elections

US Congress “Public Option” Healthcare Compromise with Insurance Companies Does not Live Up to Promises to American People

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Kucinich Amendment May Save Health Reform

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on July 17, 2009, Printed on July 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/141404/ 

No time today for a lengthy analysis of the Tri-Committee health bill. My quick-and-dirty take is this.Those who think the bill is a wonderful progressive victory with a robust public option are wrong, and, on the flip side, the charge that it’s a “bailout for the insurance industry” is totally divorced from what the bill would actually do if passed. 

It is the most progressive, comprehensive and significant health care legislation to come down the pike since Medicare was passed in 1965. If it were enacted as written, it’d go a long way to solving a lot of our problems (but by no means all) and wouldn’t break the bank in the process. (I’ll have more next week on the good, the bad and the ugly in the new bill.)  

But it also fails some of the basic criteria that most progressives have long said is a red-line that can’t be crossed. First and foremost, it doesn’t have a public option that can compete with private insurers and result in significant cost savings.   

It has a public plan in which — as far as the statute goes (it can be expanded in 2015 but there’s no mandate to do so) — only 9-10 million people will be eligible to enroll by 2019. Similarly, the publicly-administered exchanges are projected to cover about 30 million by that year. (These relatively small insurance pools will be able to bargain in concert with Medicare to some degree, so their power will be magnified, but still…) 

Continue reading US Congress “Public Option” Healthcare Compromise with Insurance Companies Does not Live Up to Promises to American People →

elections, health care

PA 4th CD Congressman Jason Altmire Votes to Deny Pennsylvania the Right to Establish a Statewide Single Payer Healthcare System

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House Committee Allows States to Create Single-Payer Healthcare

By David Swanson
July 17, 2009

Kucinich amendment receives bi-partisan support

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a victory for single-payer advocates. Our job in the ensuing weeks will be to ensure that this amendment does not get stripped from the final legislation.] 

On Friday morning at 9:45 a.m. ET in the House Committee on Education and Labor, the committee members voted 25 to 19 to pass Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s amendment to the healthcare reform bill. This amendment, if it survives the full House, the Senate, the conference, and the President, will not alter the federal legislation except to allow states to create single-payer healthcare systems if they choose to. If this change to the bill makes news, it will pass the Senate, because there is no legitimate argument against it, and the support for it is bipartisan. 

Continue reading PA 4th CD Congressman Jason Altmire Votes to Deny Pennsylvania the Right to Establish a Statewide Single Payer Healthcare System →

Economy

Glenn Greenwald on Goldman Sachs “Blowout Profits”

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Monday July 13, 2009 06:14 EDT
from Salon.com

The events preceding Goldman Sachs’ new “blowout profits”

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/13/goldman/index.html

Remember all of this — the $700 billion bank bailout, the AIG scandal, dark and scary threats of imminent global meltdown if there wasn’t full-scale capitulation by the citizenry to the immense transfer of public wealth to the private investment banking sector?  Such distant, hazy memories:  so many exciting celebrity deaths and riveting celebrity resignations ago.  If sequences of events like these don’t cause mass citizen outrage, then it’s hard to imagine what will:

Continue reading Glenn Greenwald on Goldman Sachs “Blowout Profits” →

elections, health care

PA 12th CD Congressman John Murtha Endorses HR 676 – the National Healthcare Act

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Labor Delegation Persuades Cong. John Murtha To Co-Sponsor HR 676

Johnstown, Pennsylvania.   After meeting with western Pennsylvania labor leaders on June 29,  Representative John Murtha agreed to sign on as a co-sponsor of HR 676, national single payer health care legislation introduced by Congressman John Conyers (D-MI).  Eighty-five House members, in addition to Conyers, now have their names on HR 676.

Murtha, who has represented Pennsylvania’s 12th CD since 1974, is the eighth most senior member of the House of Representatives, and chairs the Defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. He joins PA 14th CD Congressman Mike Doyle as the second co-sponsor of HR 676 from western Pennsylvania.

Those who met with Murtha came from the Greater Westmoreland County Labor Council in Greensburg and the Johnstown Regional Central Labor Council.  The group included Ed Grystar, Harriet Ellenberger and Rosemary Trump, all Executive Board members of the Westmoreland Council, and Terry Havener of the Johnstown Council.  Also in the delegation was Father Bernard Survil, a Catholic priest active in labor affairs.

