Guaranteed Healthcare

The idea of a Medicare for All type, single-payer healthcare system will be heard on the Senate floor.  Late last evening, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont filed Senate Amendment No. 2837, and there are two additional original co-sponsors of this amendment, Senator Roland Burris of Illinois and Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

I am an official (dare I say, proud?) member of Casualty of the Day.

I received my health insurance premium renewal  extortion notice.  They've hit me with an 18.5% increase.

My current monthly premium is $629.83 per month, the renewal notice is $746.30. This represents right around an 18-18.5% increase. They expect me to pay $8955.60 a year for junk insurance.

What makes this assault so deadly, is that we are in the midst of a huge recession, wages are declining, people are losing their jobs and of course, their employer-provided health insurance.

I have a vision though. Armies of desperately sick Americans descending on Congressional offices and emergency rooms across America, pleading for medical care. We are heading over a financial cliff and into a healthcare Armageddon. This is not hyperbole, it is reality.

"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?

I am adding my voice to the thousands who are joining the protest today against the immoral and profit driven insurance companies who are making obscene amounts of money substituting "health coverage" for health care. We all have friends, neighbors and even family members who have horror stories to tell about being denied the help they thought they were paying for. You can read many of these stories on these pages.

The New York Times is reporting that in a major reversal, the SEC "has told companies they must allow shareholders to vote on a proposal for universal health insurance coverage."

This is huge. I make no claim to be an expert on the SEC or corporate proxy statements, but my power of intuition is  intact, and this strikes me as a transformative event.

Over the years, the commission said, it had reversed its position on certain issues to reflect "changing societal views," and that now appears to be the case with respect to health care.

http://www.nytimes.com/...

One more irony about the healthcare crisis: the politicians in charge of fixing it…are guaranteed healthcare through a system that is not just “single-payer” (in terms of being financed by the government instead of insurance companies), but beyond is actually government-run.

Nurses are running ads today in 10 Iowa newspapers pointing out that this means that Dick Cheney, with his heart trouble, would probably be dead now if he were an ordinary American forced to search for cardiac care in a thicket of mercenary insurers and heartless HMOs.  Cheney gets guaranteed healthcare; we get squat.

See the Cheney Ad in PDF here

We’ll take a look below, also at some recent highlights from the healthcare movement…