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Today's Top News
2.6 Million New American Jobs and a Working Healthcare System…Who Knew?
The nation's most trusted
healthcare professionals published their long-awaited study this week that
shows 2.6 million new jobs created following the implementation of a single
payer - publicly funded, privately delivered -- healthcare system. The
National Nurses Organizing Committee and California Nurses Association study
also found that establishing a national single-payer style healthcare system
would provide a major stimulus for the U.S. economy by infusing $317 billion in
new business and public revenues, with another $100 billion in wages into the
U.S. economy.
Wow. While the new Obama healthcare transition team works on how to expand and protect the for-profit health insurance industry and mandate that uninsured Americans purchase coverage, nurses stayed on the side of patient advocacy and honoring the President-elect's vision of healthcare as a basic human right . For many years, many leaders, including Obama, have told Americans that single-payer is the right thing to do but that it is not politically feasible. It's too hard to make those pesky special interests take a back seat to human rights, they muse.
Single payer = 2.6 million jobs -- $317 billion in new business and public revenues -- $100 billion in wages
Nurses went to work and asked more questions to answer the call the Obama team put out to "think big" and send us the ideas you have. It's a ground-up sort of listening effort, the transition team promised. The nurses have long battled for single-payer healthcare reform on the basis of patient care, patient safety and the moral imperative that their profession demands. So taking on the task of giving this President the information he needs to back up what he knows is right was a natural undertaking.
So, now in light of these study results, if there remain those who argue a single payer system is not politically feasible, it will certainly be because of a specific and direct desire to keep the profit motive in healthcare and not the desire for a healthier and more secure nation.
Single payer = 2.6 million jobs -- $317 billion in new business and public revenues -- $100 billion in wages
Just this week, we learned from news reports out of New York that United HealthGroup, the darlings of the AARP insurance system, have been bilking their policy holders out of millions of dollars as they used tainted figures to pay claims and left patients to pay out-of-pocket costs higher than they should. United HealthGroup will be fined $50 million but they aren't the only insurance giant bilking the public. A representative of the American Medical Association even admitted this case was only the tip of the iceberg. Insurance companies are not there for the good of the insured - they are there to make big bucks.
So, why in the world would any President interested in the human right to healthcare want citizens to suffer under these unscrupulous and greedy companies? The reality is, it will take courage and great leadership to truly address the special interests that play in healthcare funds just like they did and do in hedge funds and sub-prime mortgages and other risky financial instruments. As the nurses studied how to make the system better and revitalize the economy in the process, the financial giants are embracing the health insurance giants and developing all sorts of financial tools to capture the amazing gift of forced consumption of their products that passage of a flawed healthcare reform measure would deliver.
Single payer = 2.6 million jobs -- $317 billion in new business and public revenues -- $100 billion in wages
It's hard to imagine the big players on Wall Street would be giving so generously to the inaugural celebration, as reported in the Wall Street Journal this week, unless they remained perfectly confident of the promises made to them. Healthcare reform is being drafted and planned and vetted through carefully edited listening instruments aimed at enrichment of the power brokers who will sell the insurance and the financial tools from which they will profit wildly. The costs of this sort of effort will be enormous - subsidies from taxpayers to purchase private, for-profit insurance? That's a chunk of change. Another chuck of our change going to people who don't operate in our best interests.
But single payer reform, the nurses explained to the listening Obama team members, would make a huge and positive economic impact for all Americans... well, perhaps except for the CEOs of those insurance and financial industry giants salivating so anxiously as they watch their multi-billion dollar bail-out take shape framed as healthcare reform. But there is another way.
"Through direct and supplemental expenditures, healthcare is already a uniquely dominant force in the U.S. economy," said Don DeMoro, lead author of the study and director of the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy, the NNOC/CNA research arm.
"However, so much more is possible. If we were to expand our present Medicare system to cover all Americans, the economic stimulus alone would create an immense engine that would help drive our national economy for decades to come," DeMoro said.
Single payer = 2.6 million jobs -- $317 billion in new business and public revenues -- $100 billion in wages
So, the nurses cared enough to look at the whole reform picture, and they have found an amazing and exciting result. Doing the right thing for one another will also be doing the right thing for our nation. We need not sacrifice our human rights any longer in order to keep a flawed and dangerous insurance industry making huge profits.
And the really good news? The nurses were welcomed as healthcare policy "stakeholders" by the Obama team and the study is in their hands. Surely, the chance to do what is right and what is just will prove an attractive choice for a President who has seen what injustice has done to so many people and who tells us he understands.
