Medicare

What the American People Want in Health Care

hungeski — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:30:17 -0600

(From The Paragraph.) “[The American people] … have rendered a judgment about what we have attempted to do so far,” said Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) at the president’s big health care meeting last week.³⁰+³¹ “[P]ut that on the shelf and … start over with a blank piece of paper and go step by step.” This theme, that the American people want to start over with a blank sheet of paper, was repeated by Republicans throughout the six-hour meeting. But when Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) got his turn, he gave it a twist: “[The American people] say, look, take the Etch-A-Sketch, go like this [shaking imaginary Etch-A-Sketch upside down], let’s start over, let’s do incremental things …”³²+³³ Vice President Joe Biden addressed the Republican claims of knowing what the American people want: “I think it requires a little bit of humility to be able to know what the American people think. … I know what I think. I think I know what they think, but I’m not sure what they think.”³⁴

The Republicans pointed to polls showing that most Americans don’t like Congress’s health care bills, but President Barack Obama pointed to polls showing that most Americans do like individual points of the health care bills.³⁵ Taking a cue from Vice President Biden, I won’t claim to know what others want, but I know what I want in a health care system, and, taking a cue from the Republicans, I am writing it on a blank sheet of paper:

1. Good, Constant Coverage: I want a plan with good, reasonable coverage that is always in effect — even when I’m in between jobs.

2. Insurance Standards: I want coverage without insurance company tricks and loopholes: no caps, no denial for preexisting conditions, no cancellation when needing an pricey treatment.

3. Quick Treatment: I want to be able see my doctor, or go to a walk-in clinic and get treatment, without waiting days for an appointment.

4. No Paperwork: I want to be able to show my health care card and get treatment — no interview, no forms.

5. Doctor’s Best Judgment: I want my doctor to act from one’s own best judgment, and not from the need to ring the cash register.

6. No Premiums: I want to pay for this out of our taxes. But if I have to pay a premium, it should be affordable, and I should be able to pay it into a public, non-profit plan.

7. Everyone In: I want these things for everyone in America. A healthier nation is a stronger and freer nation.

Which of these features do you want in a health care bill?

Click HERE to vote in the poll.

While Congress’s bills would address some of these features in some measure, I think that the best and least costly way to get them would be to improve and extend Medicare to all.³⁶ While Congress has not moved on that, several states are now moving towards a single-payer system.³⁷

Sources

³⁰ ‘Health care summit: Transcripts from every speaker’ – Washington Post, 2010-02-25

³¹ ‘Sen. Mitch McConnell suggests the President starts over on reform at White House health summit’ – CQ Transcriptions, 2010-02-25

³² ‘Rep. Peter Roskam makes remarks at White House health summit’ – CQ Transcriptions, 2010-02-25

³³ ‘White House Health Care Summit, Part 2’ C-SPAN, 2010-02-25 – video Etch-A-Sketch routine at 134:40

³⁴ ‘Vice President Joe Biden makes remarks on cost at White House health summit’ – CQ Transcriptions, 2010-02-25

³⁵ ‘Poll: Americans Want Dem Health Care Reforms, Not Dem Bills’ by Evan McMorris-Santoro, Talking Points Memo, February 24, 2010

³⁶ ‘Comparing the House and the Senate Health Care Proposals’ New York Times, 2010-02-23

³⁷ ‘Single-Payer Healthcare Coming to Minnesota and Maryland’ by David Swanson, 2010-03-03

California keeps passing bills for state single-payer healthcare, but Ahhhnold won’t sign em, and Jerry Brown who wants to be governor doesn’t seem to want it badly enough to make a commitment on healthcare. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania is encouraged that their current governor has said he probably will sign a single-payer healthcare bill, and the legislature just might pass one. But Minnesota has an angle neither of these other states can claim: a serious candidate for governor who is the state’s leading advocate for single-payer.

