James Ginderske -- Candidate for 49th Ward Alderman

My friend Jim Ginderske, who was an active supporter of the Single Payer referendum here in Illinois, is running for 49th Ward Alderman against the incumbent Joe Moore. Anyone who wants real healthcare reform and lives in the ward should support Jim's candidacy. To read more about what he's done to improve healthcare in Rogers Park and what he'll do to address the neighborhood's status as a medically needy community, check out the James Ginderske 2007 website.

Sen. Feingold proposes legislation for pilot projects

Here is an article that outlines a new proposal from Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold. It basically is meant to encourage state governments to experiment with Universal Healthcare models. The positive aspect to it is that if a state wanted to implement a single payer system, there would be funding available to pursue that.

Feingold unveils health-care plan
BY FREDERIC J. FROMMER
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON - Sen. Russ Feingold said Monday he will push legislation that would set up pilot projects to help states provide universal health coverage, delving into an area that could help broaden his appeal as he contemplates a presidential run.

"The time has come to see if we can get across our ideological differences -- which are serious -- and to see if we can at least get off the dime with the idea of pilot projects," Feingold, D-Wis., said. "I thought it was time basically to break a logjam."

An estimated 46 million Americans lack health insurance.

Feingold plans to introduce the legislation in Congress later this week or early next week. He acknowledged it has no chance of passing this year but said he wants to have something ready for when a new Congress takes over next year.

Under Feingold's bill, the federal government would set up a program that would allow selected states to design their own health coverage plans. Feingold estimates the legislation would cost $32 billion over 10 years, and two or three states could participate, or groups of states could apply together.

Ann Marie Hauser, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, suggested Feingold instead join Republican leaders and "mainstream Democrats" on expanding health-care savings accounts.

Under Feingold's bill, a federal task force would select which state proposals to fund and oversee their implementation.

To pay for the program, Feingold calls for savings in other areas of government, including:

• Increasing the rebate that drug manufacturers pay to Medicaid, which would yield an estimated $8.3 billion over 10 years.

• Increasing the passenger security fee collected by airlines from $2.50 for nonstop travelers to $5, which President Bush has proposed for next year's budget. The plan estimates this would bring in $15.5 billion over 10 years.

• Extending customs and border fees, set to expire in 2014, for two years, which would bring in an estimated $6.25 billion.

Corporate hospitals: looking to profit from illness

This is a very interesting article that deals with corporate run hospitals and how they benefit from the current system dominated by private insurers. One interesting point it makes is that investors could be taking encouragement from the Massachusetts "universal healhcare" bill that funnels more people into private health plans. It also details a twisted system where profit is made by closing facilities and decreasing hospital stays -- regardless of the patients actual health needs. Of course, a single-payer system would be very bad for this system, and the prospect of the Massachusetts model of universal healthcare spreading in its place was very good news for those who invest in it.

Betting on a sick boom
By David Lazarus
San Franciso Chronicle

... "The Wall Street guys are betting that hospital utilization is going to go through the roof," said Sue Houck, a Boulder, Colo., health care consultant. "But their accountability will be less because they've gone private."

HCA operates 176 hospitals and almost 100 surgical centers in 21 states. In the Bay Area, it owns San Jose's Good Samaritan Hospital, Regional Medical Center of San Jose and Los Gatos Surgical Center.

"This deal augurs continued increases in health care prices, continued problems with access and continued frustration," Houck said. "It doesn't bode well for the consumer at all." ...

But health care experts say the only reason investors would funnel serious cash into hospitals is if they expect significant returns on their investment -- and that can only mean higher profits resulting from more medical spending, increased patient volume or both.

"Everyone in the industry is waiting for the Baby Boomers," said Paul Szklarski, chairman of the Health Industry Research Group, a New York consulting firm. "The presumption is that we're all going to be in the hospital soon.

"Probably not a bad bet," he added. ...

"If health insurance expands, this would be very positive for hospitals," Ginsburg observed.

It wouldn't address the underlying problems that cause health care costs to post double-digit increases year after year. But it would potentially allow millions of people now lacking coverage to seek medical treatment they might not otherwise pursue. ...

Transition to a single-payer system would almost certainly usher in a period of intense uncertainty for hospitals and other medical facilities as funding switches from private insurers to government coffers.

James Kahn, a professor of health policy at UCSF, said the buyout of HCA suggests that the money men behind the deal don't foresee a single-payer system being created in the United States anytime soon.

"I would assume that they're more comfortable with a future that's more like the present," he said.

That's what they're buying.

Still more details on SF universal healthcare plan

The San Francisco universal healthcare plan recently passed, catching the attention of local and state governments around the country who may try to model their own proposals on it. Here are some of the details of the plan written about in the Contra Costa Times:

All eyes on S.F.'s ambitious universal health care plan
By Sandy Kleffman
CONTRA COSTA TIMES

If it succeeds, other cities and counties may attempt a similar move toward universal health care. But it will not be easy to follow suit.

San Francisco has unique qualities that make it the perfect place to launch such an experiment, many say. ...

San Francisco is both a city and a county, which means it has just one set of leaders to grant approval for such a plan.

It also has a well-established primary care system, a sizable amount of health-care dollars it can redirect, and disproportionately fewer uninsured than many other areas. ...

The goal is to offer health care services to the 82,000 uninsured adults who earn too much to qualify for Medi-Cal, which serves the state's poorest residents.

The program would be open to everyone, regardless of immigration status, income or a pre-existing medical condition.

It differs from typical universal health care proposals in one key aspect: It would provide access to services, rather than insurance. ...

Under the new program, participants would receive preventive care and screening to help ward off chronic conditions or at least identify them early enough so they can be kept from getting worse.

Not only does this result in healthier people, but it also helps lower costs ...

Firms with 20 or more workers have to kick in $1.06 for each hour worked by an employee. Those with more than 100 workers will pay $1.60 per hour.

Companies that already provide health insurance to their employees will be exempt, as long as they spend at least as much as the mandatory contributions. ...

Participation would be optional for the uninsured. Those who do join will have a co-pay based on their income.

The co-pays would range from $3 per month for those at the lowest income levels to $200 per month for those at the highest. ...

Unions, corporations & the fight for universal healthcare

The following article appears at TomPaine.com. It references a Wall Street Journal piece written by Andy Stern from SEIU calling for corporate support for single payer. The article is short, but it makes a good point that not enough of the unions themselves are supporting single-payer as the answer to the healthcare crisis. And it's going to have to be Labor, not corporate execs, who lead on this issue.

Push For Universal Care
By Alexandra Walker

While the rest of the world was distracted by the powder keg in the Middle East, the Service Employees International Union's Andy Stern quietly fired an opening shot yesterday in the battle for universal health care.

The movement for universal health care is decades old, of course. But the battle to get corporate America to join it is just beginning. Writing yesterday in the Wall Street Journal , Stern declared the era of employee-based health care over, and made a direct appeal to U.S. business leaders to "make health care their national priority."

With balance sheet after balance sheet showing companies spending more on health care than any other expense, it's hard to believe corporate America isn't already bankrolling an advocacy group in Washington to push a government health insurance program. And yet just last week, the CEO of the company that is arguably most affected by health care costs—GM—arguing against government-run health care, in favor of cost-efficiency and consumer education. ...

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

That might be Hillary Clinton's motto regarding healthcare reform. The NY Times reports (see link below) that the very groups that attacked Clinton's attempt at universal healthcare back in th '90s are now filling her campaign coffers with donations. Or maybe her motto could be, "whatever it takes to get elected." She's got a pretty good track record for not sticking by her principles when there's an office to be won, that is if she even has any principles at this point. Let's hope that someone with a legitimate interest in universal healthcare and without the bias that health insurance and pharmaceutical dollars buy will be the Democratic nominee in 2008.

Clinton wins over health care industry
Contributions roll in as senator mends rocky start from '90s initiative
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ and ROBERT PEAR
New York Times

... As she runs for re-election to the Senate from New York this year and lays the groundwork for a possible presidential bid in 2008, Clinton is receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from doctors, hospitals, drug manufacturers and insurers.

Nationwide, she is the No. 2 recipient of donations from the industry, trailing only Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa.

Some of the same interests that tried to derail Clinton's health care overhaul are providing support for her Senate re-election bid. ...

