Category: Health Care

Health Reform’s Missing Ingredient

By Ron Wyden, Senator D-OR, NYTimes Op-Ed

September 17, 2009

The various bills making their way through Congress would, as the president explained, provide some consumer choice by establishing large marketplaces where people could easily compare insurance plans and pick the one that best suits their needs.

[…]

The problem with these bills, however, is that they would not make the exchanges available to all Americans. Only very small companies and those individuals who can’t get insurance outside of the exchange – 25 million people – would be allowed to shop there. This would leave more than 200 million Americans with no more options, private or public, than they have today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09…

Wait a second, I thought the Public Option, would give us a Choice —

give US ALL a Choice?

The Insurance Exchange will be closed to “more than 200 million Americans”?

that must be a typo!?!

At the outset of putting fingers to keys this morning, I wasn’t intending to write about this topic. I changed my mind, however, because if one more documented instance of Big Pharma’s greedy, hypocritical, exasperating behavior means that we might all benefit from substantial and lasting health care reform, then I am certainly not above sharing my personal story. In particular, this highly frustrating anecdote refers to the unnecessary hassle it has been to obtain one of the three medications I must take on a daily basis to effectively treat my illness. This forthcoming narrative also underscores the perfidy of the industry itself and, in particular, its automatic assumption that anyone who uses its free or reduced cost services must be trying to cheat the system. It shouldn’t surprise any of us by now that this underlying attitude somehow isn’t portrayed in the self-serving television advertising advancing the program’s merits.

You may have seen the commercial. It was pretty ubiquitous for a good long while. A soothing voiceover, couched in hushed tones meant to intimate gentle sympathy, states that American’s pharmaceutical industry might be able to help those who are uninsured attain their prescription drugs at a deep discount. We are led to believe that an imaginary bus tour is underway, looking for all the world like the kind favored by political candidates on their way back and forth from event to event. A series of different looking people from all walks of life announce proudly their allegiance to their own particular state of residence. A man who once led a daytime TV show which frequently showcased the results of paternity tests and established the true identity of baby daddies smoothly performs his role as spokesperson. That this ad aired constantly in the immediate period before Health Care Reform became a political and ideological football was no accident. The implication was that Big Pharma could regulate itself just fine, thank you, and not only that, the industry was so altruistic as to offer medications for needy Americans without need of government arm twisting. I admit at the time I viewed these ads with much suspicion, but after I unexpectedly lost my Medicaid coverage at the end of July, it was an option I had no choice but to pursue, since paying $700 a month out of pocket for a thirty day supply isn’t exactly an viable alternative.

You know, for a party that has spent the last three decades cowering in Centrist fear at even the echo of a whisper of the word ‘tax’, and is so afraid of offending right wing civil libertarians that they don’t say peep when teabaggers bring loaded guns (including assault rifles) to Congressional Town Halls and Presidential rallies, I find it incredible that Congressional Democrats are seriously considering a massive government program that would soon force every American citizen and legal resident (but not illegals, ironically) to pay a substantial amount of discretionary income most of them don’t have directly to a large private insurance corporation. What’s worse, if people don’t it fork over, the government fines them even more money.

In this economy?  Pay those guys??  Or you’ll fine us?  For getting sick?

Are they nuts?

(Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system.)

Look, before we pass something that has the potential to be perhaps the most unpopular US law since the Alien & Sedition Acts, don’t you think we really should have an open and honest debate about whether a universal health insurance mandate is actually such a good policy idea in the first place?

Let’s talk numbers. Even the most policy-averse can understand basic numbers.

From Reuters:

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

“We’re losing more Americans every day because of inaction … than drunk driving and homicide combined,” Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.

Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage.

A 1993 study found that those without health insurance are 25% more likely to die. That study put the number of annual deaths at 18,00 a year. The new study used the same methodology. It excludes people over the age of 65, because they have health insurance. It’s called Medicare. A government run health plan. The increased number of deaths is due largely to the increased number of uninsured. 27,000 more, each year. Since 1993. Since the Clinton Administration’s attempt to reform health care was destroyed, largely by the insurance industry.

The subject title comes from one of the just released Kaiser Family Foundation survey of employers titled Employer Health Benefits 2009 Annual Survey

This annual survey of employers provides a detailed look at trends in employer-sponsored health coverage, including premiums, employee contributions, cost-sharing provisions, and other relevant information. The survey continued to document the prevalence of high-deductible health plans associated with a savings option and included new questions on health risk assessments. The 2009 survey included 3,188 randomly selected public and private firms with three or more employees (2,054 of which responded to the full survey and 1,134 of which responded to an additional question about offering coverage). Researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and Health Research & Educational Trust designed and analyzed the survey.

There’s a whole host of links to the survey at the above link in mostly pdf format.

Poll Finds Most Doctors Support Public Option

by Joseph Shapiro, NPR — September 14, 2009

When polled, “nearly 3/4 of physicians supported some form of a public option, either alone or in combination with private insurance options,”

[…]

Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, conducted a random survey, by mail and by phone, of 2,130 doctors. They surveyed them from June right up to early September.