Read the whole study Here.
Comments
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38 Comments so far
Show AllA Working Healthcare System? Who must we disembowel to get this?
Humbaba-Hello, we would have to disembowel,
1. The Insurance Thieves ad their Legions of Lobbyists.
2. The Pharmaceutical Rapists and their Minions in DC.
3. The American Medical Association-It will be a cold day in Hell when M.D.Thieves making a million dollars a year want to change THAT system. Question? Under a fair system could they make that?
I'm an Obama supporter but not blind. To one or more of these three groups, most politicians have sold their soul and allegiance. 2/3rd's, easy. If Obama tries to change this he can, but only if he deftly gets America behind him.
And it would be hard, starting with, "So you want SOCIALIZED medicine" from the right-wing spin masters in the MSM.
But he better try.
Exactly, unless all three of those evils are overcome we're going to be stuck with the system we've got. The one that costs more than any other medical system yet places us 38th on the World Health Organization list.
Take the money from the defense budget.
This is something we have all known for a long time.
Why not take the money from defense if needed, military spending can be cut and produce a better military.
Truth is, institurting a single payer system would pay for itself in the saving's from the old system.
Thomas More:OK by me.
NYCartist
Lets do it then!
"While the new Obama healthcare transition team works on how to expand and protect the for-profit health insurance industry and mandate that uninsured Americans purchase coverage, nurses stayed on the side of patient advocacy and honoring the President-elect's vision of healthcare as a basic human right"
That's what it comes down to:
a basic human right vs. protecting the for-profit health insurance industry
nurses vs. parasites
our president-elect siding with our better or worse angels.
Too bad we'll never get anything like it from Obama and Co. They want to model something along the lines of the Massachusetts system - mandatory health insurance for all.
Yea and most of us still won't be able to afford. Do you know how much it cost for a family of two to maintain COBRA a week. Let me put it to you this way I would be handing over my unemployment check and some. Last I checked Obama want to give the people who can't afford insurance a two thousand dollar a year credit. That wouldn't even begin to pay for basic health insurance. I was paying that much of my share when I had a job.
Rickster
Obama is going to:
-fix healthcare
-create millions of jobs
-fix the housing crisis
-fix the economy
-bring peace on earth
-close Guantanamo
-stop global warming
...and on the seventh day, he is going to rest
Tough work to keep all those promises to the people who deserve basic human rights...
Donna Smith, American SiCKO
Donna Smith:way to go! Great article. Happy New Year wishes to you and wishes for continued good work. Thanks. (I remember your holiday time articles on CD.) Shall I assume that unemployed people can be in single-payer coverage,too? It would be a rotten idea to exclude anybody.
Everybody in, nobody out.
Donna Smith, American SiCKO
"So, why in the world would any President interested in the human right to healthcare want citizens to suffer under these unscrupulous and greedy companies? The reality is, it will take courage and great leadership to truly address the special interests that play in healthcare funds just like they did and do in hedge funds and sub-prime mortgages and other risky financial instruments."
"It will take COURAGE and great leadership" -- COURAGE - the thing that Kucinich had in plenty -- but, sadly, not Obama - and that's why the corporate world chose him over Kucinich.
truthseeker58
"So, why in the world would any President interested in the human right to healthcare want citizens to suffer under these unscrupulous and greedy companies? The reality is, it will take courage and great leadership to truly address the special interests that play in healthcare funds just like they did and do in hedge funds and sub-prime mortgages and other risky financial instruments."
Excellent comment! The truth in small.
"and that's why the corporate world chose him over Kucinich."
What's really sad about it is the American people bought in to it. Kucinich wasn't electable because the corporations said he wasn't and the American people bought it.
Rickster
Yes, and cut military spending. Shut down the Empire. Close overseas military bases. Reduce spending on weapons.
The nurses are leading the way. We must get behind them. It might mean disemboweling some corporate institutions.
I see this as a spinoff of the shock doctrine. Seize the moment of crisis to do good, as FDR did.
Hello? For how many years have we been pushing for this? Of COURSE it will create jobs and make health care affordable - and yes, if this is socialized medicine, you bet we want it, and high time, too.
A totally comprehensive, single-payer, private physician system that covers absolutely everybody need not cost the general taxpayers a red cent. I can prove it. The enormous savings come from 1) the billions and billions of excess overhead that now go to profits, and 2) the requirement that those with large medical expenses, and high incomes, must pay something toward their care. Please write to me for the detailed plan jerepst@att.net. . . . I have costed this out reasonably thoroughly, it is clearly viable.
