You can't see them. They're hidden from view and probably always will be. But the health insurance industry's big guns are in place and pointed directly at the citizens of Vermont.
Health insurers were not able to stop the state's drive last year toward a single-payer health care system, which insurers have spent millions to scare Americans into believing would be the worst thing ever. Despite the ceaseless spin, Vermont lawmakers last May demonstrated they could not be bought nor intimidated when they became the first in the nation to pass a bill that will probably establish a single-payer beachhead in the U.S.
When he signed Act 48 into law on May 27, surrounded by dozens of state residents who worked for many years to achieve universal coverage, Gov. Peter Shumlin expressed great pride in what had been accomplished.
"We gather here today to launch the first single payer system in America, to do in Vermont what has taken too long -- to have a health care (system) that is the best in the world, that treats health care as a right and not a privilege, where health care follows the individual, not the employer," Shumlin said.
The problem for Shumlin and his allies is this: It will take five years before Vermont can fully implement its new system, partly because the federal health care reform law prohibits states from undertaking more far-reaching reforms until 2017 unless granted waivers from the feds to do so. And though Vermont's Congressional delegation is on board to pursue a waiver that would let the state set up a single payer system two years from now, the insurance industry's friends in Washington are not keen to let that happen. That's because they want to use those five years to persuade Vermonters that they really don't want to go the single payer route after all.
During my 20 years as a health insurance PR executive, I was involved in numerous efforts to make the very term "single payer" toxic to most Americans. We even spent hundreds of thousands of premium dollars in 2007 to help finance the operation of a front group, called Health Care America, for the sole purpose of trashing a movie -- Michael Moore's Sicko -- that put single payer systems abroad in a favorable light. You can rest assured that the industry will spend much, much more to make sure that Vermont does not succeed.
I have observed in Vermont over the past several days just how the invisible hand of the insurance industry is working. Insurers know their efforts will be more effective if they can get others -- third party advocates, they call them -- to carry out them out. I recognized the campaign because the tactics are the same as those used in previous attempts to kill reforms insurers don't like.
Part of the strategy is to get key groups of individuals to begin raising doubts, to get Vermonters to second-guess themselves. Among the first groups the insurers have targeted are those most easily spooked -- certain business owners and physicians, especially specialists who thrive in the current system.
Last Wednesday, legislators got a sampling of what they're in for. At a hearing on creation of the state's health care exchange, or marketplace -- mandated by the federal reform law -- employers worried about losing the ability to choose from numerous competing insurers. And they worried too about not being able to shift their employees into benefit plans with high deductibles. Insurers and employers have been collaborating for the past several years in a mutually beneficial effort to shift more of us into high-deductible policies. The higher the deductible, the less insurers and employers have to pay for our care. This collaboration has been so successful that increasing numbers of American families filing for bankruptcy are, at least theoretically, insured.
At a hearing a few days earlier in Rutland, this one for health care providers, several physicians were, wittingly or not, using some of the same industry talking points I used to write for insurers' allies.
Dermatologist Dan McCauliffe was one of several doctors there who suggested that patients needed to pay more -- not less -- out of their own pocket for care. Ironically, this skin doctor joined other physician specialists in arguing that health care costs would never stabilize until patients had "more skin in the game," a term my former colleagues used frequently as we tried to spin the "advantages" of high-deductible plans. According to statistics from the American Medical Association, dermatologists are among the highest paid specialists, making on average more than $230,000.
So why do insurers care so much about Vermont? Even though Vermont is a small state where most for-profit insurers have little business, the insurers don't want a single state to go single payer. Just last week, single payer advocates in California fell just a few votes short of getting a bill to the floor of the Senate for a vote. If Vermont succeeds, California lawmakers might actually get the votes they need.
Health insurers make enormous amounts of money off of us, something they cannot do so effectively in other countries, especially Canada. The four largest insurers, United, WellPoint, Aetna and CIGNA, reported earning a combined $11 billion on nearly $220 billion in revenues last year. For years insurers have been successful in persuading Americans to believe something that is at best debatable -- that they play a useful role in the U.S. health care system. They are nervous that if Vermont proves to the rest of the country that health insurers are about as useful as teats on a boar, they might have to figure out another way to make a few billion bucks.
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A Massachusetts woman (who lost a great job with insurance) got cancer while uninsured. She HATED living in the "liberal" culture and did not support Obamacare. But in Mass. she could access care while uninsured.
I said, "Did you take the treatment?" She paused and said "Yes."