Update on SF universal healthcare plan

Here is a link to a San Francisco Sentinel article that updates the status of the universal healthcare plan being proposed there and gives some more details as to how it would work:

Newsom and Ammiano unite on San Francisco universal health care

It doesn't state who will administer the healthcare coverages provided by the plan(s), but it's a pretty easy guess that it will be private insurance companies. The range of possible worker copays is huge ($3 to $201 monthly), which seems pretty steep on the high end. Maybe we should start emphasizing the point with these public officials that we need "affordable comprehensive" universal healthcare. They seem to be more concerned about arranging it so that everyone has health insurance, no matter how expensive or how bad the actual coverage is.

San Fran Universal Healthcare proposal

San Francisco's mayor proposed a universal healthcare system for the city. I haven't seen many details yet, but it's said to include a mixture of public and private coverages. One sticking point, as the article below discusses, is how to fund the proposal. One funding proposal involves getting businesses to cover some of the costs. I guess the business community isn't too fond of that. God forbid they have to contribute anything to the communities they get so much from.

Newsom-Ammiano Health Care Proposals Merged

The Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee voted unanimously yesterday to merge two proposals aimed at provided universal health care to San Franciscans. Mayor Gavin Newsom's proposal, which he co-wrote with a panel of experts and some Supervisors, contained the framework for the plan, but according to testimony from both the Budget Analyst and Public Health Director Mitch Katz, it lacked sufficient funding to work. Supervisor Tom Ammiano's proposal solves that problem by requiring businesses with more than 20 employees to cover part of the cost of their employee's health care. All eyes now turn to Newsom, who must choose between passing universal healthcare to win national acclaim or opposing the measure to satisfy the city's business community. ...

IL Representatives who have co-sponsored H.R. 676

Along with its original sponsor, John Conyers Jr (MI), 72 of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives have now signed on to The National Health Insurance Act (H.R. 676): "To provide for comprehensive health insurance coverage for all United States residents, and for other purposes." Six of these are from Illinois.

Rep Davis, Danny K. [IL-7] - 5/26/2005
Rep Evans, Lane [IL-17] - 6/7/2005
Rep Gutierrez, Luis V. [IL-4] - 5/18/2005
Rep Jackson, Jesse L., Jr. [IL-2] - 5/25/2005
Rep Rush, Bobby L. [IL-1] - 12/15/2005
Rep Schakowsky, Janice D. [IL-9] - 12/13/2005

If your representative is on the list, send them a note thanking them for their support. If they aren't, let them know why you think they should sign on.

Note: if you click on the names above, it will show you every bill that they've co-sponsored. It's a lot of info, but still pretty cool.

NPR story on healthcare in Tennessee

You can click the link below to listen and/or read a story that aired on NPR about the 200,000 residents of Tennessee who were dropped from the TennCare healthcare plan to solve the state's budget crisis. It documents some pretty sad stories about the hard choices people are forced to make when they lose their health insurance. People are forced to decide between food and medicine, can't seek treatment for chronic illnesses and rely on emergency care. It's an outrageous situation that's too typical these days.

Tennessee Health-Care Cuts Roil Poor Community
by Julie Rovner

A joke from a friend

American Health Care

Two patients limp into two different American Medical clinics with the same complaint. Both have trouble walking and appear to require a hip replacement.

The first patient is examined within the hour, is x-rayed the same day and has a time booked for surgery the following week.

The second sees the family doctor after waiting a week for an appointment, then waits eighteen weeks to see a specialist, then gets an x-ray, which isn't reviewed for another month and finally has his surgery scheduled for 6 months from then.

Why the different treatment for the two patients? The first is a Golden Retriever..... The second is a Senior Citizen.

Some good arguments for Single Payer

This article from the Asheville Citizen Times makes a good case for exploring Single Payer. The mainstream media seems to have gotten over its reluctance to talk about national health insurance as a viable alternative.

We can address our health care crisis, or we can outsource it

... Recent data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that compared health care spending in 30 industrialized nations put the annual average health bill for an American is $5,267. That’s more than double the world median of $2,193.

Now, the U.S. has the best doctors, nurses and health care professionals on the planet. But we are nowhere near having the best health care system. Despite the aforementioned lavish spending, millions of our citizens are underinsured and a growing number – 46 million – have no insurance at all.

Further, we’re toward the bottom on infant mortality, life expectancy and a host of other measures among industrialized nations.

What’s more, a relatively new phenomenon, medical debt, is reaching alarming levels. A study by the Commonwealth Fund showed nearly 20 percent of Americans are paying off medical debts. Among middle class Americans who are underinsured, according to a survey conducted by Reader’s Digest, almost half have refused or delayed medical treatments for serious conditions, or put off or didn’t renew prescriptions for drugs. Half had used credit cards to pay health costs.

This is despite health spending in this nation that represents 14.6 percent of the Gross National Product (compared to 7.7 percent in the United Kingdom).

We’re spending plenty. We’re not spending wisely. ...

Read full article

Businesses seeing appeal of Single Payer?

This is an article from Crain's Cleveland Business regarding the changing auto industry, and the comments of UAW's president at their convention last week in Las Vegas. It ends with a call to explore the viability of instituting a single-payer system in this country in order to keep manufacturers competitive.

Getting real

... To be specific, the Bush administration and Congress should examine the ramifications of instituting a single-payer national health plan. As Mr. Gettelfinger correctly noted last week in his speech, the high concentration of older workers and retirees at Ford and GM is causing the automakers to feel the impact of rising health care costs in a big way. However, those two companies are far from alone in their struggles with the medical component of their business expenses.

The challenge of covering those costs is particularly acute among employers with stagnant or shrinking rosters of active workers but growing rolls of retirees. Without a way to spread those costs and those risks beyond their own pools of insured lives, many companies face a daunting future. It is why we believe a single-payer system deserves a fresh look.

Read the full article

Interesting article on the conflict between profits and health

Someone forwarded me the following article from Asia Times Online. It deals with a struggle within the World Health Organization (as provoked by the US government) over whether countries should be able to circumvent intellectual property rights and produce low-cost generic drugs in order to deal with the health crises they face. It's as direct a conflict as you can get between those who view government as the protector of corporate profits and those who view it as the guarantor of public well being.

Pharmaceutical companies explain that the cost of their drugs is the direct result of the amount they spend on R&D. The irony is that a lot of their research is done with public funding at public universities. The high costs also reflect the tremendous amount of money spent marketing the drugs they develop. Also, the decisions on what drugs to R&D isn't based on public health needs, but on expectations of profit.

The conflict between private wealth and public health is the same we see here in the US, where the pharmaceutical and insurance industries dictate public policy, to the detriment of our health as a nation. To me, it is an issue of morality and social justice: how can we justify the amount of human suffering that is being created in order to feed the ever-expanding coffers of private companies?

Anyway, the article is interesting on many levels, including the way the US (in service of corporations) tries to control international bodies and bully its critics.


World health: A lethal dose of US politics
By Dylan C Williams

BANGKOK - When World Health Organization (WHO) director general Lee Jong-wook died of a cerebral hemorrhage last month before the start of the United Nations agency's annual World Health Assembly, the world's most prominent public-health official was arguably of a conflicted mind.

The WHO veteran was caught in the middle of an intensifying global debate over how to reconcile intellectual-property protection with the pressing public-health need to expand access to expensive life-saving medicines, a hot-button issue that has sharply divided WHO member states along developed- and developing-country lines.

An Asia Times Online investigation reveals that at the time of his death, Lee, a South Korean national, had closely aligned himself with the US government and by association US corporate interests, often to the detriment of the WHO's most vital commitments and positions, including its current drive to promote the production and marketing of affordable generic antiretroviral drugs for millions of poor infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which can cause AIDS.

Read the full article

Upcoming Chicago event on healthcare reform

A Panel Discussion sponsored by
DL21C and GSB Government and Politics Group

Tuesday, June 20, 2006, 6:00 to 8:00 pm
University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business
Gleacher Center, Room 600
450 N. Cityfront Plaza Drive, Chicago, Illinois

Come hear experts and leaders share their political and policy-related ideas for reforming healthcare in Illinois

Distinguished Panelists:

Barry Maram
Director, Illinois Healthcare and Family Services

The Honorable Mary Flowers
Member of the Illinois House of Representatives

John Bouman
Director of Advocacy, Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law

Dr. Quentin Young, M.D.
Founder, Health and Medicine Policy Research Group

Ian Doughty (Moderator)
Director, Office of Professional Development at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago

Refreshments: Appetizers, non-alcoholic drinks, and a cash bar.

Free to members of the GSB Government and Politics Group and the DL21C
$5 for non-members, payable at the door.

RSVP at gdiephou@chicagogsb.edu by June 18, 2006

The AMA's solution to universal hc? Make people buy it.

The logic seems a bit twisted to me, but it's what I've come to expect from an organization such as the American Medical Association that has proven to value its own narrow self-interest more than public health.

