Palin Mirrors McCain's Free Market Healthcare Fundamentalism

John McCain's selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin offers a vivid glimpse of the philosophical leanings of a Presidential candidate who bears little resemblance to the media's rapturous portrait of an independent maverick, and provides a window into the policies that a McCain presidency would promote.

While probably most evident on the issue of women's reproductive rights and the possibility that the next President could have up to three Supreme Court appointments, it is perhaps even more striking in the realm of healthcare, one of the most critical issues facing voters in November.

Gov. Palin's portfolio on healthcare, as in other areas, is thin. But her ideological orientation is abundantly clear. She is a vocal proponent of market medical care and deregulation, the path that has led to the current grave healthcare crisis. It also happens to perfectly match McCain's own prescription on healthcare.

This past January, Palin proposed and stumped for legislation to repeal Alaska's certificate of need (CON) program requiring hospitals and other healthcare providers to obtain state approval prior to expansion of certain new facilities or expanded services.

CON's were mandated by the federal government in the 1970s, as Palin herself noted in a commentary in the Anchorage Daily News in February, "to make sure healthcare facilities matched community need and provided access and quality care." Due to vociferous opposition from the free market crowd, the federal mandate was repealed in the Reagan years, and many states subsequently dropped their state programs.

In her Anchorage commentary, Palin made her views crystal clear as well, writing that eliminating her state's CON program "will allow free-market competition and reduce onerous government regulation."

But CON programs, where they still exist, have proven useful in protecting public and community-based independent hospitals by limiting cutthroat competition by wealthier corporate chains or speculators who are focused on profits not on providing care.

In Alaska, for example, attacks on the CON program are led by private boutique, specialty care clinics and surgery centers that want to cherry pick higher paying patients without having to meet federal rules to provide emergency care to all patients regardless of their ability to pay.

Like her free market fundamentalist running mate, Palin argues that increased market competition and deregulation would reduce costs, increase access, and improve quality.

However, an unleashed market, especially during the Bush years, has had the exact opposite effect on healthcare. Costs are so high that employers are dropping coverage like hotcakes and four in 10 Americans have trouble paying medical bills.

More than 70 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured; the number of uninsured dipped slightly in the most recent report, but only because the escalating economic crisis pushed millions more impoverished people into the government Medicaid program.

As for quality, the U.S. now ranks last among 19 industrialized countries in preventable deaths and has a dismal ranking in many other patient indicators.

As former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said bluntly -- and accurately -- at a healthcare forum during the Democratic convention in Denver, it's time "to destroy the myths about healthcare" starting with the one "that we have the best healthcare system in the world."

McCain's program promises more of the same, and worse. His plan includes allowing insurance companies to evade and undermine current state regulatory standards and public protections.

He'd also tax employer-sponsored healthcare benefits. That's intended to push workers to fend for themselves in the private market, with the dubious claim that the lure of more individual customers will somehow encourage insurance giants to reduce costs through increased competition.

The combined consequences will be to shift more of the healthcare cost and health risk away from insurers and employers on to the already over loaded backs of individuals and families.
As Sen. Barack Obama put it in his acceptance speech in Denver, "in Washington, they call this the "Ownership Society," but what it really means is that you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck, you're on your own. No health care? The market will fix it. You're on your own. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, even if you don't have boots. You are on your own."

That's the brutal reality of the McCain-Palin approach to healthcare.

Read more reaction from HuffPost bloggers to John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate

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Comments

[BluePride]

The question I would like introduced to the healthcare debate is WHY does your employer have the control to determine ALL healthcare choices for you?

Your employer decides:

WHO: is and is not covered.

WHEN: employees become covered (there's an ever-increasing 'probationary' status placed upon newly hired employees), the times at which they cease to be covered (e.g. working less than the stipulated required to qualify for benefits, out due to injury not work-related, job reduction, layoff, firing ).

HOW: specific procedures are or are NOT covered depending on price vs. incident . Companies actually determine specific organs they WILL and WILL not repair/rep­lace/susta­in.

WHERE: Your employer determines the locations of the delivery of your care. This delivery is not to determine your needs but rather bottom-line considerations.

WHAT: All determined by cost. Reading your employer's benefit books will show you that many of life's situations and your health needs are NOT listed or seriously resolved. Deadlines for 'pre-authorization' have typically been passed thus allowing employers to deny all future challenges.

This leaves me questioning: WHY?

I guess the 'PATIENT' has to hurt enough to care.

The current system is 'socialized medicine' without calling it that. Those insured are charged multiple times more to defray costs associated with the uninsured and under insured. There are those who betray their morals and claim workers' comp because they are working uninsured with one option: sit in an Emergency Department for hours.

[RN4MERCY]

Maverick McCain and Pistol Packin' Palin---bad for our health! How can they possibly justify their position that "competition" in health care is somehow good for people? As nurses we know it isn't, of course. Competition? As in, "the insurance company with the highest body count wins." Profit at the expense of the sick and injured is obscene, and shouldn't be tolerated in a just society.
We don't need mavericks, pistol packin' mamas, and insurance mandates. We're dying in this country because of a lack of access to heath care; 101,000 deaths due to preventable illnesses. McCain, Palin, and their posse of insurance company donors are FUNDAMENTALLY wrong. Free market competition? "For what will a man give in exchange for his soul?
Like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said, ""Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane."
At least Barack Obama is on record as saying that if our Congress will pass HR 676, (single-payer universal healthcare legislation), he will sign it. The choice is clear to me. Thank God for the freedom to exercise it!

[dwlb]

Just another reason, Sarah Palin is more of the same. More of the same radical right wing free market fundamentalism that would expose our bodies to the frigid alaskan wilderness of profiteering health care corporations preying on the most vulnerable-- the sick and injured, elderly and infants, like a pack of wolves encircling a straggling caribou calf.

By supporting the elimination of Certificate of Needs, Palin shows her abandonment of any support for health care services to be justly and equitbly distributed among the population, leaving for-profit hospital chains to their own devices to pick and choose which communities to offer healthcare services and who to cut off. Is this the politics that holds human LIFE in such high esteem?