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By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com

Old Law Could Stop Corporate Dinosaurs

hungeski — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:36:35 -0600

(Cross-posted from The Paragraph.) Since U.S. states abandoned their old laws that curb corporate power, many corporations have become dinosaurs — huge beasts that have outlived their time, but that keep on stomping through the world.¹ One type of dinosaur is the big oil company, whose products feed disastrous global warming climate change. Such companies should cut back production as the world limits greenhouse gases. Instead, the largest of them, ExxonMobil, has spent many millions to cast doubt on the scientific facts of climate change.²+³ Another type of dinosaur is the for-profit medical insurance company, whose kind controls the gates to health care, shutting out many millions, and canceling the policies of many who need a costly treatment.⁴+⁵ Such companies should bow out of the basic medical insurance business, and let Congress improve and extend Medicare to all. Instead, they have hired former government officials to lobby for keeping control, while getting millions of new, healthy customers at taxpayer expense.⁶ A third type of dinosaur is the Wall Street bank, whose kind sold lousy bonds as AAA-rated, sold vast amounts of bets against those bonds, and sold more bonds backed by those bets — before crashing the economy in 2008.⁷ Such banks should have gone bankrupt, letting smaller, well-run banks pick up the slack. Instead, those banks deemed “too big to fail” got government bailouts, and are now working on the next bubble and crash, while their lobby — the biggest in D.C. — works to thwart Congress’s tries at stopping them.⁸+⁹ All of these corporate dinosaurs have spent much money to skew policy for themselves and against the public. But among the old state laws are those that totally ban corporations from the public policy arena. If the U.S. Congress would pass such a law, it could at last send the corporate dinosaurs stomping into history, where they belong.

Here is an example from Wisconsin in 1905 of a law banning corporate influence on public policy:¹⁰

No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office.

Penalty: Any officer, employe, agent or attorney or other representative of any corporation, acting for and in behalf of such corporation, who shall violate [this act] shall be punished upon conviction by a fine of not less than one hundred nor more than five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment in the state prison for a period of not less than one nor more than five years, or by both … and if the corporation shall be subject to a penalty then by forfeiture in double the amount of any fine so imposed … and if a domestic corporation, it may be dissolved, … and if a foreign or nonresident corporation, its right to do business in this state may be declared forfeited.

Similar Ohio Law, 1908

Section 1, That no corporation doing business in this state shall directly or indirectly pay, use or offer, consent or agree to pay or use, any of its money or property for, or in aid, of any political party, committee or organization, or for, or in aid of, any candidate for political office or for nomination for any such office, or in any manner use any of its money or property for any political purpose whatever, or for the reimbursement or indemnification of any person or persons for moneys or property so used.

Section 3. Every corporation which violates section 1 of this act shall be punished by a fine of not more than five thousand nor less than five hundred dollars… Any officer, stockholder, attorney, or agent of any corporations which violates section 1 of this act who participates in, aids, or advises any such violation, and any person who solicits or knowingly receives any money or property in violation of this act shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than one year or a fine of not more than one thousand dollars, or both at the discretion of the court.¹¹

Other Wisconsin Laws

From research by Jane Anne Morris:¹

corporations were required to have a clear purpose, to be fulfilled but not exceeded.

corporations’ licenses to do business were revocable by the state legislature if they exceeded or did not fulfill their chartered purpose(s).

the state legislature could revoke a corporation’s charter for a particular reason, or for no reason at all.

the act of incorporation did not relieve corporate management or stockholders/owners of responsibility or liability for corporate acts.

as a matter of course, corporation officers, directors, or agents could be held criminally liable for violating the law.

state (not federal) courts heard cases where corporations or their agents were accused of breaking the law or harming the public.

directors of the corporation were required to come from among stockholders.

corporations had to have their headquarters and meetings in the state where their principal place of business was located.

corporation charters were granted for a specific period of time, like 20 or 30 years (instead of being granted “in perpetuity,” as is now the practice.)

corporations were prohibited from owning stock in other corporations in order to prevent them from extending their power inappropriately.

corporations’ real estate holdings were limited to what was necessary to carry out their specific purpose(s).

corporations were prohibited from making any political contributions, direct or indirect.

corporations were prohibited from making charitable or civic donations outside of their specific purposes.

state legislatures set the rates that corporations could charge for their products or services.

all corporation records and documents were open to the legislature or the state attorney general.

All of these provisions were once law in the state of Wisconsin. And similar ones were on the books in most other states.

Sources

¹ ‘Fixing Corporations: The Legacy of the Founding Parents’ by Jane Anne Morris, Madison, Wisc.

² ‘Some Like It Hot’ By Chris Mooney, Mother Jones May/June 2005 Issue

In 1989, the petroleum and automotive industries and the National Association of Manufacturers forged the Global Climate Coalition to oppose mandatory actions to address global warming. …

…

[W]ith the release of the IPCC’s third assessment in 2001, a strong consensus had emerged: Notwithstanding some role for natural variability, human-created greenhouse gas emissions could, if left unchecked, ramp up global average temperatures by as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius (or 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100. “Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science,” wrote Science Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy in a 2001 editorial.

