Public Option "Single-Payer" Health Care

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Keeping Them Honest
By PAUL KRUGMAN - NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist
June 5, 2009

“I appreciate your efforts, and look forward to working with you so that the Congress can complete health care reform by October.” So declared President Obama in a letter this week to Senators Max Baucus and Edward Kennedy. The big health care push is officially on.

But the devil is in the details. Health reform will fail unless we get serious cost control — and we won’t get that kind of control unless we fundamentally change the way the insurance industry, in particular, behaves. So let me offer Congress two pieces of advice:

1) Don’t trust the insurance industry.
2) Don’t trust the insurance industry.

The Democratic strategy for health reform is based on a political judgment: the belief that the public will be more willing to accept reform, less easily Harry-and-Louised, if those who already have health coverage from private insurers are allowed to keep it.

But how can we have fundamental reform of what Mr. Obama calls a “broken system” if the current players stay in place? --- Click here for REST OF OP-ED COLUMN!... ---

Single-Payer Health Care
By Nicole Gaudiano - Free Press Washington Writer • June 4, 2009
Vermont's Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) has sponsored the Senate’s only single-payer health-care bill, a plan that would rely on a single source of funding, rather than multiple private insurers, for health care. During a Wednesday news conference, he called it “incomprehensible” that such a proposal isn’t part of the Senate’s discussion on the issue.

Sanders favors a state-administered system funded by the federal government. He said he would continue to seek a hearing in the Senate on the single-payer approach.

Sanders said there’s no question why the current health care system is “so dysfunctional.”

“We have a system dominated by private health insurance companies whose goal is not to provide health care to people,” he said. “In fact, it is to deny health care to people because every dollar they deny ... is a dollar more in profits that they make.”

Sanders arranged a meeting among several single-payer advocates and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., a leader on the issue. But the physicians and nurses said they left without assurances that their plan would be considered.

“We will therefore need to continue to press him,” said David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. “It’s what our patients desperately need.”

Himmelstein said the group did secure a promise from Baucus to “use the power of his office” to ensure that charges are dropped against 13 health care providers who were arrested for disrupting Finance Committee hearings last month when they protested the lack of single-payer proponents as witnesses.

“There’s a conspiracy of silence within the Congress in terms of single-payer,” said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association. “It’s been kept off of the agenda.”

A spokesman for Baucus did not return a call for comment.

President Barack Obama is seeking a Senate vote on health-care reform by August. Proposals are being drafted in the Senate Finance and Health, Education, Labor and Pension committees, of which Sanders is a member.

“It’s going to be a grassroots effort,” Sanders said. “When millions and millions of people say every American is entitled to health care as a right, and it must be comprehensive and it must be cost effective ... we’re going to have a single-payer system.”

Signup for 'Collin County Health Care day of Service' - June 27th

President Barack Obama Pleads For Action On Health Care

Americans spend more on health care every year than we do educating our children, building roads, even feeding ourselves—an estimated $2.6 trillion in 2009, or around $8,300 per person. According to the National Coalition on Healthcare, nearly 266,000 companies dropped their employees' health care coverage from 2000 to 2005 and for those employees that have not yet lost coverage the average employee health insurance premium is rising nearly eight times faster than income.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that, if Congress does nothing about healthcare, our annual health costs will soar to about $13,000 per person in 2017, while the number of uninsured will climb from 48 million this year to over 54 million by 2019. Already more than half of Americans say they have cut back on health care in the past year due to cost concerns. Roughly one in four of us say we put off care we needed, and one in five of us didn't fill a prescription.

Medical problems caused 62% of all personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007, according to a study by Harvard researchers. And in a finding that surprised even the researchers, 78% of those filers had medical insurance at the start of their illness, including 60.3% who had private coverage, not Medicare or Medicaid.

Medically related bankruptcies have been rising steadily for decades. In 1981, only 8% of families filing for bankruptcy cited a serious medical problem as the reason, while a 2001 study of bankruptcies in five states by the same researchers found that illness or medical bills contributed to 50% of all filings.

This newest, nationwide study, conducted before the start of the current recession by Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler of Harvard Medical School, Elizabeth Warren of Harvard Law School, and Deborah Thorne, a sociology professor at Ohio University, found that the filers were for the most part solidly middle class before medical disaster hit. Two-thirds owned their home and three-fifths had gone to college.

Profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007, while consumers paid more for less coverage. One of the major reasons, according to a new study, is the growing lack of competition in the private health insurance industry that has led to near monopoly conditions in many markets.

The report says such conditions warrant a Justice Department investigation and, says Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), provide compelling evidence of the need for a public health insurance plan option as part of the health care reform initiative President Obama and Congress are developing.

Schumer says the report from Health Care for America Now! (HCAN)

the starkest evidence yet that the private health care insurance market is in bad need of some healthy competition. A public health insurance option is critical to ensure the greatest amount of choice possible for consumers.

