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NAVIGATION PNHP RESOURCES
Posted on August 24, 2009

Where's the Wizard of Oz When We Need Him?

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By Carol Miller
Taos Daily News
August 15, 2009

The people are crying-out for access to health care. The economy is in freefall with no sign yet of the bottom. It is time for bold action. Poll after poll finds that two out of every three Americans supports converting to a universal health care system similar to Medicare.

I find myself wishing there was someone like the Wizard of Oz to give courage to politicians, the courage to stand up for us—the people, the taxpayers, the voters.

So, what’s the problem?

One problem is that most elected leaders, from the president on down, are cowards when it comes to standing up to the corporations. A few recent examples: bailouts for banks while homeowners still face foreclosure and homelessness; the AIG mega-insurance corporate bailout; and the current and most cruel bailout—protecting large sickness insurance corporations rather than giving us guaranteed access to health care. This is not reform.

A truly reformed system would focus on improving health by expanding public health, prevention, wellness programs, and easy access to health care without causing fear as to how individuals will pay for it.

It is becoming obvious that there is more interest in raising current and future campaign funds than giving us access to the higher quality, lower-cost health care that the rest of the industrialized world enjoys.

How much money has corporate health care invested in politicians to protect their profits? In the past 10 years, a cool $3.4 billion. 2008 was a big investment year for health corporations: $167 million to Congressional candidates (60% to Democrats), $18.7 million to the Obama Campaign, and $7.3 million to McCain. While that sounds like a lot to us, it is pocket change for these corporations—they make billions in profit every year.

A Billion Dollars a Day

I know there are a lot of numbers in this commentary, but if you want to memorize only one, here it is: health insurance administrative costs alone waste one billion dollars a day, $365 billion dollars a year, and a trillion dollars every two and a half years. This is a trillion dollars that are sucked out of the health care system every couple of years for wasteful paperwork and corporate profit. Not one penny of this provides any health care. This is why the corporations are fighting to have the 49 million uninsured handed over to them.

Elected Politicians are Helping Government Haters Kill Health Reform

When our elected officials refuse to strongly defend the popular, lifesaving and well-run government health programs, they open the door and airways to endless government bashing. We see now how out of control these government haters have become. Some of these are even the people we have elected to represent us!

Why won’t the president stand up and defend government health programs? He has had so many opportunities, but instead he plays into the hands of the sickness insurance corporations, feeding the myth that people like their insurance companies.

U.S. Socialized Medicine Is Popular

Americans are so trained to think that socialized anything is bad that they get frightened when they hear lies in the media that the government is going to impose socialized medicine. The definition of socialized medicine is when the government owns the hospitals and clinics and all of the staff are government employees.

This system actually sounds very familiar to 20 million Americans, and almost one out of every four New Mexicans. You know why? The United States already has a very large socialized medical system that includes military health, veteran’s health, and the Indian Health Service.

Why doesn’t President Obama ever mention this? He could let people know that the VA is a great system, recently honored as having the highest patient satisfaction of all health plans for the sixth year in a row. The military has always had a socialized health system, and service members consider it the most important benefit of service.

America Already Has a Single Payer System

It is amazing that the thought of government-run health care frightens so many people, including those who already have it. The United States today has the largest single payer health care system in the world, with 103 million beneficiaries—more than one out of every three Americans.

In New Mexico, 800,000 people have single payer health care, through Medicare and Medicaid. Add in the more than 400,000 in the socialized system, and two out of every three New Mexicans is already in government run health care. The truth is, most of them like it and are more satisfied with their coverage and care than people in corporate sickness insurance.

Here is why Medicare is popular—it keeps the private delivery system intact and leaves it to the government to pay the bills. If people want “choice,” they will find more choice of doctors and hospitals in Medicare than any other insurance plan.

The president has said time and again that if we were starting the system from scratch, he would favor a single payer system. He is clear that he knows it is the best. But he always follows this up with the comment that a lot of people like what they have, so we will build on the current system. But 123 million people already have government health care, 41% of the country. Why not get to universal health care by building on these systems?

At a recent AARP Forum on Health Reform, President Obama was unable to convince a Medicare beneficiary that Medicare is actually a government-run program. The person refused to believe that the government could operate such a great program.

Rather than standing up for the government, the president missed the perfect opportunity to educate and move the country. He could have explained that reform will not be about taking away anything from the 45 million seniors in Medicare, but instead would welcome their children and grandchildren to join them in the most popular government program.

Compare that to the current system which has grandma in Medicare, mom and dad either uninsured or in another plan, and often the children in yet another, each with annual enrollment, changing rules, and benefits unknown until you are sick and an insurance company bureaucrat tells your doctor what care you can get. Imagine the whole family in one health system, with the same rules, benefits, and enrollment for life—this is an idea worth fighting for!

People Like Their Insurance?

Really? Who are these people? This is a huge lie. The president says it over and over. Our members of Congress say it over and over, but repeating this lie will never make it true.

For the most part, people like their doctors and the hospitals and clinics where they get care, but in my many years of working in health care, I have never met anyone who told me they love their insurance company.

Insurance companies collect money every month, supposedly to pay for health care, but their profits are based on denying and rationing as much care as possible. The rationing starts before someone even signs up for an insurance plan, because sales agents are trained to discourage or deny coverage to sick people or people who they think might become sick.

With corporate for-profit insurance, you never know in advance what will be paid for and how much they will leave for you to pay. Too many people have learned the absolute heartlessness of ruthless insurance companies. More than 500,000 people in the United States go bankrupt every year as a result of medical bills or illness. Most who declare medical bankruptcy are “insured,” or so they thought. They paid their premiums every month, but when they or a family member became sick, they learned that they were not protected from financial ruin.

Who benefits from this system? Insurance executives and CEOs with sky-high compensation packages reaching to the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. The former CEO of United Health Care holds the record, receiving over one billion dollars in a single year in salary and stock options. This is the same corporation that just “won” the contract to run the behavioral health system in the State of New Mexico.

Continuing the for-profit sickness insurance industry and using tax dollars to expand it further is yet another unaffordable corporate bailout. This is a nonessential industry that makes profits from rationing health care to people who need it and, even worse, it rations the care to people who have already paid for it!

My challenge to the New Mexico Congressional delegation and the president is this: even if you don’t have the courage to support a transformation of the health care system that would let everyone into a restored Medicare program, why not at least let the 49 million uninsured enroll in this most popular government program? This is the easiest and least costly way to cover the uninsured.

There are two bills in Congress to create a Medicare-for-All program, House Bill 676 and Senate Bill 703. On July 30th, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker and California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi committed to a vote on HB676 when Congress comes back from vacation in September.

The outcome of that vote depends on us making sure that all of our representatives know we oppose the looming corporate bailout and want health care, not health insurance.

What we want is simple: one system, everyone in, nobody out.