Guaranteed Healthcare

As the debate over health care reform becomes all-out warfare between parties and within the Democratic party, Congress will adjourn shortly for its August recess with many of the key questions unresolved.  However, the bill as shaped by two or three House committees (H. R. 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act) gives a point of departure to consider the most that we might expect out of such a bill.

Together with an individual mandate described in the last post, an employer mandate is an essential part of all legislative health care reform proposals now being considered in Congress. The House bill requires employers with payrolls larger than $250,000 to contribute 72.5 percent of health insurance premium costs for full-time employees and 65 percent for families. The current Senate proposal calls for employers to pay at least 60 percent of premium costs for their full-time employees. Employers with annual payrolls of more than $400,000 would be penalized for non-compliance by paying a payroll tax up to 8 percent of wages (House bill) or $750 for each full-time worker and $375 for each part-time worker (Senate bill).

We’ve been here before. With much fanfare, health insurance mandates were enacted by Massachusetts in 2006 and touted by many as an effective model to reform health care. After three years’ experience, here is what the “Massachusetts Miracle” tells us about mandates and their costs.

As July starts to wind down and the August recess by Congress fast approaches, the debate over health care reform enters a late stage with increasingly bitter partisan differences over very divisive issues. Every day we hear about more Democrats siding with the Republicans, especially the Blue Dogs worrying about the high costs of plans on the table. Senate leaders are threatening that higher taxes and the public option will be deal-breakers. With President Obama pressing both parties for an early resolution of their differences, the hope for a bipartisan bill this year is rapidly fading. Each day brings new terms into the debate, ranging from triggers to exchanges and coops, without enough details or track record to gain our confidence that any real reform is on track.

Corporate America has highjacked the health care debate and threatens to make real health care reform impossible. Since corporate dollars trump individual votes, we have a corpocracy, not a democracy.

Now that we have a new president espousing health care reform and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, isn’t this a time to be excited and optimistic for long-overdue reform?  Much as we would like to say “Of course!”, we cannot.  The “reform” effort is already way off the track, despite the hype of “progress” in the uncritical mainstream media.

CNA/NNOC has been hot on the trail of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) executives for a long time.  Since we marched in San Francisco on June 19th, 2008, with thousands, to the front of the Capital Hilton in our hazmat suits in Washington, DC, in late September 2008, to the cold winds of Chicago and that Magnificent Mile march to the AHIP meeting there in November 2008, we have taken the message forward:  We want healthcare not for-profit health insurance for everyone in this nation.

And watch this video to see newly elected Congressman Eric Massa of New York, tell the story once again, today - March 10th, 2009, in front of the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Georgetown, where AHIP heard us yet again.

By Donna Smith, community organizer

WASHINGTON, DC -- Sometimes the pictures just tell the story without too many words.

I arrived in Washington this afternoon, and as I walked to baggage claim I saw a line of limo drivers anxiously awaiting their very special passengers.  Each of the drivers held a sign with the sponsoring company -- in this case the Bayer folks -- and each had the name of one of the folks coming in to spend some time in DC at a conference like the one being hosted by AHIP -- the American Health Insurance Plans industry group. They'll all be sharing a little lobbying time together.  Limos, fine wine, great food and a fabulous setting... what's not to like about that?

As I snapped my picture, I became even more confident in the need for some massive cleaning up of the healthcare system that has enough profit bloat in it to afford limos for some at the same time it denies life-saving care for others.  Tonight in America, at least 75 families mourned the death of a loved one who might have been saved if they'd had access to healthcare while those lucky folks who were picked up in the limos this afternoon were treated to a bit of the fine life in our nation's capital.

Well, tomorrow, I am hoping to join a group of people calling for a clean-up of this mess. 

"One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small," so begins the verse from Jefferson Starship's classic song, White Rabbit.  "And the one that AHIP's selling, won't do anything at all."

O.K., so that's not the way the verse really goes, but my subject, healthcare reform and the placebo politics that surround it is enough to make me mad as a hatter. Actually, it's made a lot of us angry, and we're getting organized for the fight of our lives. Our success and our ability to achieve true healthcare reform has everything to do with perception, placebos, and a good dose of myth-busting reality. 

When it comes to health care reform, any politician that welcomes insurers to the table as invited guests and expects them to behave like polite company, will be sadly, even tragically disappointed. Like the oysters in Lewis Caroll's classic, The Walrus and the Carpenter, we must be especially wary when the insurance industry repackages and markets itself as a solution to the health care crisis. "Now if you're ready, oysters dear, we can begin to feed."    

America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), are doing just that; they're gluttonously greedy and they're pandering for an invitation to 'fix' the crisis they created. Skyrocketing costs; marginal, reduced, detrimental-to-our-health 'benefits'; recissions, denials, exclusions, and huge profiteering by insurers has eroded and eaten away at our collective health like a cancer.  There can be no doubt about it. In medicine we have a term for that, pathognomic: distinctively characteristic of a particular disease or condition.  For example, lesions in the brain which are pathognomic of a cancerous glioma.

"So, what is that tumor or neoplasm thing in my head, nurse?" Senator Edward Kennedy might have asked that question of his trusted nurse, after his venerable doctors left the room. The short answer might have included a definition and an analogy to aid in the patient's understanding. "A neoplasm is best described as a new, uncontrolled growth of tissue that's serving no useful physiologic function.  It's crowding out healthy tissue and it's very greedy.  It doesn't share or play fair with the oxygen, nutrients, and the blood vessels that supply them.  That's why you're sick."  Like for-profit health insurers who serve no useful function in health care, they're shortening our lives and we're dying because of them.

The two major party candidates for President of the United States have extended that "invitation" anyway. It's party-convention time, and we the people are seated at the table. It's time to shed our naivete.  AHIP is not unlike the fabled Walrus and Carpenter; they're waltzing in with their buckets of campaign cash, profits they took at our expense. They're hoping we won't recognize them for who they are and they're hoping to control the party's platform. They're hoping to keep control of a system that works for them, and they're hoping that Harry, Louise, and the rest of us believe their  love affair with our premium dollars will be enough to sustain a long term relationship that's been in their best interest, not ours.  "It seems a shame, the walrus said, to play them such a trick." In reality, AHIP has no shame.  A bandaid for your cancer, Senator? Salmonella on your salad, anyone?

In an ocean of sobering reports on the collapse of the U.S. healthcare system, this just released report from The  Center for Studying Health System Change, is among the most horrifying I've seen.

Falling Behind: Americans' Access to Medical Care Deteriorates, 2003-2007

The number and proportion of Americans reporting going without or delaying needed medical care increased sharply between 2003 and 2007, according to findings from the Center for Studying Health System Change’s (HSC) nationally representative 2007 Health Tracking Household Survey. One in five Americans—59 million people—reported not getting or delaying needed medical care in 2007, up from one in seven—36 million people—in 2003. <u>While access deteriorated for both insured and uninsured people, insured people experienced a larger relative increase in access problems compared with uninsured people.