Get News & Views Updates
Most Popular This Week
- 37 Percent of People Completely Lost
- An Open Challenge to Michelle Rhee and the Corporate Education Zombies
- If Corporations Don’t Pay Taxes, Why Should You?
- Introduced Constitutional Amendment says: 'Democracy for People, Not Corporations'
- Which Members of Congress Are Standing Up for Economic Decency – And Which “Progressives” Aren’t
Popular content
Today's Top News
The Real Cure for "Obamacare": Medicare for All
As court fight looms, healthcare crisis is far from over
With the approaching Supreme Court showdown on the President Obama’s 2010 health care law (the Affordable Care Act, modeled on Mitt Romney’s law in Massachusetts), the U.S. healthcare system remains a dysfunctional mess, as nurses bear witness to every day.
(Photo: Melissa Suran/MNS)
In late March, the Court will devote six hours over three days to oral arguments on the legal challenges to the law – the most time the Court has given a case in 56 years – accompanied by a possible record 100 “friend of the court” briefs, Kaiser Health News reported February 16.
While the ACA had some undeniable positive elements, including permitting young adults up to age 26 remain on their parents health plan, and several limitations on insurance industry abuses, such as barring them from denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions, our health care nightmare is far from over.
As nurses have observed the past year, the economic crisis has accelerated broad declines in health linked to job loss, high medical bills, and families having to choose between paying for food, housing, clothing or healthcare.
As to the law itself, despite its name the ACA has done little to actually make healthcare affordable. Out of pocket health costs for families continue to soar largely unabated. Nurses now routinely see patients who have postponed needed care, sometimes even life-saving or life-prolonging care, because of the high co-pays and deductibles.
A Commonwealth Fund study last November, found that the U.S. stands out among high income countries for sick adults having cost and access problems with 27 percent unable to pay medical bills in the past year, compared to from 1 to 14 percent in other countries, and 42 percent skipping doctors visits, recommended care, or not filling prescriptions.
Dental care is a prime case study. A Pew Center report February 27 cited a 16 percent jump in the number of Americans heading to emergency rooms for routine dental problems, at a cost of 10 times more than preventive care with fewer treatment options than a dentist's office.
Nationally, premiums have jumped 50 percent on average the past seven years with more than six in 10 Americans now living in states where their premiums consume a fifth or more of median earnings.
Fifty million Americans still have no health coverage. Another 29 million are under insured with massive holes in their health plans, an increase of 80 percent since 2003, according to the journal Health Affairs.
The percentage of adults with no health insurance at 17.3 percent in the third quarter of 2011 was the highest on record, up from 14.4 percent just three years earlier, Gallup reported.
On quality, the U.S. continues to fall far behind other nations.
What should have been a shocking, under reported study from the University of Washington last June found more than 80 percent of U.S. counties badly trailing on life expectancy compared to nations with the best life expectancies. Some U.S. counties are more than 50 years behind their international counterparts, meaning they have the life expectancy that those nations had in 1957.
One reason for this disturbing news is the regression in death rates for child bearing women. The U.S. ranks just 41st in the world, and it has been getting worse, according to the World Health Organization. The average mortality rate within 42 days of childbirth has doubled in two decades, from 6.6 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1987 to 13 deaths per 100,000 in 2007, partly due to a 10 percent cut in federal spending for maternal and child health programs the past seven years.
Those who think more handouts to the private insurers and other healthcare corporations will improve these dreadful statistics should think again. The wholesale domination of our health by the same Wall Street types who tanked our economy is exactly what has caused the falling health barometers on access, quality, and cost.
Most of the rest of the world has discovered a more humane, cost effective alternative, a national or single payer system, such as expanding and adequately funding Medicare to cover everyone. Even in countries where politicians have proposed privatization or sweeping health cuts they are being met with an aroused public unwilling to trade their health systems for the broken model we have here.
Whether the 2010 law is fully or partially thrown out by the courts, repealed in Congress, or fully implemented, the need for real reform, single payer/Medicare for all, will continue to grow. For now, the fight for single payer is being taken up state by state, a movement that America’s nurses will continue to promote.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
77 Comments so far
Show AllYou're not reading what I wrote, twice now.