Taking the Massachusetts bill as inspiration, they've come out in support of mandating that all uninsured American be compelled to purchase a minimum level of coverage. Of course that minimum level of coverage will be just that, minimal. Because of this, people will avoid preventative care and rely on emergency services, continuing the health cost spiral that's put us into this crisis in the first place. Was that a Hippocratic or Hypocritical oath they took?

Here's an article outlining what the AMA is proposing:

Physicians group supports mandated health coverage
By DUNCAN MOORE
Bloomberg News

CHICAGO - The nation's largest physicians group Tuesday urged that all Americans be required by the government to have health insurance.

American Medical Association delegates meeting here, in a voice vote, ratified a proposal suggesting that individuals making $49,000 or more, or families who make $100,000 and up, face tax penalties if they do not buy insurance. Lower-income individuals should get tax credits and subsidies so they can afford insurance, the AMA said. ...

Read the full article

Is Hillary a progressive?

There is an article on the site Media Monitors Network that I found very interesting. It's called "Why Pretend That Hillary Clinton Is Progressive?" and is only marginally about healthcare, but it raises what I think is the crux of the crisis within the Democratic Party. In it, the author takes to task the organizers of the "Take Back America 2006" conference for including Ms. Clinton among its list of speakers, portraying her as a "prominent progressive."

He writes:

" The 'Take Back America' schedule set aside half an hour for a speech from Clinton but not a minute for any words from Jonathan Tasini, the longtime union activist who’s running -- on an antiwar and all-around progressive platform -- against Clinton in this year’s Democratic primary for senator from New York. ...

"Tasini points out that Hillary Clinton remains for the war in Iraq, for so-called 'free trade' agreements and for the death penalty. She supported the notorious 2001 bankruptcy bill, 'has never been for single-payer health insurance' and has worked hard to undermine a host of other progressive positions."

Republicans have shifted the political debate so far to the right, that Hillary Clinton is portrayed in the media as "left" or "radical" or "progressive". Progressive Democrats, such as this conference's organizers, have done nothing to discourage such a false perception.

As long as the powers that be within the party dictate to their constituents who their candidates should be, as long as they wage campaigns that attempt to "capture the middle" and dismiss the voters (and in many cases non-voters) that should make up their base, as long as they fail to promote a truly progressive vision that can capture the imagination of the electorate, they'll be doomed to fail. As long as progressives give their unquestioning support to those candidates, solely because a Democrat is better than a Republican, they are doomed to keep those very same candidates company in the mire of inconsequence.

Study shows insurers can't even reduce their own costs

The following editorial from ContraCostaTimes.com cites a Kaiser Permanente / NE Journal of Medecine study that shows that by trying to offload more healthcare expenses to consumers, insurance companies have actually increased their own costs. Employers faced with increased costs either pass them on to their employees or stop offering coverage all together. Employees who lose coverage or have to shoulder more of the costs, avoid preventative care and don't fill prescriptions, relying instead on emergency care, which is much more costly. This might explain why healthcare costs keep skyrocketing and our health as a nation keeps getting worse. It's a vicious cycle that won't end until politicians find some courage to make bold policy decisions. I'll try to find a link to the study and post it.

Health care woes

SHIFTING MORE COSTS FROM health insurance to the patient is not working out as hoped. Health insurers, of course, hoped to save money. That's not what's happening, according to a New England Journal of Medicine report on a Kaiser Permanente study.

... Doctor visits have decreased and emergency room visits have increased. Insurers are not seeing reduced costs.

Neither are those employees of companies that provide some health benefits. Deductibles have risen at a faster, higher rate than pay. ...

Read the full article

More on David Gill's support of Single Payer

I found an article at News-Gazette.com that describes David Gill, the candidate for Congress from the 15th district, and his support for Single Payer.

Gill pushes for universal health care
By Debra Pressey

... Gill was in Washington today to support the launch of a congressional caucus promoting the adoption of the United States National Health Insurance Act – a House bill that would implement a taxpayer-supported, privately delivered health care system available to everybody.

"I think it's a terrific idea, because it would provide affordable health care for all Americans in a very cost-efficient and healthy way," Gill said. ...

Read the full article

Two More Illinois Politicians for National Health Insurance

I'm continuing to post links to candidates for the Fall election that support some form of national health insurance. Here are two more:

David Gill for Congress (15th District)

"The healthcare system in the United States doesn't work the way it should. Learn more about the Single- payer National Healthcare Plan Dr. Gill proposes and how it will save you money, improve your quality of care, and expand your choice of providers."

Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. (2nd District)

"To date, the state-by-state (states' rights) market approach to providing health care has not adequately met the American people's health care needs. It bears repeating that the federal government is the only entity that can accumulate the financial resources and coordinate a national health care system. Such a system can be run and controlled locally, but the minimum high standards, the overall coordination and administration, and the national financial planning for such a system must be administered and made democratically accountable at the federal level."

Citizens Healthcare Working Group

Have you heard of this group? They were set up by the President and Congress to solicit input on how to reform the healthcare system. I don't know that the community meetings they held were particularly well publicized, and I don't know who exactly participated in them.

They asked citizens to respond to 4 questions:

1. What health care benefits and services should be provided?
2. How does the American public want health care delivered?
3. How should health care coverage be financed?
4. What trade-offs are the American public willing to make in either benefits or financing to ensure access to affordable, high-quality health care coverage and services?

As we all know, how you set up the questions is just as important as the actual answers people give. What is interesting is that the questions asked are framed in such a way that implies we're limited in what we can achieve as far as reform. For example, it asks what benefits and services should be provided. Well, shouldn't the assumption be that people want comprehensive care?

Anyway, you can read the report that was written based on the national hearings that took place. It's available in PDF format. Other formats are supposed to be "available soon". You can also go here to add your comments or experiences.

The votes are in for "healthcare for all" at MoveOn

As I mentioned in an earlier post, MoveOn held a vote last week to decide the three issues that would make up their "Positive Agenda". Over 100,000 people voted, and "healthcare for all" got the most votes. I'm going to post the vote totals and a member quote that MoveOn sent out to their subscriber list below.

Obviously, getting people to agree on "healthcare for all" in the abstract is pretty easy. The real fight will be over how to actually deliver on that policy goal. The recently passed Massachusetts "universal healthcare" bill is just one example of the fact that we don't always get what we vote for.

MoveOn Positive Agenda Vote Totals:

Health care for all - 65091
Sustainable energy independence - 61030
Restored constitutional rights - 35675
Guaranteed accurate elections - 35133
Global leadership through diplomacy - 28912
High quality education for all - 27874
Solutions to global warming - 26306
A guaranteed living wage - 25527
Publicly funded elections - 21096
A balanced federal budget - 20945

We need a system that is equitable and affordable for all...Health care should not be treated like a commodity. We have 46 million uninsured and many million more who are underinsured and don't have adequate health care. It is estimated that 18,000 people die each year because they don't have adequate health care that works out to 50 people every day. We cannot continue to tolerate a fragmented health care system which worries more about profits and stock holders than it does the well-being of Americans. It is time for a systemic change which will bring down the cost of health care.–Rebecca E. from Ithaca, NY.

Do we get what we pay for in healthcare spending?

I think the evidence is pretty clear that we don't. As the article points out, we're by far the biggest spender in the world, yet the quality of care we're getting doesn't measure up. If we spent that money more efficiently, we'd have the best health outcomes to go along with the best health professionals and technology. How do we do that? Single-Payer of course.

Canadians Healthier Than Americans, Survey Says

TUESDAY, May 30 (HealthDay News) -- Canadians are healthier than Americans, have better access to health care and have fewer unmet health needs, a new study of both countries reveals.

The findings come in spite of the fact that the United States spends almost twice as much per capita on health care as Canada, the researchers noted.

"This shows that you can spend much less than we [Americans] do, and deliver much more and better care then we do," said study co-author Dr. David U. Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass. ...

Read the full article

Illinois candidates supporting national health insurance

I thought I might focus on our fine state of Illinois for a change -- afterall, the blog is named "Illinois Single Payer". I'm going to start featuring candidates who are supportive of national health insurance. Below are the first two, both trying to win seats in the U.S. Congress this November.

Dan Seals for Congress (10th District)

"I believe we need to develop a national program of health insurance that provides a basic level of health care that is portable and affordable. Making the investment in a national health insurance program will pay dividends in the future, because Americans will be healthier, worker productivity will increase, and our businesses will be more competitive globally."

Read a full description of Dan Seals' views on healthcare

John Laesh for Congress (14th District)

"Expand Medicare coverage to all Americans as a voluntary alternative to our expensive and inefficient private insurance system."