The conservative from Mass.took the medical care to try to save her own life because"Romneycare" provided a way for unemployed people to access care. Why did she abandon her ideology? Because access to care became REAL -- not some ideological discussion.
Talk is cheap. Would you choose to save your own life if you were unemployed and uninsured? Let's get real with ourselves.
Art As Social Inquiry
Germany understood this when they instituted a universal health care system before WW II. Their soldiers were healthier and fewer were rejected for health problems. On the other hand, England rejected many of their men for duty due to health problems.They did not have universal health care.
Doctors around the world who live in the more developed countries and deliver socialized medicine enjoy life-styles comparable to our doctors. My daughter lived in Japan with 2 different families who were medical doctors. They lived very comfortably and enjoyed nice vacations to Egypt and elsewhere.
One of the doctors was a OBGYN and another was a neurosurgeon who was trained in Germany.
There lives were more comfortable than the little shop keeper family she lived with, of course, but they did not appear to live the stressful lives our doctors do,why? They didn't have the big offices to maintain.One worked out of clinic and the other worked out of a hospital near by. Our doctors could learn from them.
I come from a family of docs, and the truth is that while they make an excellent salary they also work incredibly long hours, have a very stressful job, and are saddled with very high debt starting out. People talk about wanting teachers to be paid more, but doctors should make less? I'm not a big supporter of insurance companies and I understand the effectiveness of propaganda but I actually did look at the data before deciding I don't support a single-payer initiative.
Doctors have been undermining socialized health care since Dr.John J.A. O'Reilly in 1919 was calling universal health care insurance "UnAmerican, Unsafe, Uneconomic, Unscientific, Unfair and Unscrupulous".
The AMA has made universal health care insurance into question of "Americanism vs socialism" but at times it was also cast as Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazisim,or Communism,depending upon which negative imagine you wanted to evoke to the public.
Senator Mitch McConnell accused President Obama and his allies of "an audacious effort to Europeanize the country". In 1798, John Adams signed an "Act for the relief of sick and disabled Seaman" to allow for the care of merchant and naval seaman. This was no "unAmerican" act.
It was the right thing to do.
When doctors start looking after their patients as well as they look after their own interests, this will be a better country. I don't resent the wealth of doctors since many of them have been my husbands clients, but the greatest obstacle to their financial well-being has often been their own lack of good judgment in handling money. Wealth doesn't necessarily guarantee good judgment any more than intelligence does.
We would have a single payer system now if it wasn't for Fox,Clear Channel,Republicans,conservatives and especially tbaggers.
It's time to outlaw lying on our radios and TV.
Really Comrade. Self-sufficient? Really? Self-sefficient? Conservatives,Republicans and tbaggers wouldn't know self-sefficient if it hit them in the ***.
Wall Street well over $20 trillion dollars bailout and counting. Comrade!
GE trillions in bailout money. Trillions. Comrade!
Exxon Mobil billions in bailout money. Comrade!
If you don't like Vermont there's plenty of conservative state you can move to like Texas,South Carolina,Arizona...all States that are broke,have no health care,very high taxes,very high State fees,very weak labor laws,terrible schools,high pollution...
Good luck Comrade.
Keep watching Fox and listening to Clear Channel (Romney Radio) and keep doing exactly what Rush Limbaugh tells you to do. Comrade.
Get the profit out of health care.
It is if you are easily scared and wear blinkers....
If you are more concerned with a healthy bottom line, than a healthy paitent, then you are the one who is sick.
California's legislature twice passed single-payer health care when they knew Republican Gov. Schwarzenegger would veto it.
Now with Democrat Jerry Brown back as Governor, the insurance industry is pulling out all the stops to prevent SB810 (single-payer health care) from passing again when we have a Governor who would probably sign it.
What is most sad is that the Democratic State Senators who are not voting for this bill this year who supported this legislation in the past represent some of the poorest districts who's residents would most benefit from this needed legislation.
Just think of all the headaches that could be solved with this one line. The whole komen thing, gone, women would have access to their own doctors for screening. Planned parenthood, abortions only. The funding would be clear. The Obama contraceptive regulation, unnoticed because religious employers would not have anything to do with health care. The current system has as much to do with controlling people (women especially) than cost. If costs were what conservatives were worried about, we would get single payer so fast it would make your head spin.
If you have gone to a dermatologist lately, they are the most frustrating, high cost medical care you can get. They REFUSE to write a perscription for a generic drug, manipulate your condition to fit their speciality, and try to sell you expensive crap medicine, that is just repackaged generics with made in china plastic attachments or applicators. It is very very difficult to find a good one.