J. Epstein
I am a huge supporter of single-payer universal health care. I moved from the US to Britain (which doesn't have a very good health system) and I would never move back! It is so very nice to go see a doctor whenever you need to and not have to hassle with any forms, claims, or payments.
I am sorry though, but what you say is wrong.
EVERY country with nationalized health care pays for it out of the people's pockets.
The western nations do it with a tax. The communist nations do it by not paying people anything and promising to supply all your basic needs for you so that you don't need paying (you work for the collective state, the state takes care of you....I know I know..that's not what happens in fact, but our western societies are far from 'free' as well that's not the point, the point is they pay too.)
There is a simple and fundamental reason for this.
You can never EVER spend enough on health care. Period.
People do not want to die and they will beg and scream for everything you can throw at them to cling to those extra seconds of life. The resource limit is truly a black hole.
In the USA the triage used to decide who gets the care is based entirely on money and the illness itself is irrelevant, indeed it might even be made-up.
In Britain visiting an Accident and Emergency ward is like watching an episode of MASH. People who come in bleeding all over the floor get seen right away, even if they clearly have no funds.
But despite this system, which is about the least expensive in Europe, it does NOT pay for itself. We all still have to pay for it. But in the USA you pay more, far more, the money goes to the insurance industry and you also pay with your health.
"In Britain visiting an Accident and Emergency ward is like watching an episode of MASH. People who come in bleeding all over the floor get seen right away, even if they clearly have no funds."
That's the way it is in the USA also. I've actually had to wait for care while accidents victims got taken care of. That's just the way it should be. The more life threating the injury should determines who get cared for first.
Rickster
Just imagine if america did all the right things as already so clear need to be done - including of course "shutting down empire", and all other wasteful, costly, exploitative institutions :
the REAL WEALTH OF NATIONS -- that of america's : its OWN PEOPLE -- would be freed to truly realize for ALL the "american dream" of UNbelievable prosperity, justice, and decency and humanity...rather than this RATRACE , GREEDY, SELFISH , FEARFUL, INSECURE and UTTERLY BANAL and CORRUPT society it has become.
OK Everybody! Transfer article to your email account
Fwd it to Conyers.
Fwd it to Ted Kennedy
Fwd it to Obama Transitions team
Fwd it to your Senators and Congress people
Fwd it to you State reps.
& do it once a day for thirty (30) days
& if nothing happens keep forwarding...
I have just been presented with a bill for $136.00, for a walkin visit to get a perscription renewed, that required a blood test. I have Medicare Insurance.
I have paid for Medicare for 57+ years. I currently pay for Medicare out of my SS check. Medicare does NOT cover any of my medical needs, the above, the perscription, vison care, dental care.
So much for Medicare!!!
No Medicare really doesn't pay very much for the people who need it most. I know a person who is spend their entire SS check every month and with Medicares help is still owing money for medical bills.
Medicare for all as it now stands is not a viable solution.
Rickster
Although I strongly support Single payer Medicare for all, realistically
it will ultimately cut a lot of unproductive jobs. All those clerks, Administrators,
Call Center people in Drs. Offices, Hospitals, Insurance companies will mostly be out of work. There won't be a need for a couple "Insurance specialists" for every Drs Office to wrestle with Health Insurance companies for payments. There will still be a need for some to deal with Medicare payments but not nearly at the current level.
And there won't be the need for the enormous army of clerks and others and in particular hugely paid Corporate executives mostly paid to deny medical payments.
But there will be MORE need for productive healthcare professionals to provide the
medical care now more open to all. However even this if it leads to
better preventive care should be more productive and will probably reduce
crisis medical care demand.
Numerous studies have shown that European countries are as productive as the US
even though they have medical care, pensions, shorter work weeks, etc.
I wonder if the greatly improved productivity of their healthcare system unencumbered by the 30% corporate insurance bureaucratic waste has a lot to do with that.
Of course the other reason for increased productivity in Europe is not having
the gargantuan $1 Trillion war waste spending of the US...
Another major source of unproductive wasted labor and resources..
Everyone,
STOP! A single-payer plan will NOT increase employment. It will decrease it, but that's not a reason to forgo one. Where do you think that the billions of dollars to be saved "from the insurance industry" will come from? Well, yes, 20% will come from profits, but the other 80% will come from all the people who administer the plans. Of course some of them will be needed by the single-payer system, but for instance there will need to be only one I/T department for the entire system. It will be bigger than any one of the hundreds of existing ones, but absolutely positively smaller than the sum of all of them. The same is true for the finance and accounting departments, a not insignificant portion of any insurance provider.
