Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Protesters Deliver a Message about Health Care—but Can Leaders Deliver?
SANTA FE, N.M. - Imagine a health care plan that covered pretty much any medical cost incurred inside or outside of a hospital, from emergency room visits to preventative care-plus dental care, mental health and substance abuse treatment, physical therapy and all the prescription drugs one can eat.
Activist group moveon.org organized rallies last week at the district offices of US Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall, both Democrats who already support “public option” health care. Photo by Caroline K Gorman. In March, US Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, introduced such a plan, the "American Health Security Act." It would automatically enroll every US citizen in a federally regulated, state-run medical insurance program-a so-called "single payer" plan.
It is not the health care plan Congress is about to pass.
Most of the generally Medicare-aged rallygoers at a July 9 health care rally held pre-printed signs demanding a "public option" plan. A few held hand-lettered "single payer" signs.
Both slogans probably read like gibberish to many passersby. Regardless, it was clear that many public option sign holders, in their heart of hearts, support a single-payer plan like Sanders.'
"You've got to take what you can get, then you go after what you want," picketer Genevieve Cervera said, after calling single payer a "lost cause."
David Pease, a Santa Fean who has also lived in England and Canada, was less fatalistic. "They keep saying a single-payer solution is off the table," Pease told the crowd. "I say if a single-payer solution is off the table, we should get rid of the table."
Sanders' plan is controversial because it would ban the sale of private health insurance that duplicates any government-funded services (although individuals and employers would still be able to purchase coverage for extra benefits).
If single payer has gotten nowhere, New Mexico's elected representatives are part of the reason why. All, in vague terms, endorse the emerging Democratic Party consensus-shaped by private hospitals and insurance companies who have billions of dollars at stake in the outcome of the debate-toward a public option plan.
Sanders' bill wound up in the 23-member Senate Finance Committee, of which US Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, is among the senior most members. Finance Committee leadership has ensured Sanders' bill will never see a vote.
Instead, that committee-as well as the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, on which Bingaman also serves-is so far backing the public option approach favored by President Barack Obama.
Such an approach maintains the status quo, except that private health insurance plans would have to compete with a new, government-run insurance program. Labor unions and business owners alike are concerned this approach may do little to lower medical costs nationwide.
Obama had hoped to sign a health care reform bill by August, when Congress takes a recess. As of July 13, that deadline was looking unlikely.
"He might as well give up if he can't get this done with 60 senators," Santa Fe health care protester Robert Baroody says of Obama. Perhaps Baroody's harsh judgment is no surprise, given that he helped run Ralph Nader's last presidential campaign in New Mexico. But such dissatisfaction was the norm among Baroody's fellow protesters outside Bingaman's office on Marcy Street.
"We voted for these people to get this job done," Cervera said.
Rally organizer Carol Nicola noted that Bingaman was slow to support even the middle-of-the-road public option plan. Why? "One could say, perhaps, lobbying influence," Nicola said.
In fairness, if New Mexico's congressional delegation has followed rather than lead in the health care debate, it's not necessarily because its members are bought and paid for. It's just as likely they simply lack influence. Bingaman is the only non-freshman of the bunch, although US Sen. Tom Udall, D-NM, served five terms in the US House.
In 2006, when he ran for re-election, Bingaman took $348,263 in donations from the health care industry-triple the average for senators elected that year.
That was an exception to the rule: New Mexico's delegation otherwise doesn't crack the top 20 when it comes to campaign contributions from medical and insurance companies. That's significant, because donors tend to target the most powerful politicians.
What follows are total campaign donations from health care interests to New Mexico's congressional delegation members over the span of their careers, as calculated by the Center for Responsive Politics at opensecrets.org.
Only Bingaman had significant insurance industry contributions, so SFR didn't list insurance contributions to the other lawmakers. For comparison's sake, the average US representative has taken $34,676 in donations from "health professionals;" the average US senator has taken $84,983.
SEN. JEFF BINGAMAN, D-NM
Rank of "health professionals" among industry contributors: 2
Total from health pros: $547,616
Rank of the insurance industry: 11
Total from insurance: $160,875
Number of New Mexico children who could've been insured for a year with the sum of those contributions: 968*
Boilerplate health care statement from website: "I strongly support a public option. The most critical elements of such a plan are that it would be established and overseen by the federal government, and made available to all Americans."
SEN. TOM UDALL, D-NM
Rank of health pros among industry contributors: 9
Total from health pros: $276,170
Children that money could've insured: 377
Interview talking points: "I'm in support of a public option. I think we need it to keep the insurance companies honest. I think we need the competition that a public option would bring," Udall tells SFR.
REP. BEN RAY LUJÁN, D-NM
Rank of health pros among industry
contributors: 9
Total from health pros: $41,050
Children that money could've insured: 56
Boilerplate: "It's time to fix this broken system that is making it difficult for families to make ends meet. Ben supports comprehensive health care reform that makes health care affordable and accessible for American families."
REP. MARTIN HEINRICH, D-NM
Rank of health pros among industry
contributors: 10
Total from health pros: $56,550
Children that money could've insured: 77
Boilerplate: "We should use our ingenuity to develop a fair, common sense plan to make sure that every American has access to high quality affordable health care."
REP. HARRY TEAGUE, D-NM
Rank of health pros among industry
contributors: 14
Total from health pros: $40,900
Children that money could've insured: 56
Boilerplate: "Harry will work to make sure every American takes responsibility for his or her health by choosing an option that is affordable and works for them. Harry also believes that in order to decrease the cost of health insurance, we must bring a new focus on prevention."