Even some leading corporations that had previously supported “skepticism” were converted. Major oil companies like Shell, Texaco, and British Petroleum, as well as automobile manufacturers like Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler, abandoned the Global Climate Coalition, which itself became inactive after 2002.

Yet some forces of denial—most notably ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, of which ExxonMobil is a leading member—remained recalcitrant. In 1998, the New York Times exposed an API memo outlining a strategy to invest millions to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and other key audiences.” The document stated: “Victory will be achieved when…recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” …

Though ExxonMobil’s Lauren Kerr says she doesn’t know the “status of this reported plan” and an API spokesman says he could “find no evidence” that it was ever implemented, many of the players involved have continued to dispute mainstream climate science with funding from ExxonMobil. …

³ ‘Put a Tiger In Your Think Tank’ Mother Jones May/June 2005 Issue

ExxonMobil has pumped more than $8 million [from 2000 to 2003] into more than 40 think tanks; media outlets; and consumer, religious, and even civil rights groups that preach skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe.

⁴ ‘Medicare for All: The Only Sound Solution to Our Healthcare Crisis’ By Guy T. Saperstein, AlterNet, January 16, 2007.

The United States has the most expensive healthcare system on the planet. Even including the 47 million uninsured, the U.S. healthcare system costs almost double per capita what single-payer systems in Europe, Japan and Canada cost; in the United States, healthcare costs were $5,635 per person in 2005.

⁵ Bill Moyers Journal, July 10, 2009

The House Energy and Commerce Committee found that the major private health insurers had rescinded the policies of approximately 20,000 people in a five year period, to avoid paying out approximately $300 million in benefit claims.

⁶ ‘Familiar Players in Health Bill Lobbying Firms Are Enlisting Ex-Lawmakers, Aides’ by Dan Eggen and Kimberly Kindy, July 7, 2009, The Washington Post

The nation’s largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress in hopes of influencing their old bosses and colleagues, according to an analysis of lobbying disclosures and other records.

…

The hirings are part of a record-breaking influence campaign by the health-care industry, which is spending more than $1.4 million a day on lobbying in the current fight, according to disclosure records. …

The push has reunited many who worked together in government on health-care reform, but are now employed as advocates for pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

⁷ ‘An Inside Story of Wall Street Bank Crashes’ The Paragraph,
December 26th, 2008

⁸ ‘Capital City’ by Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, Jan.-Feb. 2010

let’s take a virtual stroll down K Street and see what everyone is spending on the world’s second-oldest profession. It’s all laid out for us by OpenSecrets.org. The defense lobby? Pikers. They contributed $24 million to individuals and PACs during the last election cycle. The farm lobby? $65 million. Health care? We’re getting warmer. Health care was the No. 2 industry, at $167 million.

And the finance lobby? They’re No. 1, with a very, very big bullet. They contributed an astonishing $475 million during the 2008 election cycle. That’s up from $60 million almost two decades ago.

⁹ ‘Don’t Reinflate the Old Bubbles’ By Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, October 14, 2009

What we’re witnessing here is pretty simple: another bubble in financial assets. All that “liquidity” created by the Federal Reserve and other central banks has accomplished its task and prevented a global financial meltdown. But unless they move now to begin sopping up that liquidity, the central bankers run a serious risk of reinflating many of the same bubbles that got us into this mess in the first place.

…

The problem is that because we didn’t get into this recession in the normal way, the normal analysis and remedies are not appropriate. Slow growth and high unemployment are indeed going to be a big problem over the next several years, but they aren’t going to be solved by pumping out lots of cheap money that is used to speculate in stocks, bonds and commodities rather than be invested in the real economy. And if all this speculation has the effect of driving up the price of commodities and driving down the value of the dollars we use for imports, then it is perfectly possible to wind up with high inflation and high unemployment at the same time — as happened in the late 1970s.

