Why the United States lacks full health care
By Peter Phillips and Bridget Thornton
MinutemanMedia.org
Published Friday, October 19, 2007
Health and disability insurance companies are systematically cheating the American public. Michael Moore’s top-grossing movie Sicko is one example of the growing concern surrounding health care in the US.
The number of Americans without health insurance reached forty-seven million at last count, or sixteen percent of the population. The cost is rising two to three times faster than inflation and is the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the country. We pay more and get less medical care than the rest of the industrialized world. The total per capita health care cost in the US exceeds the expense per person in all other full care countries.
The Institute of Medicine estimates that as many as eighteen thousand Americans die prematurely each year because they do not have health insurance. This figure does not include those who die prematurely each year because their insurers delay, diminish, or deny payment for promised benefits. Reports about people who die unnecessarily from withheld services seldom receive broad coverage in the corporate media. Lack of media coverage has led to a nation of people uninformed about how national health and disability policies are controlled by the private insurance industry and how government regulators are powerless to do anything about it.
If industrialized countries around the world offer health care as a basic right, why is it not happening in the US? Private insurance companies are motivated to make as much money as possible and do so by systematically delaying, diminishing, and denying payment for promised services, and blaming individuals for their own misfortune.
On the boards of directors of the nine largest insurance companies are one hundred thirteen people. These directors are some of the richest in the world. They hold one hundred fifty past and/or present positions with major financial or investment institutions in the US, including such major firms as J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Lord Abbett, Bank of America, and Merrill-Lynch. Additionally, these board members have connections to some of the largest corporations in the world including General Motors, IBM, Ford, Microsoft, and Coca Cola. The combined affiliations among the one hundred thirteen health insurance directors represent revenue of over 2.5 trillion dollars 2006.
As some of the richest most powerful citizens in America, health care executives dominate health policy with their campaign donations and active lobbying. They spend millions to keep themselves in the insurance business despite overwhelming evidence that we would all be better off without them. They use these profits to propagandize the American public and influence voters through scare tactics of “socialized medicine” and long delays of service that supposedly occur in single-payer systems.
The single-payer advocacy group, Physicians for a National Health Program, reports that private insurance corporations spend an enormous amount of money on business-oriented expenses rather than health-related investments. A 2003 study in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that spending for administrative costs associated with health care amount to over $320 billion per year or about thirty-one percent of health care costs in the US overall. The administrative costs in the Canadian national healthcare system amount to 16.7 percent, or about half of the overhead in the US.
Countries with common pool or single-payer systems provide similar levels of service to every person. In such countries, it is the responsibility of society as a whole to provide health care for each individual.
Americans have a choice. We can continue with a high-cost profit-driven private insurance system leaving millions to languish without care, and millions more to face the frustrations of systematic delays, diminished care, and denials of promised benefits. Alternatively, we can build a common pool health care system that provides necessary care to everyone — for less than what we are now paying.
Let’s find and support politicians who will provide universal health care outside of corporate fat-cat control.
Read Practices in Health Care and Disability Insurance: Delay, Diminish, Deny, and Blame by Peter Phillips and Bridget Thornton
Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored. Bridget Thornton is a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program. All statements above are fully documented in their new study “Practices in Health Care and Disability Insurance: Delay, Diminish Deny and Blame — www.projectcensored.org.