Ed Grystar said, after learning that Murtha has signed on as a co-sponsor, “The fact that Murtha, from a relatively conservative middle of the road district, signed on as a co-sponsor signifies that the grass roots movement for single payer is growing and opportunities exist to get others from similar districts to sign on.”

In addition to Murtha, Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) also signed on to HR 676 on July 9.  Weiner is a member of the Energy & Commerce Committee which is one of three committees writing the House bill.

health care

CMD’s Wendell Potter Featured on Bill Moyers Journal, Friday, July 10th

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The Center for Media and Democracy’s Wendell Potter will be interviewed on the PBS TV program Bill Moyers Journal this Friday, July 10th, at 9PM Eastern time. (For exact times in your area check online).

Wendell Potter, CMD’s Senior Fellow on Health Care, spent more than 20 years as a public relations executive for two large health insurers – Cigna and Humana – but left the industry after witnessing practices he felt harmed American health care consumers. In his own words:

“I am speaking out about how big for-profit insurers have hijacked our health care system and turned it into a giant ATM for Wall Street investors, and how the industry is using its massive wealth and influence to determine what is (and is not) included in the health care reform legislation members of Congress are now writing. I was in a unique position to see not only how Wall Street analysts and investors influence decisions insurance company executives make but also how the industry has carried out behind-the-scenes PR and lobbying campaigns to kill or weaken any health care reform efforts that threatened insurers’ profitability.”

Wendell first went public as an advocate for health care reform as the lead witness at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on June 24th. Since then he has been much in the news media. His TV interview with Bill Moyers will be his first extensive television interview in his new role as journalist and analyst on health care issues for CMD.

health care

Dr. David Himmelstein & Dr. Steffie Woolhandler of PNHP Discuss the “Public Option” and Health Policy

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Should Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) support a public Medicare-like option in a market of private plans?

 

PNHP should tell the truth: The “public plan option” won’t work to fix the health care system for two reasons:

1. It foregoes at least 84% of the administrative savings available through single payer. The public plan option would do nothing to streamline the administrative tasks (and costs) of hospitals, physicians offices, and nursing homes. They would still contend with multiple payers, and hence still need the complex cost tracking and billing apparatus that drives administrative costs. These unnecessary provider administrative costs account for the vast majority of bureaucratic waste. Hence, even if 95% of Americans who are currently privately insured were to join a public plan (and it had overhead costs at current Medicare levels), the savings on insurance overhead would amount to only 16% of the roughly $400 billion annually achievable through single payer.

 

2. A quarter century of experience with public/private competition in the Medicare program demonstrates that the private plans will not allow a level playing field. Despite strict regulation, private insurers have successfully cherry picked healthier seniors, and have exploited regional health spending differences to their advantage. They have progressively undermined the public plan – which started as the single payer for seniors and has now become a funding mechanism for HMOs, and a place for them to dump the unprofitably ill. A public plan option does not lead toward single payer, but toward the segregation of patients; with profitable ones in private plans and unprofitable ones in the public plan.

 

Would a public plan option stabilize the health care system, or even be a major step forward?

 

The evidence is strong that such reform would have at best a modest and temporary positive impact
– a view that is widely shared within PNHP. Indeed, we remain concerned that a public plan option as an element of reform might well be shaped in a manner to effectively subsidize private insurers by requiring patients to purchase coverage while relieving private insurance of the highest risk individuals, stabilizing private insurers for some time and reinforcing their control of the health care system.

 

Given the above, is it advisable to spend significant effort advocating for inclusion of such reform?

 

1. We are doctors, not politicians. We are obligated to tell the truth, and must answer for the veracity of our stance to our patients and colleagues over many years. Ours is a very different time horizon and set of responsibilities than politicians’. Falling in line with a consensus that attempts to mislead the public may gain us a seat at the debate table, but abdicates our ethical obligations.

2. The best way to gain a half a pie is to demand the whole thing.

 

Is fundamental reform possible?  
We remain optimistic that real reform is quite possible, but only if we and our many allies continue to insist on it.