Single-payer topic dominates health-care listening sessions
By MIKE DENNISON
Billings Gazette
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
ANACONDA - In a packed meeting room today at Anaconda’s hospital, state worker and Butte resident Anna Dockter asked U.S. Sen. Max Baucus’ chief of staff the question on everyone’s mind: Why is national, public health insurance for all not being considered as a reform option?
“We’re all recounting our experiences with private health insurance,” she said. “We have pretty good insurance, and we’re still paying thousands of dollars (for our medical care.)”
John Selib, Baucus’ chief of staff in Washington, D.C., gave the same answer he gave four hours earlier at a similar meeting in Dillon: A national, “single-payer” health plan won’t pass Congress.
“There is a single-payer bill introduced in the Senate,” Selib said. “It does not have a single co-sponsor. There’s some pretty simple arithmetic you need to do. … It takes 60 votes to pass something in the Senate.”
Selib went on to say that Baucus, Montana’s senior senator and the national point man for health-care reform, wants the same thing that single-payer advocates want: broad-based, affordable health coverage for all Americans.
Insisting on single-payer as the only, best option could lead to no reform at all, while other approaches will accomplish much of what public-insurance advocates want, he said.
“Both (single-payer advocates) and Baucus believe that we need to do something to fix the system,” Selib said. “We have a chance to fix that now. … I think if it’s out there on the table, we should take it.”
Yet Selib’s protestations didn’t stop the questions and comments about single-payer, which is the technical term for national, taxpayer-financed health insurance for all.
“If you get a major illness in this country, plan to spend the next two years of your life sorting out the paperwork on what you end up paying,” said Sheila Roberts, a University of Montana-Western professor who attended the Dillon meeting. “If you get a major illness in Canada (which has a single-payer system), you go to the hospital and you don’t even sign anything. You go home and that’s it, it’s over.”
The Anaconda and Dillon meetings are among two dozen “listening sessions” that Baucus staffers are holding this week, primarily in small- and medium-sized towns across Montana.
Selib opening each meeting Wednesday with an explanation of the reform ideas supported and pursued by Baucus, a Democrat who chairs the powerful Senate Finance Committee. A health-care reform bill or bills are expected to be introduced by the end of June and on the Senate floor this summer, Selib said.
Ideas and principals supported by Baucus include health-insurance reforms that will make it easier for the uninsured to buy private insurance and a “public option” insurance plan offered by the government as competition for private insurers, he said.
“If you think your insurance company is screwing you … then you’d have the option of going to the public plan,” Selib said. “Senator Baucus is fighting tooth and nail to include that in any final deal.”
Then he asked the standing-room-only audiences for comments - and got an earful, mostly on the whys, hows and whats of national health insurance as the preferred option.
When someone asked what a single-payer system might cost, Selib said he didn’t know - and that prompted Mark Phillip, an engineer from Anaconda, to speak up from the back of the room at Anaconda Community Hospital.
“Doesn’t Canada spend 60 percent per capita (on health care) that we spend?” Phillip said. “That’s a pretty good estimate.”
Phillip said later that he had worked for 3 1/2 years in Alberta, and didn’t see any major problems with Canada’s system, where all citizens are covered by public health insurance.
Linda Lodden, a retired state worker from Anaconda, asked the crowd whether all Americans should have the same health care and same health insurance, including members of Congress and the president - essentially, a single-payer system. Nearly all hands in the audience went up.
Yet those who professed support for a national, single-payer system didn’t necessarily insist it’s the only way to go.
Mary Jo O’Rourke of Dillon, whose husband runs a dental clinic in town, urged Baucus to pass what reforms he could, and to make sure to include the “public option” insurance to compete with private insurance and to preserve regulations for small-business “associations” that buy group insurance.
“If we push so hard for a single-payer system, which is what I believe in … if we press so hard for that, then we may get nothing,” she said.