Read a full description of John Laesh's views on healthcare

Medicare then and now

This article compares the rollouts of the original Medicare plan and that of Part D. One went smoothly and one didn't -- not hard to guess which is which. One plan had the best interest of seniors in mind, the other that of big pharma and the insurance companies. One is a model of efficiency, the other a boondoggle of needless complexity. Bush and his group of small government (when it suits them) fanatics did a good job trying to undermine a longstanding program with a proven social benefit; one that coincidentally is an example of an efficient, public single payer system.

A tale of two Medicare plan rollouts
By Saul Friedman
Newsday.com

... "Medicare has become the most popular and successful program of the last 40 years," Hayes said, "because the president [Lyndon Johnson] believed in the efficacy of government."

And author Nancy Altman ("The Battle for Social Security") said that while Johnson and the Congress relied on professionals in government to design Medicare, President George W. Bush and the Republican leadership disdained government and Part D was written in secret by drug and insurance industry lobbyists, then narrowly passed under cover of darkness. ...

Read the full article

MoveOn seeking issues for "positive agenda"

MoveOn members across the country are hosting "Positive Agenda House Parties" tomorrow (May 25), where they will discuss the issues they think the organization should be active in. May I suggest that if you're going to one, you push for real healthcare reform in the form of single-payer? Because of the Massachusetts bill, universal healthcare is on a lot of people's minds, but we'll continue to get incomplete and faulty reform until we pressure the pols to enact a single-payer system. These piecemeal, incremental reforms will further delay any implementation of single payer, and true healthcare reform can't wait; too many people are suffering now.

Single-Payer healthcare is an issue religious progressives should embrace

The following article was written to take religious progressives to task for their insignificance in the current political debate. The author lists 7 issues he thinks religious progressives should fight for. One of these, as you might have guessed, is a single-payer healthcare system. I have to say I agree with the other planks of this platform as well. They're issues that both the religious and non-religious should get behind if they truly believe in social justice.

Peter Laarman: All Stand Down: Conceptual Confusion on the Religious Left
from HuffingtonPost.com

... My own list of unifying issues would include: (1) attacking domestic poverty by insisting on livable wages and the right to organize; (2) implementing a radically different energy policy designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions; (3) demanding a return to progressive taxation in the United States of America; (4) guaranteeing health care for all through some form of single payer system; (5) saving American democracy itself by separating our legislators from the corporate teat; (6) dismantling America's dysfunctional and appallingly racist prison-industrial complex; and (7) transforming foreign policy through serious development assistance for the Global South and a reversal of the "dominance doctrine" the neocons put into place following 9-11. ...

Read full article

Excellent article on the new Vermont healthcare bill

The following is a very good article by an Vermont internist. It lays out the problems with taking an incrementalist approach to healthcare reform -- especially one that ignores the major driving force behind the escalation of healthcare costs: the private insurers that lobby to preserve their existence in every universal healthcare bill that gets passed. He lays out the most compelling arguments for a single-payer system. How long will it take before our elected officials start listening to those with the public interest in mind, not the profits of private insurers?

Catamount Health offers little in the way of reform
By MARVIN MALEK, MD

... The Medicaid program will be under sustained pressure because it serves as the bottom of the safety net. The sickest — and most expensive people to insure – end up insured through the Medicaid program when they become too ill to work and exhaust their savings.

While you're adding a new population for the state to insure by not taking on the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, you are leaving aside the best tactic to reduce costs. The current system of multiple private health insurance companies adds enormous amounts of administrative expense. I see it every day as we contend with complex insurance company policies which attempt to avoid paying any and every medical bill, and I can only imagine the parallel expense taking place at the other end of the phone line at the insurance company. And by not consolidating into one large insurer for the entire population, we fragment our ability to get serious about negotiating down the prices of medical supplies and prescription drugs — and to create a better coordinated system of care for those with chronic illnesses. ...

What does that mean to me? Yet more sets of rules for our practice to contend with. And I can only imagine the administrative burden the chronic care initiative will place on primary care practices.

Worse yet, I fear the passage of the Catamount bill will sideline the push for more meaningful health reform. We'll all be asked to give the new program a chance to work, likely putting the brakes on effective health reform for at least three, and maybe four or five years. Meanwhile, there will be ever more underinsured patients, ever higher health costs, ever greater Medicaid deficits. ...

Read full article

Action Week for H.R. 676 begins on 06/07/06

The organization Healthcare NOW! is putting together an "action week" beginning on June 7 -- the date that corresponds to the pro-single payer Conyers Bill's number (H.R. 676). Below is some info that they've posted on their site. To see more detailed information, you can go to their June 7th page.

"JUNE 7TH WILL BE UNIQUE and a historic day. It will happen once, and only once - never to come around again. 6/7/6 corresponds with the identifying numbers on the United States National Health Insurance Act, H.R. 676.

"HELP PEOPLE REMEMBER THE NUMBER! -- 676 -- IN a national strategy meeting, Healthcare-NOW adopted the idea of using the alignment of these 676 numbers to educate people on the issue. Congressional Representatives will be stating their commitment on that date. And we are organizing hundreds of events nationwide on that date. We hope to galvanize people to action with the understanding that it is indeed possible to win a national - single payer healthcare system and soon. People should know that HR 676 is a great resource for helping us do it."

Some more detail on the Vermont universal hc bill

The article below includes more detailed info about the Vermont healthcare bill that was recently passed. It, like the Massachusetts bill, does nothing to solve the main problem behind spiralling healthcare costs -- the high overhead and profit-taking that occurs when healthcare is administered by private insurers. It does allow for a review of the job these insurers are doing running Vermont's new Catamount Health program after 2 years, with the possibility of handing things over to a public agency. My cynnical nature leads me to believe that the forces currently in place won't allow that to happen, no matter how bad things are -- not without some serious grassroots pressure. It's also interesting to note that studies have been made that show costs inevitably increase when private plans duplicate services provided by public ones. See the PDF of the article National Health Insurance or Incremental Reform: Aim High, or at Our Feet?

Reform is in the eye of the beholder
By Shay Totten Vermont Guardian

The words rang out loud and clear across the Green Mountain State at the end of the legislative session — health care reform was finally achieved after nearly two years of partisan bickering.

But many long-time reform watchers say the final compromise between lawmakers and the governor will do little to actually bring down the cost of health care or health insurance in the short term. They predict that it may leave many Vermonters expecting a decrease in premiums with a bad taste in their mouths.

The compromise health care bill, which many Republicans and nearly all Progressives refused to support, puts in motion a plan, Catamount Health, aimed at covering as many as 25,000 uninsured Vermonters, helping those who are underinsured, and lowering the premiums for those enrolled in one of the Medicaid-funded plans.

In the end, Democrats agreed to let existing private insurance companies sell Catamount Health to Vermonters rather than have the plan offered through a third-party administrator (TPA). Democrats had wanted a fallback, TPA-run plan if the private insurers balked. So the Douglas administration offered a provision to require that all insurers carry the new plan, and that at the end of two years the system can be examined to determine if it is working. At that time, the Legislature could decide to have Catamount Health run by a third-party administrator. ...

Read the full article

Some stats on national healthcare trends

One of the beautful things about the Internet is the tremendous variety of sources from which you can cull information. Today my Googling eyes discovered an article from the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. It's interesting for a few different reasons: 1. It includes some good but sad statistics on healthcare trends in this country; 2. The first woman interviewed has a great quote that encapsulates the moral imperative to fix this problem now; 3. It includes the comments of an advocate for a single-payer system; 4. It includes a strange quote from a health insurance representative -- you tell me if you can make sense of it. I'm including the juiciest bits below -- feel free to follow the link to the full article as always.

Health insurance crisis calls for deep reform
By: Chris Nisan

“It doesn’t seem right for people to make money off of people’s suffering and sickness,” said Tina Masiee. ...

According to a January 2006 report issued by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, ... since 2000 the number of uninsured people 65 years and under has increased by six million. ...

• Employer-sponsored healthcare coverage dropped by five percentage points between 2000 and 2004.
• Two-thirds of this growth in uninsured adults occurred among the poorer sections of the working class.
• The majority of these uninsured are those who work but whose incomes don’t allow them to buy health insurance.
• Those of oppressed nationalities are uninsured at a higher rate than Whites.
• The uninsured rate among Black people is 21 percent.

