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Topic: An industry that causes half of all bankruptcies. (Read 798 times) |
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Blunderov
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An industry that causes half of all bankruptcies.
« on: 2009-08-25 01:34:36 » |
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http://www.opednews.com/articles/This-Isn-t-Reform-It-s-Ro-by-Chris-Hedges-090824-314.html
This Isn't Reform, It's Robbery
by Chris Hedges Page 1 of 1 page(s)
www.opednews.com
Percentage change since 2002 in average premiums paid to large US health-insurance companies: +87%
Percentage change in the profits of the top ten insurance companies: +428%
Chances that an American bankrupted by medical bills has health insurance: 7 in 10
Capitalists, as my friend Father Michael Doyle says, should never be allowed near a health care system. They hold sick children hostage as they force parents to bankrupt themselves in the desperate scramble to pay for medical care. The sick do not have a choice. Medical care is not a consumable good. We can choose to buy a used car or a new car, shop at a boutique or a thrift store, but there is no choice between illness and health. And any debate about health care must acknowledge that the for-profit health care industry is the problem and must be destroyed. This is an industry that hires doctors and analysts to deny care to patients in order to increase profits. It is an industry that causes half of all bankruptcies. And the 20,000 Americans who died last year because they did not receive adequate care condemn these corporations as complicit in murder.
The current health care debate in Congress has nothing to do with death panels or public options or socialized medicine. The real debate, the only one that counts, is how much money our blood-sucking insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health services are going to be able to siphon off from new health care legislation. The proposed plans rattling around Congress all ensure that the profits for these corporations will increase and the misery for ordinary Americans will be compounded. The corporate state, enabled by both Democrats and Republicans, is yet again cannibalizing the Treasury. It is yet again pushing Americans, especially the poor and the working class, into levels of despair and rage that will continue to fuel the violent, proto-fascist movements leaping up around the edges of American society. And the traditional watchdogs—those in public office, the press and citizens groups—are as useless as the perfumed fops of another era who busied their days with court intrigue at Versailles. Canada never looked so good.
The Democrats are collaborating with lobbyists for the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and for-profit health care providers to craft the current health care reform legislation. “Corporate and industry players are inside the tent this time,” says David Merritt, project director at Newt Gingrich's Center for Health Transformation, “so there is a vacuum on the outside.” And these lobbyists have already killed a viable public option and made sure nothing in the bills will impede their growing profits and capacity for abuse.
“It will basically be a government law that says you have to buy their defective product,” says Dr. David Himmelstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a founder of Physicians for a National Health Plan. “Next the government will tell us a Pinto in every garage, a lead-coated toy to every child and melamine-laced puppy chow for every dog.”
“Health insurance is not a race to the top; it is a race to the bottom,” he told me from Cambridge, Mass. “The way you make money is by abusing people. And if a public-option plan is not ready and willing to abuse patients it is stuck with the expensive patients. The premiums will go up until it is noncompetitive. The conditions that have now been set for the plans include a hobbled public option. Under the best-case scenario there will be tens of millions [who] will remain uninsured at the outset, and the number will climb as more and more people are priced out of the insurance market.”
The inclusion of these corporations in the crafting of health care legislation has not stopped figures like Rick Scott, the former head of the Columbia/HCA health care company, from attempting to sabotage any plan. Scott's company was forced to pay a $1.7 billion fraud settlement—the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history—for stealing hundreds of millions from taxpayers by overbilling for medical care. Scott, who made his money primarily from Medicare, is now saturating the airwaves in a reputed $20 million ad campaign that is stoking the anger and fear of many Americans. His ads are coordinated by CRC Public Relations, the group that masterminded the “Swift boat” attacks against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
“They are using our money to campaign against us,” Dr. Himmelstein told me. “The money for these commercials came from health care interests that collect fees from American patients. We experienced this before in Massachusetts. We ran a ballot initiative for universal health care in 2000 and the insurance industry spent $5 million on it, including the insurance company I am insured by. They used my premiums to smear an idea that 70 percent in Massachusetts, according to polls, favored before this smear campaign. Universal health care was narrowly defeated.”
The bills now in Congress will, at best, impose on the country the failed model in Massachusetts. That model will demand that Americans buy health insurance from private insurers. There will be some subsidies for the very poor but not for anyone above a modest income. Insurers will be allowed to continue to jack up premiums, including for the elderly. The bankruptcies due to medical bills and swelling premiums will mount along with rising deductibles and co-payments. Health care will be beyond the reach of many families. In Massachusetts one in six people who have mandated insurance still say they cannot afford care, and 30,000 people were evicted from the state program this month because of budget cuts. Expect the same debacle nationwide.