According to the recently released HCAN report, “Premiums Soaring in Consolidated Health Insurance Market“:

In the past 13 years, more than 400 corporate mergers have involved health insurers, and a small number of companies now dominate local markets but haven’t delivered on promises of increased efficiency. According to the American Medical Association, 94 percent of insurance markets in the United States are now highly concentrated, and insurers are thriving in the anti-competitive marketplace, raking in enormous profits and paying out huge CEO salaries.

These mergers and consolidations have created a marketplace where a small number of larger companies use their power to raise premiums—an average of 87 percent over the past six years—restrict and reduce benefit packages and control and cut provider payments.

These facts are at the heart of the current debate over health care reform.

President Barack Obama pleaded for action on his health care agenda, during his weekly radio and Internet address to focus on his domestic priority even while traveling overseas.

"If we do nothing, everyone's health care will be put in jeopardy," Obama said. "Fixing what's wrong with our health care system is no longer a luxury we hope to achieve, it's a necessity we cannot postpone any longer," said the president.

Read - How Pharma and the Insurances companies plan to kill the 'public option' in health care reform.

Why Healthcare Needs Reform!

Updated...

The President gives remarks after hosting a healthcare reform meeting. $2 trillion in national savings was committed by the stakeholders in attendance on May 11th.

CrooksAndLiars.com: Insurance Companies Suddenly Change Their Version of What They Told Obama - Remember Obama's announcement last Monday that insurance companies were going to cut the rate of health care spending?

It was all over the news: “These groups are voluntarily coming together to make an unprecedented commitment,” Mr. Obama said. “Over the next 10 years, from 2010 to 2019, they are pledging to cut the rate of growth of national health care spending by 1.5 percentage points each year — an amount that’s equal to over $2 trillion.”

Now they're insisting they never said such a thing! more...

Pro-Family Healthcare Reform

By Glenn Melancon 2008 Democratic candidate U.S. House of Representatives, TX 4th Congressional District

Facing falling poll numbers, the Republican political elites are downplaying their anti-gay and anti-abortion rhetoric. Political consultants had told them to use these “wedge issues” to divide America and win elections. More and more voters, however, want to know what their leaders stand for, not what they oppose. For the first time in thirty years we have an opportunity for real pro-family policies.

When Jackie and I took our traditional wedding vows nearly twenty years ago, they included the phrase “for richer, for poorer; in sickness, and in health.” Our ancestors knew the real threats to marriages. Healthcare and financial crises can easily wreck a relationship.

Politicians in Washington and Austin haven’t learned this lesson. The number of uninsured Americans grows every year. As many as 50 million adults and children lack coverage. The number would be even higher if we didn’t have Medicare—a government-run, single-payer health insurance provider.

Families without insurance are one accident away from bankruptcy. A trip to the emergency room can cost thousands of dollars. Once in financial ruin, families tend to argue more and break apart. Reforming health care insurance is essential to improving our financial well-being and making it easier for families to stay together.

Insurance reform should rest on a simple principle—every American has a right to quality, affordable health care from a doctor of their choice. Big insurance corporations have made affordable health care and patient choice relics of the past. It doesn’t have to be that way. Reforming the health insurance market can restore these basic features of quality American health care.

First, we need “Any Willing Provider Legislation.” Patients, not insurance companies, should choose the right doctor. Once an insurance company or HMO announces the terms of a contract, any qualified healthcare provider who agrees to the terms must be allowed to compete for patients.

“Any Willing Provider Legislation” would be particularly useful in rural Texas. Too often small town doctors are frozen out by big insurance companies. Patients are forced to travel into cities to see doctors who will accept their plan.

Congress should also guarantee equal access to healthcare insurance. Insurance companies must offer basic healthcare packages to all Americans. American families and small businesses should have the same choices and bargaining power as large corporations.

Third, Congress must require full coverage for pregnancy, diabetes and hypertension [high blood pressure]. Early intervention is the key to strong patient-doctor relationships. Patients need to see their doctor before their condition gets worse and the cost of treatment goes up. When doctors know their patients, they can help prevent expensive and possibly life-threatening complications.

Finally, we need public-private competition. All Americans should be allowed to purchase Medicare or something like it. For-profit insurers have to pay advertisers or shareholders. Medicare doesn’t. Medicare can offer the same healthcare coverage at lower costs to the consumer. The market will then determine which is a more cost effective and efficient way to sell insurance. We need real choices.

Health insurance reform will do more than anything else to relieve the financial stress that is destroying our families. Washington politicians who have been talking about protecting marriage are simply diverting your attention away from corporate greed. You know the classic con game. You’ve seen it countless times in movies. One person causes a distraction while another picks your pocket. Every time you hear gay marriage, look at your wallet—it’s lighter; look at your pension—it’s vanishing; look at your medical bills—they’re going through the roof. As Americans we deserve better. We deserve real pro-family health care.