... “We need a new healthcare system,” said protest organizer Joel Elbers. “Everybody in, nobody out — not the usual practice.” Elbers, a working pharmacist and health economic researcher active in the Minnesota Universal Healthcare Action Network, explained that he is for fundamental reform of the healthcare system in the United States. He explained that he stands for a universal system of federally funded health insurance for all — what he describes as a single-payer system. ...

"Our views on some important issues are identical, like universal health care,” said Lindsay, representing the position of United Health Care. “The only thing that differs is the financing mechanisms they propose. There are some who believe that the federal government should run the system, some that the system should be left in private hands. I don’t think the two positions are completely inconsistent.”

Read the full article

Real universal health care proposal in PA?

Kudos to Pennsylvania State Senator Jim Ferlo and his colleagues for having the guts to propose what looks like a real solution to the health care crisis ...

Healthy Choice
A Pennsylvania state senator proposes universal coverage for state residents.
by Jesse Smith, Philadelphia Weekly

Last month Massachusetts garnered national attention for legislation heralded as an answer to the state's-and possibly the nation's-problem of health coverage gaps. Requiring that all residents have health insurance, the state will subsidize coverage for the poor but will force others to purchase theirs through private insurers.

In Pennsylvania, legislators led by state Sen. Jim Ferlo and healthcare advocates are working on their own plan for universal coverage, one that would take private insurers out of the mix entirely.

"We needed a model bill out there for public debate," Ferlo says. "Change isn't going to happen in a vacuum. This is our plan, and now the legislature, governor and candidates can react to it."

Now in the Public Health and Welfare Committee, Senate Bill 1085-the Balanced and Comprehensive Healthcare Reform Act-proposes the establishment of a state-run healthcare trust as a means of repairing a system Ferlo describes as a "sick patient in need of radical surgery."

Funded by a 10 percent payroll tax on employers, a 3 percent individual wellness tax on personal income and federal money, the program would cover most medical services (with the exception of cosmetic procedures) and make no exclusions of preexisting conditions. Unlike most traditional insurance plans, the proposed system would cover those services without a beneficiary copay or deductible.

Read the full article

Shameless self promotion

I'll be extolling the virtues of single-payer at two upcoming public events. All are welcome.

1. Niles Township Democratic Meetup
Thursday, May 18th, 7pm
Edwardo's (back room)
9300 Skokie Blvd, Skokie IL (at the Gross Point Rd. intersection)

2. Free Symposium: Health Care for the Mind and Body
Tuesday, May 23, 5:30-9:30 pm
Lake Side Cafe, 1418 Howard St., Chicago IL

Presented and organized by Sharon Hyson, Art Therapist / Educator / Artist. Learn and experience why all elected officials and CEO's of health centers should have an art therapist on their team to facilitate arts programming for all ages which woud aid in increasing mental health / wellness in the community and learn why unversal health care is not only necessary but possible and why denial of health care today is tantamount to murder

5:30 -6:30: Health Care for the Mind - A talk and experiential art making workshop with Sharon Hyson.

7:00 -9:30: Panel discussion on Health Care including Emilie Junge, Francis Scudellari, Kathleen Gruber and Arlene Rakoncay.

Article on the status of healthcare reform in Ohio

The following article from the Cincinnati Enquirer details the various forces at play in the fight for universal healthcare -- politicians, small business, insurance companies, consumer advocates. So far, despite almost one million residents without coverage, they're at a stalemate. The Single Payer Action Network is trying to put a binding referendum on the ballot in 2007 to send the pols a message about how the public wants to solve the crisis.

Ohio health care needs fix
But too many varied concerns in way of insurance solution
BY KATHY BERGSTROM ENQUIRER CONTRIBUTOR

COLUMBUS - Few legislators expect the Ohio General Assembly this year to pass the kind of major health care reforms that Massachusetts enacted last month.

That's because while members of both parties, as well as lobbyists for business and consumers, see the need for change in Ohio, there are fundamental disagreements on how to improve health care here. ...

"One of the things going for us is the existing system is collapsing," said Dr. Donald Rucknagel of Cincinnati, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Cincinnati and at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

Rucknagel is regional coordinator for the Single Payer Action Network Ohio group, which is working toward getting a measure to create a single-payer universal health care system on the Ohio ballot in 2007. The system would create a single fund to pay for health care and would be paid for by three different taxes. ...

The current legislature may engage in "tweaking around the edges and taking a couple of shots at some interesting ideas," said House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Driehaus, a Cincinnati Democrat. "We're not talking about health care reform the way the state of Massachusetts has talked about health care reform."

Legislators in Ohio fail to see the big picture or the crisis when they talk about health care reform, he said. No one is challenging employer-based health care, Driehaus said, and no one is standing up for those without health insurance - 11.8 percent of the state's population, or roughly 970,000 people in 2004, according to the most recent Census Bureau estimate.

More states will try to take action because of the lack of leadership at the federal level, Driehaus predicted. But Ohio is not there yet, he said. ...

Read full article

Oregon nurses take lead in fight for universal healthcare

I found the following article on the Portland Tribune site. It details how the Oregon Nurses Association is working to put an initiative on the November ballot that promotes affordable healthcare for all.

Nurses brainstorm universal care
By SUSAN KING

... Our state seems ready to make a serious and sincere effort to improve health and health care. Oregon’s nurses are stepping up to make it happen.

We are asking that you join us. State Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-District 33, along with state Sen. Alan Bates, D-District 3, and state Sen. Ben Westlund, I-District 27 (a candidate for governor), have proposed an initiative called Healthcare Options Provided Efficiently. It would place health care on the same level of importance as public education by making access to affordable health care a fundamental right.

The Oregon Nurses Association and many other associations of health care professionals and health care consumer groups are taking this effort into the streets in an effort to collect the signatures needed to place HOPE on the November ballot.

HOPE initiates a crucial conversation about the future of health care. Will we continue to have a disconnected, and often overlapping, quilt of services? Do we continue to pick who gets care and who doesn’t based on traits such as age, income or choice of employer? Do we accept as inevitable that the cost of health care will rise beyond the ability for most individuals and employers to pay? ...

Read the full article

Michigan Gov proposes universal hc plan

Yet another universal healthcare proposal at the state level; and once again the details are sketchy. The good news is that the politicians are finally beginning to act. It remains to be seen whether the solutions they're coming up with will have any real benefit, or will end up simply feeding the bottom lines of the private insurers.

Granholm proposes health care coverage
Mark Hornbeck / Detroit News Lansing Bureau

LANSING -- Gov. Jennifer Granholm unveiled a universal health care plan for Michigan Thursday designed to cover all 1.1 million state residents who are currently uninsured.

The proposal, patterned after a law recently passed in Massachusetts, is an expansion of a plan announced in January that would provide heath coverage to the 550,000 Michiganians below 200 percent of the poverty level -- which is $38,700 for a family of four.

Her new plan also would offer health care insurance to the working poor above that level who don't have coverage. The state would subsidize premiums on a sliding scale depending on family income. It's uncertain how much participants would have to pay. ...

The Michigan plan would mirror the Massachusetts version in providing coverage to the uninsured but, unlike Massachusetts, residents would not be required to have health insurance.

Read the full article

The opportunity for universal healthcare past & present

This is a good article outlining the past missed opportunities for universal healthcare, and how the issue will become a top priority with the American people again soon.

Bubba blew it. But can U.S. health care be fixed?
Other government programs, healthier nations show it's possible

By Robert Bazell
Chief science and health correspondent
MSNBC

... But Clinton refused to accept it. Instead he allowed Hillary Clinton to set up one of the great farcical bureaucratic efforts of all time — her commission to reform health care. As the months dragged on, it became the shooting gallery where every one of the myriad special interests in health care could fire off repeated rounds, killing any chance of reform.

Clinton’s missed opportunity was the third time since World War II that universal health care was on the table with a serious desire for results. Harry Truman wanted it. So did Lyndon Johnson. Truman got nothing and Johnson, with his masterful control of Congress, managed to win Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor, but universal coverage escaped him. For Truman and Johnson, the American Medical Association led the charge against what they saw as “socialized medicine.”

Thus America remains the only industrialized country where financing health is not considered a government function like building highways and supporting national defense. We have a right to clean water piped to our homes, but not access to medical care.

Why repeat this history? Because health care reform will become a big deal again soon. Right now the Iraq war and gas prices are dominating the political discussion, but lack of affordable heath care impacts so many Americans that it must rise to the top of the agenda again. ...

Read the full article

Sad but typical story of the healthcare crisis

This is a very sad story about a woman whose daughter had a fatal liver condition and couldn't find the necessary care because she was uninsured. It lead to the mother becoming an advocate for universal healthcare. Let's hope more folks see the necessity of it without having to experience these types of personal tragedies.