“For someone my age who is making $40,000 a year you are required to lay out $5,000 for an insurance premium for coverage that covers nothing until you have spent $2,000 out of pocket,” Himmelstein said. “You are $7,000 out of pocket before you have any coverage at all. For most people that means you are already bankrupt before you have insurance. If anything, that has made them worse off. Instead of having that $5,000 to cover some of their medical expenses they have laid it out in premiums.”
The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care—$7,129 per capita—although 45.7 million Americans remain without health coverage and millions more are inadequately covered. There are 14,000 Americans a day now losing their health coverage. A report in the journal Health Affairs estimates that, if the system is left unchanged, one of every five dollars spent by Americans in 2017 will go to health coverage. Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third, 31 percent, of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough, Physicians for a National Health Plan points out, to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans. But the proposed America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 (H.R. 3200 in the House) will, rather than cut costs, add an estimated $239 billion over 10 years to the federal deficit. This is very good for the corporations. It is very bad for us.
The lobbyists have, as they did with the obscene bailouts for banks and investment firms, hijacked legislation in order to fleece the citizen. The five largest private health insurers and their trade group, America's Health Insurance Plans, spent more than $6 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Pfizer, the world's biggest drug maker, spent more than $9 million during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three months of this year. The Washington Post reported that up to 30 members of Congress from both parties who hold key committee memberships have major investments in health care companies totaling between $11 million and $27 million. President Barack Obama's director of health care policy, who will not discuss single-payer as an option, has served on the boards of several health care corporations.
Obama and the congressional leadership have shut out advocates of single-payer. The press, including papers such as The New York Times, treats single-payer as a fringe movement. The television networks rarely mention it. And yet between 45 and 60 percent of doctors favor single-payer. Between 40 and 62 percent of the American people, including 80 percent of registered Democrats, want universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans. The ability of the corporations to discredit and silence voices that represent at least half of the population is another sad testament to the power of our corporate state.
“We are considering a variety of striking efforts for early in the fall,” Dr. Himmelstein said, “including protests outside state capitals by doctors around the country, video links of conferences in 70 or 80 cities around the country, with protests and potential doctors chaining themselves to the fence of the White House.”
Make sure you join them.
Chris Hedges, currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America
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Hermit
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Re:An industry that causes half of all bankruptcies.
« Reply #1 on: 2009-08-25 07:19:42 » |
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Superb article saying what we have for years. Makes perfect sense. Read it.
Blunderov, this one deserves an "!" message Icon.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:An industry that causes half of all bankruptcies.
« Reply #2 on: 2009-09-12 22:09:36 » |
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Superb article and calculator from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
http://www.cepr.net/calculators/hc/hc-calculator.html
Play around with it. The divergent graphs show the "Baseline" (yellow line based on data from the Congressional Budget Office), what will happen to the deficit if trends in US medical costs are not altered while everything else remains equal, and alternative scenarios (blue lines) based on costs from other countries with longer lifespans than the USA.
The list of countries, rich (Japan, Switzerland), poor (Costa Rica, Chile, Portugal) and even dependent on charity from the USA (Israel) to provide universal healthcare is also interesting. Note that all the countries have "socialized medicine", all have longer lifespans than the US and, not having rapacious insurance companies, not spending 50% of their medical budget on administration, and having mixed (public-private) medical suppliers, all spend very much less than the USA on healthcare.
Ranked Alphabetically
80.8 Australia
79.4 Austria
79.5 Belgium
80.2 Canada
78.2 Chile
78.5 Costa Rica
79.3 Cyprus
77.8 Denmark
79.7 Euro area
78.8 Finland
80.2 France
78.9 Germany
79.0 Greece
78.9 High income
79.2 High income: OECD
81.1 Iceland
79.4 Ireland
79.7 Israel
80.3 Italy
82.1 Japan
78.4 Korea, Rep.
79.2 Luxembourg
79.5 Malta
79.3 Netherlands
79.7 New Zealand
80.0 Norway
78.1 Portugal
79.7 Singapore
80.6 Spain
80.5 Sweden
81.2 Switzerland
79.2 United Arab Emirates
78.9 United Kingdom
77.7 United States
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:An industry that causes half of all bankruptcies.