Some percentage of the claims adjusters will be needed by a single-payer plan, but the truth is a government plan IS likely to have less rigorous cost-controls. It's hard for politicians to adopt rules which end in the death of some constituents. The survivors are likely to vote for "Anyone But ". As a result of a more permissive will mean fewer calls from unhappy members angrily protesting or begging for a change in a determination. So, fewer call center operators will be needed.
Finally, there will be fewer administrative staff required by the care providers. I think we can all assume that no attempt to make doctors and nurses employees of a National Health Service a la England will occur. Doctors will still be able to form for-profit partnerships and LLC's as in Canada. But those care provider organizations will themselves need fewer administrative staff, because there will be less paperwork to prepare and monitor. Part of President-elect Obama's health care reform plans is digitization of all medical procedure and history records. The actual care providers -- the doctors and nurses when recording what they did to and for a particular patient -- become the procedure coders in a fully electronic system. The only administrative support needed is to apply payments to the proper account.
Finally, please remember that health insurance is one of the top 10 sectors of the economy. Large providers are major elements of the S&P 500 and a fairly recession resistant portion of millions of peoples' retirement plans. Companies like UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint, CIGNA, Aetna, Health Net, and PacifiCare will simply go away; they will no longer have any value.
So, please do not think that adopting a single-payer system will increase employment. It will improve health care in America and make it available to every person. It WILL lower costs but at the certain cost of millions of jobs directly and indirectly. Perhaps the increase of 2.5 million nurses will be realized, and some of them will be nurses who now serve as claims adjusters for private health insurers. But the losses in the industry directly and in households employed in it will at least offset the gains in direct care.
"So, please do not think that adopting a single-payer system will increase employment."
anandakos, you seem very well versed with what will hopefully be one day the "old system". That's the problem--you may be too well versed. That is, you make the classic mistake of basing your arguments on and constraining your thinking to merely what is.
Yes, I find that the other side tells half the story and wants to make that the definitive argument against single payer. Half truths avail us nothing at this point. We need honesty and all that transparency the Obama folks have promised us. All of it.
Donna Smith, American SiCKO
Hello Donna,
I get the sense from some of these comments here and others like them that one of the excuses useful to merely extending the current corrupt system of healthcare to include all will be that by not doing so we will lose jobs connected to that system.
In other words, in order to not lose the jobs mentioned above, we're supposed to prop up and keep running an efficiently inferior, wasteful and corrupt system which actually decreases economic prosperity, opportunity and jobs--writ large throughout the greater economy--so that we don't lose... jobs? Huh?
This sort of constrained thinking has less to do with pragmatism and more to do with a kind of mindset similar to the fatalistic, narrow-minded, twisted logic that was practiced in the Soviet Union for years.
Losing jobs connected to a corrupt system becomes necessary when that corrupt system causes even more jobs to be lost or not created. And losing your life because of that corrupt system, as 18,000+ innocent people do per year, is even worse.
Call it deadly inefficiency or just efficiently deadly--it's the half of the story they leave out.
Sicko,
I SAID "but that (the loss of jobs) is not a reason not to forgo one (a single payer system)". Re-read the first paragraph of my post with your paranoia glasses on the table beside you.
All of the wonderful jobs you predict will come from your $1,000 per month not spent on health care premiums, multiplied by millions of people, will be to some degree offset by the thousands of dollars not spent by the people who administer the plans today and who will not have jobs in the new system, multipled by hundreds of thousands.
Look, I've been a progressive since February 7, 1965 when I walked out on Nelson Rockefeller at the 100th Anniversary celebration at Cornell University chanting "End the war in Vietnam, bring the troops home". Not that he could have done so, of course, but it was one of the first anti-war demonstrations.
I worked in a genuine collective natural foods wholesale warehouse company with full consensus decision making for three years, and I've sat-in in uncompleted reactor pits. I'm not a shill for the insurance companies.
But we all need to remember that the "inefficiency" in the private for-profit health insurance system is largely represented by human beings doing jobs to whatever level of competency they can manage.
TANSTAAFL. Making such a serious change in our economy WILL be painful and disruptive to millions of people who are stakeholders in the existing system. WHAT IS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT THAT? You sound a bit like Dick Cheney when he says "So what?" Ideology always must be tempered by human kindness; we've just spent eight years in an uncontrolled experiment unwittingly designed by its perpetrators to demonstrate exactly that.