Daughter's death helped ignite health care push
By JILL MOON, The Telegraph

Vermont passes health care bill

The article doesn't provide a lot of details, and "advocates" claim it does a better job than the Massachusetts bill, but a couple details seem to indicate it's another partial solution: 1. It doesn't cover all of the uninsured; 2. The new "Catamount Health" insurance plan will be sold by private companies.

Vt. politicians agree on health care bill
By ROSS SNEYD
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

MONTPELIER, Vt. -- As many as 25,000 Vermont residents who have no health insurance will be able to get it under a reform package agreed to Tuesday by Gov. Jim Douglas and legislative leaders.

The bill would extend health care coverage to as much as 96 percent of the state's population by 2010. Currently, slightly less than 90 percent of Vermonters have health insurance.

"This gets health insurance into the hands of Vermonters who don't have it," said House Speaker Gaye Symington. "It isn't just insurance. It's quality insurance." ...

Read full article

Labor and HMOs

I found this article on the PNHP site. It's an interesting description of how HMOs came into being in the early '70s with the support of the AFL-CIO. Now, with the push to privatize Medicare and Medicaid, will Labor step up and take the lead in fixing the mess they helped create?

Unions Should Break With Managed Care
by Kip Sullivan

... Despite solid evidence that turning Medicare and Medicaid over to HMOs raises the costs of these programs and damages quality of care, politicians of both parties continue to support the further privatization of both programs.

To give you some idea of how solid the data against privatization of Medicare and Medicaid are, consider just two studies. A 2003 study of California’s Medicaid program, which is partially privatized, by a University of Maryland economist concluded that privatization raised that program’s cost by 20 percent.

In a 1999 report to Congress, the U.S. General Accounting Office stated, “[N]umerous studies conducted by us … and others demonstrated that the Medicare program spent more on beneficiaries enrolled in health plans than it would have if the same individuals had been in FFS [‘fee for service,’ which refers to the traditional Medicare program].”

Unions do not wield as much influence with Democrats today as they did in 1971, but they remain a critical part of the Democratic base and could play a very important role in sharpening and strengthening Democratic health policy. The AFL-CIO could help the nation extract itself from this health care mess if it were to renounce its endorsement of managed care and undertake a campaign to roll back the privatization of Medicaid and Medicare. ...

Read the full article

Barbara Ehrenreich on universal healthcare

Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickled & Dimed and Bait & Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, wrote the following piece for The Progressive.

President Bush, Meet Lorraine
By Barbara Ehrenreich

... The fact is there’s a big difference between the economics of health care and that of, say, costume jewelry. We the consumers control the demand for costume jewelry; we can splurge on it or leave it alone. But we have precious little control over our demand for health care. Sure, we can exercise and refrain from smoking and sky-diving and swimming with sharks. We can eat right, too (whatever that may mean, with the dietary advice fluctuating from month to month). But it’s the medical profession that determines how often we need our blood drawn, our breasts squished, our cervices scraped, or any of the other nasty interventions they have to offer.

If the medical care we consume was under our own control, I’d say, sure, save up for it and use it wisely. But it’s no more in our control than the wind and floods we insure our homes against.

You think it’s too expensive to have universal health insurance? Let’s be hard-headed about Lorraine’s case. If she’d been diagnosed earlier, she might have gotten by with a mastectomy and a bout of chemotherapy instead of burning up Medicaid dollars in an ICU. She might be out volunteering for the needy right now, instead of lying in terror in a hospital bed.

Read the full article

More analysis of the Massachusetts "universal healthcare" bill

Here's another analysis of the recently passed Massachussets bill and why it won't work. I've edited it down for this post. You can read the full text of the article on the In These Times website by clicking on the headline.

Massachusetts’ ‘Universal Coverage’ Bill is No Such Thing
By Kip Sullivan

... Romney’s expectations of the law are going to be dashed, and his obituary for single-payer will prove to be premature. The fundamental flaw of the Massachusetts law is that it does little to reduce health care cost inflation. The bill attempts to improve coverage by funneling money through the bloated insurance industry. Insurance companies allocate roughly 20 percent of their revenue to cover their administrative costs (which include marketing, telling doctors how to practice medicine, providing dividends, and financing high management salaries). That is 10 times the overhead of Medicare, which allocates only 2 percent of its expenditures to overhead, and about 20 times that of Canada’s single-payer system, which allocates 1 percent. Moreover, a system of multiple insurers drives up the administrative costs of clinics and hospitals. This is especially true if all or most of the insurers practice managed care. ...

The failure of the Massachusetts law to cut health care costs will be aggravated by its method of reducing the number of uninsured: It requires all Massachusetts residents to buy health insurance. Health insurance, in other words, will be treated like car insurance—you have to have it or you’ll be in violation of state law and subject to a fine. ...

To meet their obligations under the mandate, most employed Massachusetts residents will continue to buy health insurance from their employer. But because the law does little to reduce premium inflation, employer flight from the health insurance market will continue, forcing more and more employees to purchase insurance on their own. In Massachusetts today, it costs employers about $4,000 per year to insure an employee without dependents and $11,000 a year to insure an employee with dependents.

So, how will the state’s uninsured be able to afford such a big-ticket item? ... Unfortunately, it is impossible from reading the law to know what the minimum level of coverage will be, how much insurance companies will charge for it, and how much the subsidy will be for any given income level. The law merely tells us that a state board with the odd name “board of the connector” will determine what constitutes “minimum creditable coverage,” and that this board will determine how big the subsidies have to be to make the coverage “affordable” to residents. ...

What will probably infuriate residents most will be the enforcement of this bill. The bill requires employers, providers, and residents to make reports to the government about who has insurance, and it punishes the uninsured with fines enforceable by the Department of Revenue. ...

The spectacle of hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts residents having to buy insurance with awful coverage that they cannot afford, and many refusing to buy insurance and taking steps to avoid paying their fines (such as not filing income taxes) will come into focus in the latter half of 2007 and the first half of 2008—that is, in the year leading up to the 2008 Republican national convention. The media, in short, will have plenty of time to unearth horror stories about Romney’s “model” legislation. Odds are good that Romney will rue the day he took credit for this bill.

Good article by Paul Krugman

I found the following story on a site called Inside Bay Area. It was written by Paul Krugman, and must have been syndicated to a few different places. There's good info in it.

Death by insurance

FOR LOWER-income working Americans, lack of health insurance is quickly becoming the new normal. Thats the implication of survey results just released by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonpartisan organization that studies health care. The survey found that 41 percent of nonelderly American adults with incomes between $20,000 and $40,000 a year were without health insurance for all or part of 2005. Thats up from 28 percent as recently as 2001.

Many of the uninsured reported spending their entire savings on health care and/or that they were having difficulty paying for basic necessities. And most uninsured adults reported cutting corners on medical care to save money — failing to fill prescriptions, skipping medications, going without preventive care.

Here's the other side of the same coin: Health insurers business is lagging, reports The Wall Street Journal, as rising premiums and medical costs push more of their traditional-employer customers to shun or curtail company health benefits. And some investors are feeling the pain. Aetnas stock price fell sharply last week on news that its medical cost ratio — a term Ill explain in a minute — rose from 77.9 to 79.4.

Taken together, these stories tell the tale of a health care system thats driving a growing number of Americans into financial ruin, and in many cases kills them through lack of basic care. (The Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, estimates that lack of health insurance leads to 18,000 unnecessary American deaths — the equivalent of six 9/11s — each year.) Yet this system actually costs more to run than we would spend if we guaranteed health insurance to everyone. ...

Read the full article

U.S. vs. U.K. healthcare systems

I found the following article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that details a Journal of the American Medical Association study that compares the cost/quality of the U.S. health care to that of the British nationalized system. Needless to say, ours costs more and delivers worse results. The doctors quoted in the article offer differing explanations for the disparity -- judge for yourself whose is more convincing.

Excerpts are provided below. Click the headline to read the full article.

If our health care's so great, why does study say we're "sicker than the English"?
By John Fauber
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

... Compared with the British, white, middle-aged Americans are substantially less healthy, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Pick the disease — diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, lung disease, high blood pressure — and Americans are much more likely to have it than their counterparts on the other side of the pond. ...

Adding insult to injury, Americans pay more than twice as much for their medical care as the British: $5,274 a year per person in the United States versus $2,164 in England, the study notes.

Doctors not associated with the study say it is the latest evidence of befuddling health disparities in the United States compared with other industrialized countries. It also undermines the often-cited claim that America has the best health care in the world, doctors said. ...