« Reply #3 on: 2009-09-17 13:38:34 » |
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[Blunderov] Predatory corporations which have an obviously fundamental conflict of interest with the citizenry are in heavy competition with each other for their prey. Us.
democraticunderground
Insurance Company MUST PAY 10 MILLION Dollars For REVOKING Policy Of Teen With HIV
Thu Sep-17-09 11:45 AM
Source: HuffingtonPost
The South Carolina Supreme Court has ordered an insurance company to pay $10 million for wrongly revoking the insurance policy of a 17-year-old college student after he tested positive for HIV. The court called the 2002 decision by the insurance company "reprehensible."
That's the most an insurance company has ever been ordered to pay in a case involving the practice known as rescission, in which insurance companies retroactively cancel coverage for policyholders based on alleged misstatements - sometimes right after diagnoses of life-threatening diseases.
An investigation this summer by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and earlier ones by state regulators in California, New York and Connecticut, found that thousands of vulnerable and seriously ill policyholders have had their coverage canceled by many of the nation's largest insurance companies without any legal basis. The congressional committee found that three insurance companies alone made at least $300 million over five years from rescission. One of those three companies was Assurant.
In Febuary 2008, a private arbitration judge in Los Angeles ordered Health Net Inc. to pay more than $9 million to a breast cancer patient whose health insurance it revoked shortly after her diagnosis and while she was undergoing chemotherapy. The plaintiff in that case, Patsy Bates, a then-52-year-old grandmother and hair-salon owner, was unable to continue her chemotherapy for several months. During the case, evidence emerged that Health Net had paid bonuses to employees to reward them based on the number of policyholders they had rescinded. The judge who awarded Bates the $9 million said in his decision: "It's difficult to imagine a policy more reprehensible than tying bonuses to encourage the rescission of health insurance that keeps the public well and alive."
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/17/insurance-comp...
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Hermit
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Re:An industry that causes half of all bankruptcies.
« Reply #4 on: 2009-10-30 04:23:33 » |
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Health care: Most wouldn't have public option
[ Hermit : It seems that Americans do not understand insurance at all. For the user, the cheapest insurance is that which spreads the risks most broadly, minimizes costs and eliminates the need to pay shareholders a profit. The opposite of American practice. Which probably explains why the single-payer, card based, publicly funded French system provides the highest quality of health care at one of the lowest costs, and why all the "socialist" systems, including those of the, often maligned in the public discussion, British and Canadian systems, are still vastly better and far cheaper than what passes for healthcare in the United States. Many Americans do seem to understand this at some level, recent surveys show that 76% of the public think that a "public option" is needed. If they comprehended a little more, they would understand why they cannot afford that it be optional. Personally I think that until every American has access to exactly the same system as enjoyed by the politicians that the politicians are simply shuffling deckchairs while they wait for Armageddon. I really hope that we see at least one more voting cycle before we are eliminated so that those who voted for Democrats in 2008, can look very hard at the medical disaster being assembled here, the ongoing erosion of guaranteed rights and privacy, the collapsing global social and economic structure and the ever expanding wars and maybe make different choices based on conscience rather than pragmatism, when next polling stations open. ]
Source: SF Chronicle
Authors: Carolyn Lochhead
Dated: 2009-10-29
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's gambit to include a government-run insurance option in health care legislation has given a fresh tailwind to the idea despite opposition from conservatives.
But lost amid the ideological battle for or against a public option is a key overlooked fact: The vast majority of Americans would have no access to a public option even under its most expansive versions.
House and Senate bills limit the option to the smallest businesses and to individuals who cannot get insurance, or whose health care costs exceed 12.5 percent of their income. Even seven years into an overhaul, an estimated 90 percent of Americans, including nearly everyone who has employer-based coverage now, would be shut out of a public option.
Those currently in other government programs, such as Medicare and the Veterans Administration, also would be excluded.
The public option under all bills would be offered through insurance exchanges, a Web-based market for health plans. But most people who are unhappy with the insurance they have now would be locked out of these exchanges, leaving many Americans who are watching the debate in for a big surprise.
Only a handful of senators, such as Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Mary Landrieu, D-La., have focused on widening the exchanges where a public option might be available. Wyden wants everyone who now has employer-based coverage to have access to the exchange if they don't like their insurance companies, but his efforts have been lost amid the narrower fixation on the public option itself.