The right policy response is for the Fed to begin withdrawing some of this extraordinary monetary stimulus even as the rest of the government steps up its effort to stimulate the real economy. That means more money for extended unemployment benefits; more aid to the states so that they can maintain the most vital public services; and more money to expand mass transit, state college and university systems, efficient energy production and basic scientific research. The economist Paul Krugman estimates that for every dollar in extra debt that will be required to finance this fiscal stimulus, about 40 cents will be repaid almost immediately in the form of tax revenues from higher short-term economic growth. And if the money is invested wisely in quality projects with high returns, the other 60 cents could wind up being a boon to future generations, rather than a burden.

¹⁰ ‘Wisconsin statutes. 1919: embracing all general statutes in force …, Volume 2, section 4479a’ edited by Lyman Junius Nash, Arthur Frederick Belitz

¹¹ ‘DEMOCRACY FOR SALE: How Ohioans Kept Corporations out of Politics; How and When They Re-entered’ — American Friends Service Committee

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By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com

Bernanke wants to steal from Social Security and Medicare to pay for Wall Street excesses.

Michael Kwiatkowski — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:33:39 -0600

You just knew this was coming. Unsatisfied with stealing trillions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize Wall Street's gambling habit, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke wants to raid Social Security and Medicare to pay for it, according to The Huffington Post (image of Bernanke supplied by the HuffPo article). This has even GOPers nervous, considering the pounding they took when George W. Bush proposed privatizing the social safety net to provide gambling money for bankers. That may be why they're slower than usual to vote to keep the co-architect of America's financial meltdown in place.

In that regard, they may actually be allies, however unreliable, as Vermont's Bernie Sanders works to prevent Bernanke from being appointed to a second term as Federal Reserve chairman. David Sirota over at Closed Left provides a list of potential Senate targets who might be prodded into blocking the nomination. This is a good opportunity, especially with an election year coming up, to put the pressure on Democrats and Republicans alike to get something positive done for once. Call your senators and tell them that if they want your money and votes next year, they will block Bernanke's re-appointment.

Public v. Corps in National Health Care Debate

hungeski — Mon, 18 May 2009 00:09:15 -0500

Cross-posted from The Paragraph

As the U.S. Congress works on a national health care bill, people have lined-up behind three main proposals. The one most favored by citizens and doctors — and many Democratic lawmakers — is the single-payer system, which would improve and extend Medicare to all persons.x¹ With this system everyone chooses one’s own doctors, and no one has to shop for health insurance. This type of system has been proven to work well in many other developed countries.x² But both Congressional committees working on the national health care bill have taken single-payer off the table, saying that moving to it from today’s huge for-profit insurance system would be “disruptive”.x³ The second proposal, favored by much of the national Democratic leadership, is the public option, where a person would pick one from a menu of several insurance company plans and a non-profit government insurance plan.x⁵ Like single-payer, the public option would be free of the huge costs in marketing, executive pay and profits of insurance company plans. But, to keep the public option viable, lawmakers would have to tool the system to guard against insurance companies cherry-picking the healthiest persons. To get the public option passed, proponents might have to deal with renegade Democrats sympathetic to insurance company gripes of not being able to compete.x⁶ The third proposal, favored by insurance companies, and those Republican lawmakers who favor any proposal at all, keeps an all-private insurance system, which would have some new regulation while requiring all persons to buy insurance.x⁷ This type of system was adopted three years ago in Massachusetts, but has failed to control costs and provide health care to all.x⁸ Still, the millions of dollars the insurance business has put into lobbying and lawmakers’ campaign chests might sway Congress to choose this system.x⁹ So, while it appears that corporate pull has yanked single-payer off the table, it remains to be seen if the people have enough pull in Congress to at least get a viable public option.

Sources

Cartoon credit: ‘Count Bleed-Ya-Dry’ by Bill Jarcho via The Backbone Campaign

¹ ‘AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION: TODAY VS. 30 YEARS AGO – January 11-15, 2009’ CBS NEWS/NEW YORK TIMES POLL – pdf

Americans are more likely today to embrace the idea of the government providing health insurance than they were 30 years ago. 59% say the government should provide national health insurance, including 49% who say such insurance should cover all medical problems.

Poll by Annals of Internal Medicine, 1 April 2008 – pdf

More than one half of the respondents from every medical specialty supported national health insurance legislation, with the exception of respondents in surgical subspecialties, anesthesiologists, and radiologists. Current overall support (59%) increased by 10 percentage points since 2002 (49%). Support increased in every subspecialty since 2002, with the exception of pediatric subspecialists, who were highly supportive in both surveys.

