The Current Health Care “Reform” Facing Congress
by: Rabbi Michael Lerner on March 1st, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Image courtesy of FlickrCC/janinsanfran.
Steffie Woolhandler’s “A faulty prescription for reform” and John Nichols’s “The Missing Voices at the Healthcare Summit” both show why it’s a huge mistake to be “realistic” in reforming the health care system.
In order to be realistic, President Obama and the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate refused to give any attention to a “Medicare for Everyone” approach — the only approach that could actually solve some of the major problems facing health care in the United States. As long as our health care is not about “care” but about profits, there is little chance of arriving at a health care system that will actually serve the needs of Americans. This was the same mistake made by President Clinton in his approach, and it is fast becoming a major reason why Democrats may lose their congressional majority in 2010: people don’t trust a government whose interventions often seem more oriented toward the needs of corporations than the needs of ordinary American citizens, and the only force that is really articulating the resentment people feel at having to pay more and more taxes to fund programs that largely serve corporate power is the anti-government right wing. We need to build a counter-force to that, one which is truly understanding of why people would be opposed to government spending when it is not serving their interests, and the health care plan now being supported by Obama is likely to intensify this right-wing reactionary response to a real problem: the problem of corporate greed and the profit motive distorting medicine and making health about profits not about caring.
Woolhandler writes:
President Obama, at today’s summit and in his proposal earlier this week, has embraced a deeply-flawed bill — the Senate bill — as his model for reform. That bill would leave about 24 million people uninsured in the year 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office…. Their proposal is based on handing over $440 billion in taxpayers’ money to the private health insurance industry, the cause of the problem in the first place. Their rationale is to subsidize purchase of the insurers’ shoddy policies, which are riddled with gaps like ever-increasing co-pays, deductibles and uncovered services. Decades of experience show that the private insurance industry can neither control health care costs, nor give American families the health coverage they need. Many states already regulate insurance premiums and coverage, so merely regulating private insurers is not the solution. Moreover, the Senate plan to send $440 billion into the coffers of the profit-driven insurance industry will give them even more financial and political power to block future reform.
And Nichols questions calls for “a rational discussion about whether Obama is going far enough” to counter all the Republican grumbling about Obama “going too far”:
Why not consider not just Republican alternatives to President Obama’s proposal but the fix that Obama, himself, once suggested (as a 2004 U.S. Senate candidate) was the essential point of beginning for a just and equitable health-care system in a developed nation? Why not let the dozens of House and Senate members who support a Medicare-for-All, single-payer system into the discussion? Why not let House Judiciary Committee chair John Conyers, D-Michigan, Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and other members of Congress ask the questions that should be asked about Obama’s compromise plan?
The current health care situation makes clear why the first and foremost task of a movement to heal and transform our society is to change thinking — not just to ask “what can be accomplished next week in Washington?” So while the Network of Spiritual Progressives is an activist voice for social justice, our primary focus is not on passing some specific piece of (inevitably flawed) legislation, but rather to use each specific struggle to help people realize that the world we want cannot be accomplished till we are willing to replace the culture of money and power with a culture of love and generosity. And the reason that this is not impossible or utopian (despite it being very, very difficult to achieve) is that most people in our society actually would prefer to live in a world based on kindness, justice, ecological sanity, love, generosity, and caring for each other’s well-being.
We urge YOU to call your U.S. senators and congressional leaders this next week to demand that they support a health care reform that really is a reform and not just a giveaway to the insurance industry (check out recent statements made by leaders of the Physicians for a National Health Plan). Call 1 202 224 3121, and then tell them the name of your senators and your congress person. When you reach that office, tell them you want Medicare For Everyone, not a deeply compromised plan that may soon turn millions of working people into haters of government. If you feel you need to know more about what a rational plan would look like, click here.
There were around 100 people at the church my husband and I attended this Sunday. Out of that 100 there were at least three people who have been terribly impacted by our current health care system, which Republicans continue to tout as “the best in the world.”
One man had lost a cousin who had died because he did not have access to regular health care. The disease this cousin died of could have been treated.
My friend Anna died of lung cancer, in part I believe, because for the last decade she has not been able to get health insurance.
A woman had to drag her adult son to the emergency room to treat his out of control heart. Her son has no health insurance and is in dire financial straits and even though he’d been suffering with this condition for a while, he didn’t want to see a doctor because he didn’t know how he would pay for it.
I’ll add my mother to the mix, who died after breaking her ankle a few years ago. She had a “Medicare Advantage” plan and was told that she would have to pay out of pocket for being in a nursing home while she recovered because her plan didn’t cover her. She became so upset that her condition worsened immediately. She died a few weeks later.
Now I’ll add my father. After my mother died he became terribly ill. His “Medicare Advantage” doctors were literally killing him, having misdiagnosed him and ignoring my pleas to reconsider his treatment. When we removed him from their care and got the VA to take care of him, they properly diagnosed him and switched him to completely different treatment. He would have died if we had continued to let the insurance company determine his care.
Enough already! We need to have REAL competition.
While acknowledging the significant bias against the Green Party, Universal Single Payer has been a part of our platform forever. I’m encouraged to see more and more progressives (including anti-Green progs) recognizing the need for a different bottom line coupled with the need to be principled rather than “realistic”…. from where I sit in an extremely hyperbolic and inverted, increasingly irrationally bizarre world and culture (where “newspeak” is now mainstream conventional wisdom), often times what’s actually “realistic” ends up being the action that’s based on principles which are rooted in that different bottom line of love and generosity.
Since 1993, I feel like advocating for this better bottom line, and for universal single payer has become an exercise in exhaustion. But just when I’m ready to pack it in and quit, R. Lerner is there to help me once more pick up the phone, send the emails and keep talking to people in the battle for hearts and minds trying to forge the foundations of a world that could be rather than the really horrific one the world is.
All is not lost. The campaign for single payer health care is alive and well and growing at the state level. Support in the Pennsylvania Legislature for Sena te Bill 400/House Bill 1660 is growing within both parties.
The Senate Banking and.Insurance Committee, chaired by a Conservative Republican held a very successful hearing on the bill. The State Democratic Committee last month unanimously endorsed the bill and an Economic Impact Study of the bill. As of today 30 of 50 Senators have signed on in support of the EIS. Cities and Counties across the state, hammered by health care premiums for employees and retirees, have endorsed the bill.
Other states are also making real progress. It is important to get the Congress to pass Dennis Kucinich’ effort to allow states to initiate single payer programs which could serve as models for a national program. The profit-driven system we have is driving us into the ground. Sooner or later it will have to go.