's executive order barring researchers who receive federal funds from researching all but a handful of stem cell lines created before 2001.
"Promoting science isn't just about providing resources, it is also about protecting free and open inquiry," Obama wrote. "It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it's inconvenient especially when it's inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology."