Most doctors – 63 percent – say they favor giving patients a choice that would include both public and private insurance.

[…]

another 10 percent of doctors say they favor a public option only; they’d like to see a single-payer health care system. Together, the two groups add up to 73 percent.

http://www.npr.org/templates/s…

Hmmm? I wonder if Doctors, know anything about our Broken Insurance System?

Ya think!?

Glenn Beck calls Obama racist

Americans may recall, it began with a Sweet aside and grew into a [Glenn Beck] beckon.  Now, the stage is set.  The audience is explosive.  Words of woe are shouted from every hall.  For more than a month the media has given rise to the troublesome message.  The reason for health care reform; the Obama Administration yearns to provide a platform for “stealth reparations.”

If you want people to get nothing done, convince them they are on one side of something. —Carolyn Casey

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, interviews Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, regarding a Robust Public Option:

AMY GOODMAN: Congress member Grijalva, I also want to ask you about Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus and his close ties to the healthcare industry. […]

REP. RAUL GRIJALVA: I think the product that has come out from his committee and himself, I really believe that it has no legitimacy in this debate. It’s an insider product. It’s there to protect the industry. It is not there to try to look for that middle ground. He is key in holding up deliberations, has been key in trying to work on a consensus, but everything you see in his legislation had to be approved by the industry before it became part of the plan. So I don’t think it’s legitimate.

[…] I consider Senator Baucus’s proposal to be essentially an insider trader move to protect an industry and really doesn’t have validity at all, both political validity or content validity.

SurveyUSA conducted a Poll in Mid-August — prior to Obama’s well-received Speech in September — and they found that across the spectrum of Demographics Groups, a majority of Americans thought it was Extremely Important to have a Choice of a Public Option!

SurveyUSA Poll

Here is the Question which was asked, in a Survey of 1200 Americans, from all around the Country:

In any health care proposal, how important do you feel it is to give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance — extremely important, quite important, not that important, or not at all important?

All Groups

Margin of Sampling Error: ± 2.9%

Survey by SurveyUSA

Geography: USA 50 States

Data Collected: 08/19/2009

Release Date: 08/20/2009

Sponsor: MoveOn.org PAC

Last entry; remember ACTIVISM AND BRAVERY TRUMPS LECTURE. GO OUT AND DO IT! peace, out, D.

Cross posted from my blog, The Wild Wild Left (and I was told WWL & DD were the only 2 mentioned on Detroit’s WWJ radio report! 🙂

We parked at Mexican Jones, a small and empty restaurant I worked for at one time, when it was thriving. In the very back of the lot, there was a neglected trellis that lead to the almost invisible path that follows the waterway along the back of the business district to the Mill Pond where the “festivities” awaited.

We could hear the roar of the crowd, and the speakers a mile out. My 10 year old was nervous. “We have to walk through all that Mom? They’ll kill us,” he said laughing, but with the tinges of fear in his voice. I assured him we would be fine, as we came around the bend into the open where our wet footsteps squeaked on the slippery boardwalk that went over the swampy creek leading to the pond.

I opened my video camera as we neared the crowd, and asked him to hold my hand  in unity. I told him despite my “Liberal” t-shirt, no one would mess with a Mom holding her son’s hand, told him it would make me safer. That appeased his queasiness at being “almost 11” and holding his Mom’s hand. There were thousands there, and as we approached the outskirts, groups of ten here and five there, their wild-eyed glares, almost drugged, hate-filled ecstasy told me I had to keep him close, keep him safe. He fell for it.

Safe, from these self-acclaimed “Real Americans.”

“Don’t run your mouth, we’re here to report, not fight, Jake,” I warned him. He heard, but couldn’t help but say, “Unbelievable!” when we passed a black woman standing with a sign, standing and cheering the toward the stage from the bridge, not 15 feet from a middle aged businessman, whose sign read, “We don’t want no BaLack Obama.” “Mom why would she support these Republicans, they hate people like her, they’re racists,” his voice rising in the pitch of a distraught youth, whose voice has not yet changed. I saved the explanation that Brighton was chosen for a reason for a later date. Making it in Howell, the National Seat of the Klan for many years was too overt, so they made it 8 miles away in Brighton. They knew what base they were tapping. Hard core racists.

Then we entered the crush, the belly of the beast, circling to the right across from the roped off stage area to our left. A swarm of middle-aged whiteness, dotted with the elderly and swaddled in flags, crosses, fear and rage. A smattering of hard-core skinheads rubbed elbows with them, and were accepted in every quarter like family.

I felt like my Liberal shirt was a Star of David and I was pushing my way through a Hitler Youth rally. Yet somehow, I found myself smiling, and laughing aloud at them. At the sheer fallacy of them.

A Grateful Dead concert could not have been weirder, with the costumes and chanting, yet this was the antithesis of the vibe. These people wanted blood, not elevated consciousness.