H.R.676 cosponsers

Title: To provide for comprehensive health insurance coverage for all United States residents, improved health care delivery, and for other purposes. (This is the single-payer bill in the House; it has 75 cosponsers.)

² ‘Rep. McDermott: The Medical-Industrial Complex in this Country is Bigger than the Military-Industrial Complex’ – Democracy Now! 2009-04-01

REP. JIM McDERMOTT: Basically, a single-payer system, which is what every industrialized country in the world, except the United States, has adopted, is a system in which you guarantee a set of benefits for every citizen of the country. No matter how much money, where they live, what color they are, what ethnicity they are, whatever, everybody is entitled to the same generous benefit package. And that’s true in France, and it’s true in Germany, and it’s true all over the place. The French, for half the money that we spend, are getting, by the World Health Organization, the best healthcare in the world.

Now, the second thing that you have to have besides a generous benefit package is a single-payer system. And you can put the money together through the government, or there are a lot of different ways it’s done in all the countries of the world, but when a patient goes into a hospital in Canada, they hand a card in for the national plan, and that’s the end of it. And you are not threatened with bankruptcy in Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Japan, Italy, Spain. None of these countries can a citizen be bankrupted by their illness. But it is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States, because we have put the emphasis on individuals doing it.

³ ‘Doctors Arrested at Senate Roundtable on Healthcare’ – Institute for Public Accuracy, 2009-05-05

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, has stated on multiple occasions that single payer is “off the table” of health reform.

‘Pelosi Pushes For Truth Commission’ – Hotline On Call, 2009-04-22

As our members came back from their recess, a great deal of what they heard out there was public options, public options, public options, public options. In our caucus, over and over again, we hear single payer, single payer, single payer. Well, it’s not going to be a single payer. … We had an opportunity for that awhile back, and it was not realized. And that’s not what it’s going to be. So we had to take people from a place that they see universal, affordable, quality health care available best in single payer and say this can be achieved in other ways.”

‘Proposal would require all to have health coverage’ By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR and ERICA WERNER, Associated Press, 2009-05-14

The summary of the House proposal says one of its main goals is to “minimize disruption” for people who already have coverage by allowing them to keep their coverage. All Americans would be protected by an annual limit on out-of-pocket costs, a safeguard already in the best private plans.

⁵ ‘HEALTHY COMPETITION: How to Structure Public Health Insurance Plan Choice to Ensure Risk-Sharing, Cost Control, and
Quality Improvement’ By Jacob S. Hacker, Ph.D., UC Berkeley Department of Political Science and UC Berkeley School of Law, April 2009 – pdf

⁶ ‘Ben Nelson Plans To Oppose Public Health Plan’ by Ryan Grim, The Huffington Post, 2009-05-02

Nelson’s problem, he told CQ, is that the public plan would be too attractive and would hurt the private insurance plans. “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the game,” Nelson said. Including a public option in a health plan, he said, was a “deal breaker.”

…

As he so often does, Nelson said, according to CQ, that he planned to form a “coalition of like-minded centrists opposed to the creation of a public plan, as a counterweight to Democrats pushing for it.”

⁷ ‘Republicans Dithering on Health Care’ By Philip Klein, The American Spectator, 5.13.09

The major fault line that is emerging between Republicans and Democrats is over the creation of a new government-run plan modeled after Medicare that would be offered alongside private insurance plans on a government-run and regulated national insurance exchange. …

…

[Republican Senators] Enzi, along with Grassley and Hatch, have all come out strongly opposed to a government-run plan, meaning that if Democrats go ahead with it, bipartisan reform will fall by the wayside.

⁸ ‘Massachusetts’ Plan: A Failed Model for Health Care Reform’ by Dr. Rachel Nardin with Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, all of Harvard Medical School, February 18, 2009

⁹ ‘Health Sector Has Donated Millions to Lawmakers’ By Dan Eggen, The Washington Post, Sunday, March 8, 2009; Page A09

Health insurers and drug makers have showered members of the 111th Congress with millions in campaign contributions over the last four years, with a special focus on leaders who will play major roles in shaping health-care legislation, according to a study to be released tomorrow.

Health insurers and their employees contributed $2.2 million to the top 10 recipients in the House and Senate since 2005, while drug makers and their employees gave more than $3.3 million to top lawmakers during that period, according to an analysis of federal elections data by Consumer Watchdog, a California-based advocacy group.

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By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com