... when the researchers divided people from the two countries by both education and income levels, Americans who had higher incomes and who were more educated often had higher rates of ailments such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease than English who were in the bottom level. ...

Even though more money is spent on health care in the United States, the emphasis is different. In England, more attention is paid on primary care and making sure everyone gets basic medical care.

"You get to the problems earlier," said Barbara Starfield, a distinguished professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University. ...

In These Times article on healthcare crisis

This is pretty long, and I haven't had a chance to read the whole thing yet, but it looks interesting. Click the headline to read the article.

Careless Industry
How corporate America perpetuates the health care crisis
By David Sirota

More unions getting behind the Conyers Bill (HR 676)

I found the following on a site of an organization called International Labor Communications Association. It describes growing support among unions for the Conyers bill that advocates for a single-payer national health insurance system. Read more about H.R. 676 -- The U.S. National Health Insurance Act.

SINGLE-PAYER GOVT. HEALTH CARE BILL GAINS UNIONBACKERS AS ‘COVER THE UNINSURED’ WEEK RUNS
By Press Associates, Inc. Staff Writer Mark Gruenberg

WASHINGTON (PAI) – A bill establishing a government-run Canadian style single-payer health care system for the U.S., built on Medicare, is gaining union backers, coincidentally as “Cover the Uninsured” week ran from May 1-7. The measure, H.R. 676 by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), would eliminate the private for-profit health insurance industry by establishing a government-run system.

The “United States National Health Insurance Act” would be funded through the federal budget, says a fact sheet from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which covers health issues and which sponsors the week spotlighting the uninsured.

Momentum for Conyers’ bill – plus the week-long observance and a planned Senate debate the same time on health care issues – comes just after the Massachusetts legislature voted to require every state resident to buy insurance. ...

The latest backers of Conyers’ bill were the Ohio legislative board of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen/IBT, Letter Carriers Branch 3126 of Royal Oak, Mich., and Graphic Communications Conference/IBT Web Pressmen’s Local 4N of San Francisco. The Ohio BLET said it will take the cause to its conference convention in June and – if it wins – to the Teamsters convention immediately afterwards.

Their endorsements, in late April, came just after that of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, on April 6, after lobbying by USW Local 3567 member Janet Hill, who is also secretary of the Pittsburgh-area Coalition of Labor Union Women. Both the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia CLUW chapters had earlier endorsed Conyers’ legislation.

The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, which claims 900,000 members, is the second state fed to back H.R. 676, after Kentucky’s. Conyers also has 68 U.S. House co-sponsors.

And Amalgamated Transit Union Local 825, which represents bus drivers, mechanics and other workers at New Jersey Transit, also voted to ask its parent international to back Conyers’ bill.

Read the full article

Final Hearing for the Health Care Justic Act

The final public hearing collecting testimony for the Health Care Justice Act (see PDF of bill) will be held in Pilsen next week. Here are the particulars:

Thursday May 11th
4 - 6 PM
Benito Juarez Community Academy
2150 S. Laflin
Chicago, IL

It's being organized by the folks at Campaign for Better Health Care.

Please go and give your testimony related to the current health care crisis, but include a demand that the politicians address it with the only real solution (implementing Single Payer), not the incomplete and ineffective legislation they've enacted up to this point.

Even Fox News is talking about Single Payer

In an article on the state of emergency care in the US, the author does a pretty respectful job of raising Single Payer as one proposed solution. That's a pretty big deal considering the article appears on the Fox News site. (I'm just posting the SP section. Click the headline to read the full article.)

In U.S Hospitals, Emergency Care in Critical Condition
Monday, May 01, 2006
By Don Snyder

...

Single-Payer Solution?

Doctors interviewed for this article unanimously decried the deterioration of emergency care and see a single-payer universal health plan as the answer. They point out that government programs could meet important health needs and operate with less overhead than private plans designed to make profits and satisfy stockholders.

For example, according to Dr. Viccellio, Medicare operates with a 3 percent overhead compared to private insurers who spend 30 percent on overhead.

Stony Brook University Hospital spends $15 million dollars a year on billing because the private plans are so different and criteria for payment so complex. A single payer system would eliminate the need for each hospital to operate its own billing department.

"I could vaccinate a lot of kids with the $15 million our hospital would save," said Dr. Viccellio.

However, the medical community is itself divided on this issue of universal health care.

In August 2003, the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association proposed a national health insurance program that had been endorsed by more than 8,000 doctors, including two former surgeons general.

The American Medical Association, the largest medical organization in the United States, immediately distanced itself from the article. It said that while JAMA was associated with the AMA, the publication is editorially independent. The AMA has historically opposed a national health insurance system.

AMA president Donald Palmisano, responding in 2003 to the JAMA proposal, acknowledged that "a solution is desperately needed." However, he said that a national health care system would "ration care, increase bureaucracy and demoralize doctors and patients."

Doctors who support a national health care plan acknowledge that a prerequisite for adoption of universal health care in the United States is a fundamental change in attitude by Americans.

"The commitment to health care is a commitment by an entire society," said Gardner. "I think at the moment Americans struggle with how much they are committed to health care for everyone."

Interesting poll results from conference in Cincy

I don't know how scientific this poll was, but I can't argue with the opinions expressed.

Policy group examines health care, costs
BY FEOSHIA HENDERSON ENQUIRER STAFF WRITER

DOWNTOWN - A majority of people at a health care conference Saturday said they would pay higher income taxes to have universal care.

Even more people said they would spend more tax money on health care even if that meant reducing the amount spent on the war in Iraq.

Those were just two findings from more than 500 participants at the Citizens' Health Care Working Group meeting at the Cinergy Center. Attendees included citizens concerned about health issues, health professionals, educators and people from labor groups. ...

Cover the Uninsured Week, continued

Google and ye shall find. There is a website for Cover the Uninsured Week:

http://covertheuninsured.org/

According to the site:

"Cover the Uninsured Week 2006 will create a groundswell of activities in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, including press conferences, health and enrollment fairs, seminars for small businesses, campus activities, business leader summits, interfaith outreach, and more. These activities are designed to mobilize a diverse mix of business owners, union members, educators, students, patients, hospital staff, physicians, nurses, faith leaders and their congregants, and many others at thousands of events across the country."

I don't know much about the organizations involved, and the site doesn't seem to advocate any specific solutions to the health care crisis. So, I of course would suggest you take things a step further than they do: Tell your elected officials to make the implementation of single payer health insurance, not just any healthcare reform, a priority.

Did you know it's Cover the Uninsured Week?

I found the following article on the Trenton Times website. Bravo to them for endorsing Single Payer. I'm going to look for specific events related to "Cover the Uninsured Week" and post what I find.

Editorial: Cover the uninsured

Sunday, April 30, 2006
BY EDITORIAL

Tomorrow begins the fourth Cover the Uninsured Week, a nonpartisan, national effort to urge U.S. leaders to make health coverage for Americans their top priority and to facilitate the enrollment of uninsured people who are eligible for subsidized health-care programs. With some 1,000 public events scheduled nationwide, Cover the Uninsured Week will be the largest such campaign in history. Among those who will make the case for national solutions in forums in Washington, D.C., and around the nation will be business leaders who will describe how rising health expenses limit their ability to provide health insurance for their employees and drive up the cost of competing on a global basis. ...

Bravo for the states that are trying. But the problem is a national one and must be solved nationally. Our preference, as we have said many times, is for a single-payer system like Canada's that eliminates the administrative costs that make up such an enormous part of the overall cost of health care. However, any serious attempt by Congress and the White House to cover America's uninsured would be vastly preferable to the indifference they display today.

Read the full article.

More info on the Medicare Drug (lack of) Benefit

There's a lot of good info in the article cited below on the inadequacies of the Medicare Part D Drug Program. It's more proof that if we leave it up to the pols in DC (or Springfield), the only solutions we'll get to our health crisis will be ones that benefit insurance companies and big pharma. Public servants indeed.

I'm only listing a few interesting quotes from it. Click the headline to read the whole thing, including an interesting story about how and why the parents of Mike Leavitt, head of the Dept. of Health and Human Services, dropped out of the plan.

Dr. Peter Rost: Winners and Losers in the Medicare Drug Lottery
(We the People, vs. Them the Large Insurance and Drug Companies)

According to the most recent Washington Post/ABC News Poll, 86% of seniors currently take prescription drugs on a regular basis, but only 38% have signed up for the Medicare prescription drug program. This is a glaring disparity in numbers. 44% thought the cost was too high and more Americans disapprove of the program, 45%, than approve, 41% (14% had no opinion). ...

