The Dummy's Guide to Healthcare Reform

Nurses are worried that it might be time to call a Code Blue on Washington's healthcare reform.

What started as a response to the healthcare crisis has morphed into a full-fledged healthcare reform crisis. The worse these proposals get, the more likely it becomes that our "cure" will do more harm than good.

In just the last few days of Washington horse-trading, we've seen the following:

The Secretary of Health claims we'll have uninsured for many years.

Costs will continue to spiral out of control.

Many employees might lose coverage thanks to the deal. Those lucky enough to keep coverage will still face "recision," or retroactive cancellation of their policies, if they get sick.

The administration is pondering an outright ban on "single-payer" reforms

In other words, this healthcare bill is in full cardiac arrest.

But it's not too late.

Early on, the administration and Congress made a political judgment call: let's not go too far with healthcare reform. Let's tinker. Let's do what we can, while trying to keep the private, for-profit health insurance industry at the center of our system.

This fateful error left Congress with the same problem they faced in 1993,and in fact all the way back to 1933. How can you extend coverage to all people when you first act to protect the hundreds of billions of dollars of overhead and profits enjoyed by the insurance industry?

Or, as Sen. Bernie Sanders put it, "How do you get to the root of a problem when you fail to take on the private health industry?"

The simple fact is you don't. It's one or the other: insurance overhead or patient care. You can't cure lung cancer with more cigarettes--and you can't cure our healthcare system with more insurance industry profits.

But it's not too late.

Washington is considering a series of proposals to save this touch-and-go healthcare reform bill. This bill is hooked up to the heart monitors, and they're testing to see what will stop it from flat-lining.

Finally, all the options are on the table. One Senator suggested a series of local co-ops to compete against the insurance industry. Another one suggested every American simply be saddled with a mandate to purchase something, anything, so long as it's called health insurance--no matter the cost or quality. It's in this atmosphere that administration spokespeople are going around assuring the insurance industry that nothing in their plan is a Trojan horse for single-payer, and it might be banned outright. Kind of like the "Defense of Marriage Act" for healthcare: the Defense of Insurance Act.

All wrong, and all doomed to fail.

Can I suggest we re-read The Dummy's Guide to Healthcare Reform?

First of all, you're not going to get a single Republican vote for this bill, so stop trying. Pass a good, honest, workable, smart, humane bill--and dare them to vote against it. The GOP represents the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations who are rolling in money as a result of our healthcare crisis. Why would they want to solve it?

Secondly, pass a bill that actually works. Every other industrialized nation in the world enjoys better healthcare at a lower cost than us, because their care is privately-delivered, but publicly-financed. It's called the single-payer system, and it's not an experiment. Our system is, however, a unique American experiment giving unprecedented powers to private insurance corporations, and this experiment has failed.

We don't need any more placebos or toxins. If we want to save this process of healthcare reform, it's time to really put all ideas on the table, and call in the experts from the Congressional Budget Office and elsewhere to score and debate the numbers, including the single-payer reforms succeeding in nearly every other industrialized democracy. It's time to come to terms with the fact that because single-payer reforms are the most likely to work, they're also the most politically viable.

Otherwise, our healthcare reform will soon need healthcare reform.

Comments

[suescannon]

Usually long before my patient gets to the point of cardiac arrest I have made corrections: added medications, checked electrolyte status, and most of all listened to and believed what my patient was reporting. If he says, "I'm having chest pain,' I believe him.

We are telling Congress that the tinkering they are doing to our health care system will not solve our problems. We are telling them that the private health insurance companies are a big part of the problem and that they need to be taken out of the equation. But Congress will not listen.

I fear the prognosis will not be good until Congress does listen to America's nurses and doctors and all who are not involved in the greed of the system. And when they do finally listen they will hear SINGLE PAYER. May they then act on what they hear!

[Spoons]

Why does DC think the problem is the solution? How stupid do they think we are?

Inviting the health unsurance industry to the health care justice table is like inviting the KKK to help us solve race-based Civil Rights problems, or inviting Al Qaeda's input on our National Security. Its interests are contrary and perverse to ours. By price-gouging healthy Americans and denying often desperately-needed medical care to sick ones, it has created (and proven to be) the OPPOSITE of a workable model for consumers. The health unsurance industry is unaffordable, unsustainable, unreliable, immoral, extremely harmful, overly-expensive, and totally unnecessary.

How much more eidence do we need?

Democrats are missing a huge opportunity to come off historically looking like moral heroes and fiscal geniuses. Instead it looks as though they're going to look pretty darned bought-and-sold-out silly.

[RN4MERCY]

Great post, Rose Ann. Thank you!
The insurers and their handmaiden politicians must think we're dummies. America's RNs and Physicians were hand-cuffed and arrested during recent Congressional hearings for protesting unethical and immoral placebo politics. We remain firmly convinced, by evidence-based health policy science that a single payer national health plan is the only remedy for the systemic defects that are causing our patients to suffer and die.

Would that President Obama, Kathleen Sibelius, Max Baucus, Nancy Pelosi, and Ted Kennedy and other like-minded Democrats consider their remarks and rhetoric on single-payer from the perspective of the other great social movements and come away with a profound sense of shame? For example:
"We can't end slavery because it's the system that many people are used to; most employers in the South depend on slavery."
"We can't end segregation in schools, because some people want to keep what they have; let's have a public option of separate but equal. Americans want a choice."
"All we hear is votes for women, votes for women, votes for women; well, it's not going to be votes for women! If we were starting from scratch..."

When it comes to human rights, and especially the right to healthcare, rationing based on ability to pay for medically necessary treatment is wrong! What's so complicated about ordinary equality? What part of equal access, equal opportunity, and equal protection under the law don't these politicians understand?