"When you ask people in a poll, 'Are you in favor of a public option that would be available to everybody,' they say, 'Yes,' " Wyden said. "I don't think they're going to feel the same way about a public option available to only 10 percent of the population."
Wyden, an iconoclastic liberal, questioned the basic assumption by his fellow Democrats that such a limited public option will provide adequate competition to private insurers.
"People are going to want choices, public choices and private choices, available to everybody, because that's how you're going to hold the insurance companies accountable," he said. "You can't expect that having 10 percent of the American people getting the public option will force major changes with the other 90 percent who aren't subjected to choices, public or private."
He pointed to another surprise that awaits the public: Even those who would have access to a public option may not be able to afford it.
Citing estimates that a family of four earning $66,000 could pay an estimated 19 percent of its income on health care under some bill versions, Wyden said, "I can tell you, Americans are not going to consider 19 percent of their income affordable coverage."
Many health care experts agree. "I'm afraid rude surprises could be around a lot of different corners in this debate," said Marian Mulkey, senior program officer for the California Health Care Foundation, an independent philanthropy group based in Oakland.
Mulkey said the public option has been "dominating the discussion to an extreme extent" and that its importance as a principle to liberals and conservatives may outweigh its actual effect, at least in the short run.
A public program might face the difficulties private insurers have in holding down costs. "It's not entirely clear that just because it's a public program, it will be able to negotiate lower payments to providers or somehow develop more efficient benefits in a way that will yield a more affordable plan," she said.
Health care consultant Robert Laszewski, head of Health Policy and Strategy Associates in Washington, said that even if a public option is 25 percent cheaper than a private plan, which averages $13,000 a year for a family of four, it still will cost $10,000 a year.
Under subsidies in the House bill, a family earning $55,000 would pay the first $5,500 of any premium, public or private, he said.
"How many families earning $55,000 a year do you know that have an extra $5,000 in their checking account?" he asked.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a big advocate of the public option, acknowledged that most people won't have access to it. The exchanges were kept very narrow, he said, because of the way the Congressional Budget Office analyzes budget costs.
"We have to live with CBO's numbers and that creates some constraints," Whitehouse said. "I hope that quickly the public option will begin to demonstrate that those concerns were not justified and those constraints can be lifted and we can extend the option to everybody, because that's what makes sense."
Ironically, the power of the exchanges to dismantle the current system of employer-based health care, which many economists cite as the root source of exploding costs, could raise budget costs if more people move onto the exchanges and possibly into a public option.
But whatever effect a public option may have on the government's costs, there is little disagreement that giving individuals more choices - public or private - through the exchanges would inject powerful competitive forces into the system that could lower costs for everyone.
House to reveal overhaul today
After months of tense negotiations and setbacks, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, will unveil a sweeping health care overhaul plan today, with a vote possible in the House as early as next week.
Pelosi is in an all-out push to move the legislation, which will have a government-sponsored insurance plan available to some people but not the "robust" version tied to Medicare rates that Pelosi and liberals favored.
Instead, it will have rates negotiated by the secretary of Health and Human Services, as swing-state "Blue Dog" Democrats preferred. Leaders are also working furiously to assure moderate Democrats that no public funds would be used for abortion.
House and Senate leaders have cleared the calendar for a possible weekend session Nov. 7 and another possible House session just before Thanksgiving, and canceled a planned Veterans Day break.
House Democrats said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's move to include a public option in the Senate bill Monday made it easier for moderate House Democrats to vote for a public option. [ Hermit : But as we see here, like most of what the Democrats have not accomplished so far into their absolute majority, it is largely window dressing. ]
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:An industry that causes half of all bankruptcies.
« Reply #5 on: 2009-11-06 20:45:19 » |
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Unhealthy America
Source: New York Times
Authors: Nicholas D. Kristof
Dated: 2009-11-04
The moment of truth for health care is at hand, and the distortion that perhaps gets the most traction is this:
We have the greatest health care system in the world. Sure, it has flaws, but it saves lives in ways that other countries can only dream of. Abroad, people sit on waiting lists for months, so why should we squander billions of dollars to mess with a system that is the envy of the world? As Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama puts it, President Obama’s plans amount to “the first step in destroying the best health care system the world has ever known.”
That self-aggrandizing delusion may be the single greatest myth in the health care debate. In fact, America’s health care system is worse than Slov—er, oops, more on that later.