The Washington Post states that "8 million -- and as many as 14 million by some estimates" eligible Americans have not signed up for the drug program. ...

The New York Times writes, "At least two dozen states have taken emergency action to help low-income people who could not get their medications under the program, which began Jan. 1. States are spending millions of dollars a day in such assistance."

And the Los Angeles Times claims that "a review by the Senior Action Network, a grass-roots advocacy group in San Francisco, found that Costco's prices on the top 100 drugs used by Medicare beat prices of all 48 plans in California in more than half the cases."

According to the Wall Street Journal, the "early winners" include large health insurers, who "have snagged roughly 15 million new customers and healthy government subsidies" under the program. The WSJ concludes, "By far, the biggest winner in the race to sign up seniors is UnitedHealth Group Inc., which has used an alliance with AARP to help it grab more than 3.9 million new customers"

Oregon voters are going to be busy ...

The article below describes the 7 initiatives voters in Oregon will get to vote on in November. Health care activists in the state are quite active indeed. Let's hope that kind of acitivity builds here in Illinois soon.

Learn about medical initiatives
By BILL KETTLER
Mail Tribune

You probably think you have better things to do Sunday afternoon than listen to people talk about Oregon's health care system, but you're unlikely to get a better opportunity to learn about seven medical initiatives that could be on the November ballot.

Sponsors and supporters of each of the initiatives will gather at Medford's First United Methodist Church, 607 W. Main St., to explain how each proposal would address specific shortcomings in Oregon's health care system. The two-hour program begins at 4 p.m.

The sheer number of health-related initiatives indicates how broken Oregon's health system really is, said Maribeth Healey, executive director of Oregonians for Health Security. The Portland-based nonprofit organized the Medford program as part of a series of presentations around Oregon this spring.

"Oregonians are saying, 'Enough is enough,' " Healey said. "We have to do something about the health care crisis.

"They're not exactly clear on what they want done, but clearly the Legislature is the place to do it," she said. "Nothing's going to happen in Washington D.C. very fast."

Read the full article

Legislative progress in Hawaii?

Hawaii is trying to pass a bill similar to our Governor's All Kids plan. The excerpts below from an article in the Star Bulletin don't give a lot of details, but it does mention that immigrants are covered. The legislator's comment that the funding "might not be enough to pay for the program if kids are picked up with serious medical problems" is a little troubling. They've also created a commission to explore universal health care.

Cigarette tax: $1.20 hike proposed
Also before legislators is universal medical coverage for children
By Helen Altonn

...

The Keiki Care bill agreed to yesterday would establish a three-year pilot program of health coverage for children ineligible for any state or federal health care coverage. The state and the Hawaii Medical Service Association would split costs of about $600,000 each.

A family earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level -- about $60,000 for a family of four -- would qualify, said House Health Chairman Dennis Arakaki.

"This is a big, big step for universal health," said Senate Human Services Chairwoman Suzanne Chun Oakland (D, Kalihi-Liliha) after agreement on the children's health insurance program (HB 3116).

Arakaki (D, Alewa Heights-Kalihi Valley) said 10,000 Isle children still have no health insurance.

Because of the high cost of living, many families above 200 percent of the poverty level, who are ineligible for the state's QUEST health program, cannot afford health insurance for their children, said Beth Giesting, Hawaii Primary Care Association executive director.

The Keiki Care program will be free to any families, including immigrants, she said. The $1.2 million fund might not be enough to pay for the program if kids are picked up with serious medical problems, she said. "But at least they will be getting some care."

The conferees also approved a bill that would establish a Hawaii Health Commission to develop a universal-care plan. "The goal is to provide health care for all Hawaii's people," Arakaki said. "It is a vision, but you can't get anywhere without vision."

The conferees also approved a bill that would establish a Hawaii Health Commission to develop a universal-care plan. "The goal is to provide health care for all Hawaii's people," Arakaki said. "It is a vision, but you can't get anywhere without vision.

...

Discussion Series on "Health as a Human Right"

This looks like an interesting series of discussions:

The Public Square at the Illinois Humanities Council and the Neighborhood Writing Alliance present...

HEALTH AS A HUMAN RIGHT
A Series of Community Conversations

Co-sponsors include: Health and Medicine Policy Research Group, Co-op Humboldt Park, Chicago Women's AIDS Project, AREA Chicago, Garfield Park Conservatory, The HotHouse, DuSable Museum, and the Nathalie P. Voorhees Neighborhood Center.

How can we think of health as a human right? How have the "War on Terror," Hurricane Katrina, and pending Immigration Legislation impacted our health as a nation? How does where we live effect our health, our diet, and our stress level? How would open, honest dialogue about sexuality improve our health?

The Public Square and the Neighborhood Writing Alliance present a series of conversations on public health and access to healthcare. With the participation of the leading thinkers and doers in Chicago's public health community, such as Quentin Young of Health and Medicine Policy Research Group; Courtney Bell, former director of Women's Health Center; Danny Block of Chicago State University; and Miguel Morales of Co-op Humboldt Park, we will consider not only the challenges of an inadequate healthcare system, but also the way in which issues such as geography, demographic inequalities, food distribution, sexuality, adolescent access to healthcare, and the strains of war can and should inform our larger picture of public health.

RESERVATIONS ARE REQUIRED and can be made at info@prairie.org or 312.422.5580. Please specify which of the panels you are registering for with the date. Please include the names of all guests in your reservation.

How Do We Think of Health as a Human Right?
A Conversation About War, Immigration, Universal Healthcare, and the Corporatization of Healthcare
Wednesday, May 10, 6pm-8pm
DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Place

Let's Talk About Sex and Health, Baby
A Conversation about Reproductive Health, Youth, and Sexual Identity
Saturday, May 13, 1pm-3pm
HotHouse, 31 E. Balbo

How Do We Build Healthy Places?
A Conversation About Geography, Food, and Transportation
Saturday, May 20, 2-4pm
Garfield Park Conservatory, 300 N. Central Park Ave.

Good Article on the Medicare Drug Plan

The author of the following piece lays out the problems with the Medicare Drug Benefit and calls on Congress to at least extend the May 15 deadline:

Deadline Extension Is Needed Rx For Ill-made Medicare Drug Plan
By Robert Arnow

Facts on the Massachussets Bill (from Mass-Care)

• Most uninsured people will now have to buy their own insurance without any or with very little financial support.

• The Bill will not help the underinsured or those with poor quality insurance, including those on Medicare paying high out-of-pocket costs.

• It will not attempt to reduce the costs of health insurance for individuals and businesses paying the highest prices in the world.

• 40 percent of the uninsured in Massachusetts, the 292,000 who earn more than three times the poverty level income, will be forced to purchase their own health insurance without any help or subsidies from the state. Bad insurance for someone earning three times the poverty level will cost them 20 percent of their total income.

• The Bill raises only $170 million per year in new spending to help subsidize 748,000 uninsured people in Massachusetts. This is not enough to pay for 45,000 people. All other funds used by the Bill are a shell game, most taken out of Free Care - which provides medically necessary health services for the uninsured - and moved into more wasteful plans run by commercial insurance companies.

• This Bill, which will affect the lives of hundreds of thousands, was bought and paid for by healthcare industry lobbyists. Industry lobbyists spent over $7.5 million this year to make your health care Bill work for them. Forcing uninsured people into private insurance plans will create new business and new profits for insurers, without reforming the system of waste and discriminatory health care access for Massachusetts residents.

Massachussets' bad example spreading

Politicians seem to recognize a bad idea when they see one, and are quick to jump on the bandwagon toward failure. It seems other states are looking at the Massachussets bill and seeing it as a beacon of false change. Check these two articles out:

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2 Wisconsin Plans Tout Universal Health Coverage

Massachusetts Recently Passed Similar Bill

MADISON, Wis. -- New ideas on how to cover every working Wisconsinite with health care are floating in the State Capitol.

The plans come on the heels of Massachusetts passing a bill to require everyone in that state to have health insurance. The idea is modeled after the way some states require all drivers to have auto insurance.

Now some lawmakers in Wisconsin said it's time to adopt a similar plan. ...

Read the full article.

Assembly panel approves bill for universal health care coverage

SAMANTHA YOUNG
Associated Press

SACRAMENTO - An Assembly committee approved a bill Tuesday that would mandate Californians buy health insurance coverage much like drivers are required to purchase auto insurance.

Although California voters and politicians repeatedly have rejected forcing individuals and employers to pay for a universal insurance program, lawmakers are seeking to capitalize on the momentum from a new Massachusetts law that will make that state the first in the country to establish mandatory health insurance. ...

Read the full article.