Judith Dasovich
Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader
May 16, 2009
Government-financed health care is not government-run health care. Private for-profit insurance companies do not want you to understand this. Right now, your health care is run by people who value profits, not patients. Private insurance companies set the fees you can’t afford, for care they will deny you when you need it. They decide which doctor you can see and which hospital you can use. You think you’re “covered” until you get sick and find out that you are not. This is what happened to President Obama’s mother when she was dying.
In contrast, improved Medicare for all (also called single payer financing or national health insurance) uses the same system that builds interstate highways — general tax revenues pay private businesses to produce a common good. Medicare for all is not government run. It pays the same private doctors and hospitals that deliver your care now, just like our current Medicare system. Traditional Medicare has an overhead of less than 3 percent. Private insurance companies average 16-20 percent. Doctors and hospitals pay additional money to deal with their complex systems. Duke University Hospital has 900 billing clerks for 900 beds. Do you think they have one nurse for every patient? William McGuire, former CEO of United Health Care insurance company, received $37.7 million per year in salary and $1.776 billion in stock options. That “b” is not a typo. In retirement, he is guaranteed $5 million per year. $350 billion dollars per year goes to administrative waste and profits. We could provide everyone in the U.S. with health care if we used this money for actual care. The money is already there. You could have your choice of doctors and hospitals, not the ones dictated to you by the insurance companies.
The private insurance companies do not want you to understand this. That is why they will not allow Sen. Max Baucus of the Senate Finance Committee to have even one single-payer advocate at the “reform” table. Private insurance companies do not want real reform. They want you to be forced by law to buy insurance you can’t afford for care you won’t get when you need it. In 2008, Sen. Max Baucus took $1,826,652 from health care special interests in his virtually uncontested re-election bid. Patients, not profits, are the special interests of the single-payer advocates. Our speech is truly “free.” We haven’t paid Max Baucus a single dime. Is that why we can’t get a seat at his table? Is that why his response to this question was “Call the police?”
Editor’s note: Dr. Dasovich was among a group of protesters Capitol Police removed from a health care hearing after interrupting U.S. senators.
Judith Dasovich, MD, FACP is the volunteer Medical Director at the Kitchen Clinic.
