Hightower Lowdown

healthcare reform

corporate bought government stop lining your pockets!, have a conscience, and give the people TRUE health-care reform!!!
(and you wonder why healthcare cost is rising)

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2009/06/diagnosis-reform.html

Single payer HCI

JEMarks
Ref: Peter Singer, "Why We Must Ration Health Care" NYT 7-19-09.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/NYT,%20July%2019,%202009
I've been speaking out as forcefully as I can for Government based, Single Payer HCI (Medicare For All), in part to lend as much weight as I can to public demand that some form of public option get onto the table and into the final bill.
But I’ve been eager for something more than the tired and threadbare rhetoric touting the private sector perfection and Government-ineptness-at-doing-anything that adds nothing to the discussion.
The Apollo program, Hubble Telescope, Eisenhower Defense Highway System, the Office of the US Attorney General, and yes, Medicare, prove public servants as able to get things as right, and moreso, than many if not most corporations.
Thirty-five years working in both public and private sectors easily confirms this view for me; 25 of those years in one of the country’s “ten best run companies”, now a weak shadow of its former self through very late and very bad decisions. Now the banks and auto industry amplify this painfully awful history.
And, for what seems to me to be a lack of reported complaints, Medicare has a better record of not delaying or obtrusively intervening in medical procedures chosen by physicians. A local cardio-vascular technician I know cites one private payer as requiring notification of intent to use a procedure the company likes to avoid covering, even though the procedure is frequently invoked in critical if not emergency surgery situations.
The early public vs. private determinant for me was the low Medicare overhead, documented at 3-5%. Aetna overhead has been cited at 23%, with private HCI companies averaging 20-30% in an AMA report comparing US and Canadian costs, which report in conclusion advocated Government based universal coverage.
And this does not even mention the scandal that is big pharma’s price gouging, documented by multiple authors from within as well as out of that “industry”.
But Government vs. Private Pay has not seemed well enough explored to be absolutist about single payer.
Now comes Peter Singer’s lengthy commentary (Ref.), which lets a lot of sunshine in. I urge everyone to read it. Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and raises the hard questions around unlimited-health-care affordability. The idea of unlimited affordability is implicit in the public debate, and unaddressed. It literally can not be realized.
Singer speaks of how other countries have addressed this impossibility, and begun if not succeeded in finding rational and equitable approaches.
I find his thoughts about health care affordability essential to the present debate, and extremely clarifying.
One practice he reports, already in place, blends a basic universal public funding plan with supplemental private insurance.
And so I have shifted toward full public HCI, but with the availability of private HCI, with strong cost-regulatory factors built in all around.
It is a solution that needs urgent consideration. To achieve that, we must force our way past the pompous moralizing of the ideologues on both sides.
Please read singer, if only for reference.

Single Payer Healthcare

What I hear from Conservatives is that if a single payer healthcare system is put in place many businesses that currently provide some level of healthcare for their employees will drop that benefit, leaving many/most of their employees to the mercy of the single payer system. It saves them money and responsibility.

In addition, although this would provide coverage for more people that currently cannot afford healthcare, it now puts the control of the money (and that's the important thing) in the hands of our government, not in the hands of the consumer. No doubt Uncle Sam will be every bit as stingy with his payments as the current healthcare companies are, perhaps more so. Slower in their decision-making time too, no doubt. Remember, this is the same government that is creating the largest deficit in American history.

I'm no fan of the current healthcare system, but how exactly does this make health care better? It would provide the ability of some who cannot afford the current healthcare providers' coverage to get some coverage, but it's not Universal Health Care by a long shot.

What I don't see is how this plan will put the decision-making capability back in the hands of doctors. All it seems it would do is change the decision-making entity from a healthcare provider's billing department to someone in a government office who decides whether they'll pay for those treatments. I would imagine the vast majority of the people who will work in this government organization will NOT be doctors but bean-counters. Do you want whether or not you get a treatment decided by someone in a government office?

It is one thing to rail against the currently broken system, which I applaud. But I don't see the larger benefit of the single payer system. Help me understand! For those Free Marketeers who say that the Free Market will work better than a Government-operated system, I think in a true Free Market environment that might have merit. But - the problem I have with their arguments is that the current Reality is that healthcare in America does not conform to the tenets of the Free Market -- it is already a (minimally) regulated monopoly.

There has to be a better Middle Ground here. Anyone know where to find it?

Govt Health Care

If our elected officials get govt. run health care, why would they deny it from us? Is it that bad? And if it was wouldn't we have heard that by now? I definitely wouldn't mind seeing the DR. that saw Ted Kennedy or Obama.

We're doing something in Michigan too!

At a time of record unemployment and 10s of thousands of auto workers losing health insurance, Jennifer Granholm is taking the stimulus dollars meant for Medicaid and putting it in the "general fund" so she can use it for other purposes and at the same time she's CUTTING Medicaid. I guess it's pay back to all those factory workers who made the horrifically bad choice of believing their jobs would be around for life, just like it was for their parents. Sort of a going away present.

Laura

Single Payer Healthcare

Washington, Shmashington! Of course we need to keep up the pressure. And of course the "incrementalism" Jim refers to is better than nothing.

But the States are doing something also. Here in PA, we are pushing for Single Payer at the State level. Learn more about it at:

http://www.healthcare4allpa.org.

Legislation has been introduced and Gov. Rendell has said he would sign it.

A few different legislative proposals have been introduced, this one is considered to be the best and is a true Single Payer system.

Naturally, it won't be smooth and easy sailing. We have a few HMO types headquartered here (ever heard of Cigna, Aetna or Blue Cross?) who might not be as enthusiastic about it as we are.

At any rate, progressive activists here in the Keystone are plugging away at all levels!