* Based on the cost of basic coverage for a person under 18 in the New Mexico Medical Insurance Pool.
SFR interns Alex Roberts and Caroline K Gorman contributed reporting.
9 Comments so far
Show AllCervera and many other Americans who have abandoned hope for single-payer are ignoring the basic negotiating principle that you need to demand a ton to end up with an pound when you are negotiating with wealthy "stakeholders".
For decades the media has been repeatedly telling us that social security will self destruct, and single-payer is a no-go. Their goal is for their audience (you and I) to turn those assertions into facts and to reduce our demands.
By demanding single-payer, we are more likley to end up with a public option that isn't totally watered down. By limiting our demand to a public option, an outcome that includes even a watered down public option is unlikely.
Assuredly the greatest threat to the health and well being of the American citizens are it's elected officials.
If single payer fails the next move has to be campaign reform and the removal of corporate pay outs to elected officials.Hopefully that would also include removal of person from corporations.
"I say if a single-payer solution is off the table, we should get rid of the table."
Yes, what does this phrase that Nancy Pelosi popularized mean? Our congress sits at a table and does business. How does something come to be part of the business being done on the table? Why is it that our concerns are not included if congress exists to represent us? That table should be overturned.
I feel I get more done writing here than to my representatives in government.
You bet! I will write to all the above! TODAY!
Good luck with that. I wrote to Bingaman and got no response. Udall at least responded but it was a vague email (I had written a letter and mailed it to DC) in which he mostly gloated about supporting S-CHIP, which doesn't help me because I don't have children. My Congressman said (when at a public forum I asked him to support HR 676) there would be "some kind of health care reform" but that it wouldn't be single payer. Then, in an email later, he said he backed Obama's plan and gloated about supporting S-CHIP.
What's this about New Mexico's representives lacking allegiance? Does that mean they feel free to act on their own? No surprise this, being that it's what royalty always does, the "What do I care what the people think, I know what's best for them" kind of thing. When will our government pay attention to us? When our government is of, for and by the people; which, as it's turned out, is attainable right now by way of our rising up en masse, whereupon, it'll be up to us, the what sort of world.
Fees paid to private insurance companies feed the payola. Shut them off.
"Can Leaders Deliver?"
Obviously not. Because they are not deliverers. They are leaders. Leaders don't deliver. Leaders lead. Usually astray. Almost always astray. So...try something different. Because the status quo doesn't work. So take the initiative, and deliver the goods, yourself. To yourself. There is no leadership role. The people don't need to be led.
The healthcare impasse is undoubtedly the most politically instructive episode in U.S. history since the Civil War.
We ourselves -- at least 70 percent of the citizenry regardless of race, ethnicity or gender -- favor enactment of the single-payer, healthcare-as-a-human-right system that has become part of the definition of the civilized world.
But the politicians we elected -- the men and women who allegedly represent us -- have now rejected the single-payer solution in a way that demonstrates more vividly than any other current event the extent to which "we the people" have become irrelevant to the U.S. political process -- no less irrelevant than the proletarians were to the grand dukes of Tsarist Russia or the sans-culottes were to the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France.
Which is, of course, the real lesson here: the fact that the U.S. experiment in constitutional democracy has failed beyond repair -- that government by, of and for the people has been subverted to nothing more than a rubber-stamp agency for the ruling class of the most tyrannosaurically greedy economic system in human history.
While this reality has grown increasingly undeniable since the U.S. became, 46 years ago, a single-party, single-purpose state -- a state dedicated solely to the perpetuation of capitalism at any cost and by any means (that is, dedicated to the absolute empowerment of the ruling class and the total subjugation of all the rest of us) -- nothing in our history exposes the associated tyrannies more vividly than the healthcare deadlock.
Thus, instead of single-payer healthcare (with its implicit recognition of healthcare as a basic human right), we are oppressed by continuation of the present, definitively barbaric, implacably capitalistic savagery: healthcare (and thus the very right to continued existence) as a privilege allocated only by wealth: the rich live; we the poor are murdered -- slain, like so many of the people of New Orleans during and after Katrina, by deliberate abandonment and neglect.
Make no mistake: the carefully constructed mechanism of that murder is the U.S. version of the Nazis’ Final Solution. And it is a Final Solution that will be meticulously preserved behind some new smokescreen of euphemisms -- its preservation a major factor in the ongoing healthcare machinations -- precisely because this is how capitalism rids itself of the people it discards as “unprofitable”: those of us who are too old or too disabled (I am both) to be exploitable for profit.
As the breathtaking and increasingly defiant arrogance of the politicians makes it ever more obvious, “we the people” have been reduced to the powerlessness of antebellum slaves. Indeed that is precisely what we are: the de facto slaves on the Big Plantation of the United Estates of America.
Nor -- again as the healthcare standoff is proving so painfully -- is there any legal means by which we can restore our democratic prerogatives, much less our lost liberty.
In these circumstances, those who self-righteously rail at us for having “abandoned hope” reveal themselves to be arrogant PollyAnnas in neurotic denial of -- or in closed-minded ignorance about -- the last 46 years of U.S. history.
But our newly acknowledged hopelessness -- perhaps the only genuine “change we can believe in” the Obama administration will ever evoke -- is not the bottomless abyss of surrender the ruling class holds it to be. As Jean-Paul Sarte discovered during the French Resistance, hopelessness is the birthplace of true freedom of action.