All this economic realism doesn't mean we shouldn't do a single-payer system. It just means we shouldn't be painting pink and aqua butterflies on what will be a wrenching process for lots of innocent people.
Respectfully, you are not correct... and the fear mongers who want to show that single payer will cause so much job loss are just flat wrong.
When I take my own family as an example, if my resources were freed up to the tune of more than $1,000 each month that I would not have to pay in premiums to for-profit insurance companies, co-pays deductibles, finance company charges for bills and payments made on credit, etc., I would undoubtedly spend my resources in other ways in this economy. Multiply these decisions millions of times.
Seems pretty damn similar to sending Americans stimulus checks to brighten economic activity -- or was that a lie?
The ripple effect of millions and millions of people doing the same would be incredible. Exponentially so.
I love health IT as part of what we must do. But we are one helluva long way from one IT system for the whole country in healthcare. If you are talking about the financial folks getting ready to capture us all upon admission to the hospital, print our armbands with credit scores and available lines of credit for our out-of-pocket costs, then you'll love the IT being embraced now. We need better IT system for the medical records side, but we are not even close to standardizing that.
And after learning even more of the dirt on the private insurers like United HealthGroup bilking patients for at least the last 14 years, leaving people stuck with bills that eventually went to collection, forced garnishments and bankruptices, I am perfectly willing to have those companies retooled to insure something else besides human lives -- and human rights. They do not deserve the enrichment they would be handed under full insurance coverage system.
Donna Smith, American SiCKO
I am hardly saying that Single Payer is not the best solution - actually for anyone who values productivity and efficiency in actually delivering Health Services the
fact that it would actually CUT much needless bureaucracy is a good thing.
The other side of the loss of productivity is the amount of time wasted by patients and their families trying to fight Corporate Insurance companies for medical care.
But it will lead to a loss of many of those Health Insurance company jobs.
But as I delve into the details of this excellent economic analysis of Single Payer Healthcare in terms of impact on increased medical services, savings for businesses, savings for families, increased medical equipment sales, increased pharmaceutical sales etc then all of those will counteract the loss of medical insurance jobs.
But I still think it is important to take the loss of jobs and jobs transitions into account in an honest appraisal of Single Payer.
And also, I'm NOT saying that there is a single medical records I/T system. I'm just saying that if a single-payer system is adopted there WILL BE a single medical records and billing system administered by a single I/T unit at some time in the not too distant future. It will be part of the Department of Human Services I/T complex. How well it will work and preserve patient privacy is certainly of some concern, but it will eventually do both adequately to support the needs of the system.
Your anger at the existing system is quite correct and carriers like United Health deserve all the calumny they receive. The need to be replaced.
But give care to the employees of United Health. Some of the claims adjusters are moralistic hard-asses, but most are just clerical workers in who need a job.
"How well it will work and preserve patient privacy is certainly of some concern"
I'm more concerned with the way it is now. Do you really think them private insurance corporations keep our private information private. I don't otherwise they wouldn't know of preexisting conditions. I would be willing, if i had the money, to bet they sell information back a forth between them.
Rickster
They certainly do, and the tell you so in the privacy statement.
"When I take my own family as an example, if my resources were freed up to the tune of more than $1,000 each month that I would not have to pay in premiums to for-profit insurance companies, co-pays deductibles, finance company charges for bills and payments made on credit, etc., I would undoubtedly spend my resources in other ways in this economy. Multiply these decisions millions of times." -Donna Smith
I would also add to Donna's list above the premiums paid for over-priced prescriptions that feeds a corrupt for-profit pharmeceutical industry.
In terms of personal and collective freedom single-payer is undoubtedly a step forward.
Historically, and especially in our country, increasing the freedom of people (as opposed to "free" markets) has brought people greater prosperity.
Our history demonstrates nothing if not the lesson that greater freedom and prosperity go hand in hand.
Now, exactly what form "increased employment" will take as a function of that greater prosperity is hard to say. It always has been. But merely counting out any such form of increased employment out of hand is not only wrong and ahistorical but fatalistic as well.
In East Tennessee, Affordable health care won't be enough until we demand a higher standard of Acceptable health care than what is on record and what the state of Tennessee calls "Horrifying" but perfectly fine. http://www.wisecountyissues.com
Politicans and Profit Care Machines come before Patient Care.