The United States ranks 31st in life expectancy (tied with Kuwait and Chile), according to the latest World Health Organization figures. We rank 37th in infant mortality (partly because of many premature births) and 34th in maternal mortality. A child in the United States is two-and-a-half times as likely to die by age 5 as in Singapore or Sweden, and an Americanwoman is 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Ireland.
Canadians live longer than Americans do after kidney transplants and after dialysis, and that may be typical of cross-border differences. One review examined 10 studies of how the American and Canadian systems dealt with various medical issues. The United States did better in two, Canada did better in five and in three they were similar or it was difficult to determine.
Yet another study, cited in a recent report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute, looked at how well 19 developed countries succeeded in avoiding “preventable deaths,” such as those where a disease could be cured or forestalled. What Senator Shelby called “the best health care system” ranked in last place.
The figures are even worse for members of minority groups. An African-American in New Orleans has a shorter life expectancy than the average person in Vietnam or Honduras.
I regularly receive heartbreaking e-mails from readers simultaneously combating the predations of disease and insurers. One correspondent, Linda, told me how she had been diagnosed earlier this year with abdominal and bladder cancer — leading to battles with her insurance company.
“I will never forget standing outside the chemo treatment room knowing that the medication needed to save my life was only a few feet away, but that because I had private insurance it wasn’t available to me,” Linda wrote. “I read a comment from someone saying that they didn’t want a faceless government bureaucrat deciding if they would or would not get treatment. Well, a faceless bureaucrat from my private insurance made the decision that I wouldn’t get treatment and that I wasn’t worth saving.”
It’s true that Americans have shorter waits to see medical specialists than in most countries, although waits in Germany are shorter than in the United States. But citizens of other countries get longer hospital stays and more medication than Americans do because our insurance companies evict people from hospitals as soon as they can stagger out of bed.
For example, in the United States, 90 percent of hernia surgery is performed on an outpatient basis. In Britain, only 40 percent is, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute.
Likewise, Americans take 10 percent fewer drugs than citizens in other countries — but pay 118 percent more per pill that they do take, McKinsey said.
Opponents of reform assert that the wretched statistics in the United States are simply a consequence of unhealthy lifestyles and a diverse population with pockets of poverty. It’s true that America suffers more from obesity than other countries. But McKinsey found that over all, the disease burden in Europe is higher than in the United States, probably because Americans smoke less and because the American population is younger.
Moreover, there is one American health statistic that is strikingly above average: life expectancy for Americans who have already reached the age of 65. At that point, they can expect to live longer than the average in industrialized countries. That’s because Americans above age 65 actually have universal health care coverage: Medicare. Suddenly, a diverse population with pockets of poverty is no longer such a drawback.
That brings me to an apology.
In several columns, I’ve noted indignantly that we have worse health statistics than Slovenia. For example, I noted that an American child is twice as likely to die in its first year as a Slovenian child. The tone — worse than Slovenia! — gravely offended Slovenians. They resent having their fine universal health coverage compared with the notoriously dysfunctional American system.
As far as I can tell, every Slovenian has written to me. Twice. So, to all you Slovenians, I apologize profusely for the invidious comparison of our health systems. Yet I still don’t see anything wrong with us Americans aspiring for health care every bit as good as yours.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:An industry that causes half of all bankruptcies.
« Reply #6 on: 2009-11-07 23:12:05 » |
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Health Reform Without a Public Plan: The German Model
Source: Economix
Authors: Uwe E. Reinhardt (Professor Economics, Princeton)
Dated: 2009-04-17
In the previous two posts, I sought to explain why the public health insurance plan that Barack Obama had firmly promised during the presidential campaign appears to have become a deal-breaker in President Obama’s quest to sign a genuinely bipartisan health reform bill later this year.
What if that plan were sacrificed on the altar of bipartisanship? Would it be the end of meaningful health reform?
Not necessarily, if the health systems of the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland are any guide.
None of these countries uses a government-run, Medicare-like health insurance plan. They all rely on purely private, nonprofit or for-profit insurers that are goaded by tight regulation to work toward socially desired ends. And they do so at average per-capita health-care costs far below those of the United States — costs in Germany and the Netherlands are less than half of those here.
To see how this can work, think of the basic functions that any health system must perform. To wit:
* 1. the financing of health care, that is, the extraction of the required funds from individuals and households who ultimately pay for 100 percent of all health care
* 2. the pooling of individual risks with the aim of protecting individuals and households from the high costs of medical care in case of illness
* 3. the purchasing of health care from its providers (doctors, hospitals, drug companies, etc.)
* 4. the production of health care goods and services
* 5. the regulation of the entire system so that it operates towards socially desired ends.
Who should perform these functions is powerfully driven by the distributive social ethic that nations wish to impose upon their health systems.
In Europe, as in Canada, that social ethic is based on the principle of social solidarity. It means that health care should be financed by individuals on the basis of their ability to pay, but should be available to all who need it on roughly equal terms. The regulations imposed on health care in these countries are rooted in this overarching principle.
First, these countries all mandate the individual to be insured for a basic package of health care benefits.
Many Americans oppose such a mandate as an infringement of their personal rights, all the while believing that they have a perfect right to highly expensive, critically needed health care, even when they cannot pay for it. This immature, asocial mentality is rare in the rest of the world. An insurance sector that must insure all comers at premiums that are not contingent on the insured’s health status — a feature President Obama has promised — cannot function for long if people can go without insurance when they are healthy, but are entitled to premiums unrelated to their health status when they fall ill.
Second, these nations try to tailor the individual’s contribution to the financing of health care closely to the individual’s ability to pay — almost perfectly so in Germany, albeit less perfectly in the other two countries.
In Germany, statutory health insurance, which covers 90 percent of the population, is financed by a payroll tax. The individual’s premium is not a per-capita levy, as it is in the United States. It is purely income-based. Ostensibly, about 45 percent of the premium is contributed by employers, although economists are persuaded that ultimately all of it comes out of the employee’s take-home pay (See this and this).
An employee’s non-working spouse is automatically covered by the employee’s premium.
Unemployment insurance pays the premiums for unemployed individuals, and pension funds share with the elderly in financing their premiums, which are set below actuarial costs for the elderly.
Finally, premiums for children are covered by government out of general revenues, on the theory that children are not the human analogue of pets whose health care should be their owners’ (parents’) fiscal responsibility. Instead, children are viewed as national treasures whose health care should be the entire nation’s fiscal responsibility.
The health insurance premiums paid by Germans are collected in a national, government-run central fund that effectively performs the risk-pooling function for the entire system. This fund redistributes the collected premiums to some 200 independent, nongovernmental, competing, nonprofit “sickness funds” among which Germans can choose.
For example, if individual A chooses sickness fund X, then the central fund will give to fund X a capitation payment that uses over 80 variables to identify individual A’s actuarial risk. The same payment would be made for this individual to any other fund.
Thus, the sickness funds in Germany only perform the third function mentioned above — acting as purchasing agents on behalf of the central fund and patients.
Space does not permit a detailed description of the Dutch and Swiss systems. But these countries, too, have married the financing and risk-pooling systems, which try to own up to the principle of social solidarity, with a delegation of the purchasing function to competing, private insurance carriers. In the Netherlands, the latter may be for profit or not for profit. In Switzerland, they are basically nonprofit, except for supplementary coverage for items not in the basic package.
All three countries offer their citizens reliable, portable health insurance based on the principle of social solidarity, but without a government-run health insurance plan like Medicare. The $64,000 question is whether America’s private health insurers would be willing to countenance the tight regulation required for that approach.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:An industry that causes half of all bankruptcies.
« Reply #7 on: 2009-11-15 00:49:05 » |
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Kucinich: Why I Voted NO
Kucinich is one of the very few Americans who "gets it". Of course, you didn't read his statement in the MSM
Source: Kucinich Website
Authors: Dennis Kucinich
Dated: 2009-11-07
After voting against H.R. 3962 - Affordable Health Care for America Act, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement:
“We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.
“Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.
“But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies — a bailout under a blue cross.
“By incurring only a new requirement to cover pre-existing conditions, a weakened public option, and a few other important but limited concessions, the health insurance companies are getting quite a deal. The Center for American Progress’ blog, Think Progress, states “since the President signaled that he is backing away from the public option, health insurance stocks have been on the rise.” Similarly, healthcare stocks rallied when Senator Max Baucus introduced a bill without a public option. Bloomberg reports that Curtis Lane, a prominent health industry investor, predicted a few weeks ago that “money will start flowing in again” to health insurance stocks after passage of the legislation. Investors.com last month reported that pharmacy benefit managers share prices are hitting all-time highs, with the only industry worry that the Administration would reverse its decision not to negotiate Medicare Part D drug prices, leaving in place a Bush Administration policy.
“During the debate, when the interests of insurance companies would have been effectively challenged, that challenge was turned back. The “robust public option” which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million. An amendment which would have protected the rights of states to pursue single-payer health care was stripped from the bill at the request of the Administration. Looking ahead, we cringe at the prospect of even greater favors for insurance companies.
“Recent rises in unemployment indicate a widening separation between the finance economy and the real economy. The finance economy considers the health of Wall Street, rising corporate profits, and banks’ hoarding of cash, much of it from taxpayers, as sign of an economic recovery. However in the real economy -- in which most Americans live -- the recession is not over. Rising unemployment, business failures, bankruptcies and foreclosures are still hammering Main Street.
“This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America’s manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care. America continues to stand out among all industrialized nations for its privatized health care system. As a result, we are less competitive in steel, automotive, aerospace and shipping while other countries subsidize their exports in these areas through socializing the cost of health care.
“Notwithstanding the fate of H.R. 3962, America will someday come to recognize the broad social and economic benefits of a not-for-profit, single-payer health care system, which is good for the American people and good for America’s businesses, with of course the notable exceptions being insurance and pharmaceuticals.”
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:An industry that causes half of all bankruptcies.
« Reply #8 on: 2009-11-15 08:27:19 » |
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An open letter to Harry Reid on healthcare costs
If we can't get costs under control, we've blown it
Source: Salon.com
Authors: Robert Reich
Dated: 2009-11-13
Dear Senator,
I know you're in a tough spot. It would be bad enough if you only had to get Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln on board, but anyone who has to kiss Joe Lieberman's derriere deserves a congressional medal of honor.
But Harry, you really need to take on future healthcare costs. The House bill fails to do this. The public option in the House bill is open only to people without employer-provided health insurance. That will be too small a number to have bargaining clout to get good deals from drug companies and medical providers. And it will mainly attract people who have more expensive medical needs, which is why the Congressional Budget Office decided it would cost more than it would save.
You also know a public insurance option that's open to everyone would cut future health costs dramatically by imposing real competition on private for-profit insurance plans. That's why the private insurers hate the idea. Even if states were allowed to opt out of this robust public option, the big states would almost certainly opt in, giving it the scale needed to negotiate great deals from drug companies and medical providers. This would put pressure on any state that opted out because its citizens would soon discover they're paying far more.
In addition to the House's weak public option, the deals the White House and Max Baucus made with the drug companies and the American Medical Association will force Americans to pay even more. If, on the other hand, Medicare were allowed to negotiate lower drug prices, biotech drugs weren't granted a 12-years monopoly, and doctors had to accept Medicare reimbursements in line with legislation enacted years ago, Americans would save billions.
You know all this but you're also trying to get 60 votes in order get any bill to the floor. You have my sympathies, but unless you get these reforms into the final Senate bill you're not really helping most Americans afford future healthcare.
So what do you do?
First, try for the "reconciliation" process, which requires only 51 votes. Every one of the reforms I mention above would fit under the Byrd rule.
If that doesn't work, wrap these reforms together -- a public option open to everyone (allow states to opt out of this if they dare), Medicare-negotiated drug benefits, no 12-year monopoly for new drugs, and a major squeeze on Medicare reimbursements for doctors -- and have CBO score the savings. I guarantee you, the number will be large. Then you should dare anyone, Democrat or Republican, to vote against saving Americans so much money in years ahead. How is Ben Nelson going to face voters in Nebraska who would have to pay, say, 20 percent more for healthcare in the future if Nelson refuses to go along?
If neither of these tactics work, then take whatever bill you must to the Senate floor. But then introduce this reform package as the very first amendment to the bill. Call it the "Ted Kennedy Amendment for Helping Middle Class Families Afford Healthcare," and whip the hell out of the Democrats. Get the president to help you. Surely Joe Biden will. If you can't get 51 votes out of Dems for this, publish the list of Dems who vote against it, strip them of their committee chairs or sub-chairs, and make sure the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee gives them zilch when they're up for reelection.
Nobody promised you this would be easy, Harry. But, hell, why are you there, anyway? Your responsibility isn't just to pass whatever will muster 60 votes and that the president and Dems can later call "healthcare reform." It's to do the right thing by the American people and bring down future healthcare costs. Don't cave in to Lieberman or Nelson or the drug companies or the private insurers or the AMA or anyone else. Lead the charge.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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