You can't give people a choice. EVERYONE has to be enrolled in a Medicare for all system from the start, or it will be financially unsustainable because of adverse selection problems. The private insurers can undersell Medicare on the market among the young and healthy.--and will--in order to undermine it.
Moreover, Medicare for all has to be funded by a tax that would apply to everyone. It's not a premium-driven concept.
You're totally confused. You're just floating another version of the unworkable "publc option" concept, not really advocating true Medicare for all.
Be careful how you phrase the request when you ask for Medicare for all. Some doctors are starting to refuse to take Medicare patients. I have moral problems with that action by those doctors, but doctors are afraid of not getting paid enough to afford their assistants and their offices and their insurance. It's the insurance companies (and possibly the really high tech medical folks) who are swiping all this money from us. Get the doctors and nurse practitioners on our (the patients') side as we go through all this!
If you have a publicly funded plan that covers everyone, the doctors will have no alternative but to accept its fees--or else they can go to law school or apply to become letter carriers.
Or relocate to some other country.
There's a big problem with National Nurses United: despite all their admirable rhetoric on behalf of single payer, in practice the group functions as a fund-raising and volunteer arm of the Democratic Party, urging votes for the very people who consistently scuttle single payer on behalf of their slush-fund campaign donors in Big Insurance and Big Pharma.(In the critical 2008 election cycle, Obama raked in $16 million from the health sector, two and a half times as much as McCain and more than all the other presidential candidate combined; the Congressional Democrats took in more than the Republicans from the health vultures in 2008--see opensecrets.org for all the ugly data).
For example, in 2008 NNU campaigned vigorously for Obama, despite the fact that he openly stated his intention to push for just the sort of private-insurance boondoggle that was eventually passed. Their default position is still to call for votes for Democrats--the very Democrats who systematically crushed first single payer and then even a feeble public option during the critical national healthcare debates of 2008-2009. The entire Congressional Progressive Caucus scuttled single payer and the public option to line up behind Obama's Republican-inspired "free-market" nonsolution to the healthcare crisis.
Single payer is a radical demand in several respects--it firmly establish the principle of public financing in a key sector of the economy. In doing so, however, it would wipe out a broad swath of big-time capitalist enterprise in America, thereby helping to puncture the current stock-market bubble that is the only thing sustaining the illusion of "prosperity" in this badly broken economy. That's why not only the insurance sector but the financial sector have opposed single payer with relentless determination and huge washes of campaign cash to both corrupt parties.
So you have a radical demand in the clutches of essentially liberal groups like NNU, Healthcare Now, and PNHP, which, despite their nominally independent status, have never pursued a true movement-building strategy of independent mass action but have devoted their resources and energies to polite, mincing, and futile verbal lobbying of the bought-off Democrats. You are sure to see a repeat performance of this self-defeating political masochism by these groups in 2012--on the grounds of course, of fending off the Republican bogeyman, despite the lack of any substantive differences on real economic and social policy--as opposed to the cultural food fights that passes for adversary politics on the stump, thus perpetuating the illusion of "differences" between the two wings of the single corporate party--pseudo-differences that are given credence year after year by liberal groups like NNU.
Moreover, the NNU's endorsement of a state by state strategy for single payer is a function of their subordination to the Democratic Party. Fearful of confronting the national Democrats for their treachery on healthcare, they retreat to a doomed slog at the level of the states, all of which are too strapped and too fiscally fragmented to implement anything resembling real single payer.
Sad to say, NNU and its ilk are more part of the problem than part of the solution--by calling IN ACTION for support for the Democratic Party, they are sabotaging IN DEEDS, where it counts, what they profess to uphold with their words.
A divergence between the noble word and the treacherous deed--the very definition of a liberal.
Would be great if it could happen, but it will necessitate ignoring the powerful health insurance lobby along with some major victories by Democrats in Congress this Fall.
Of course, Santorum has his own solution to national health care -- single prayer.
Republicans will NEVER allow the passage of any bill providing Single Payer/Medicare for All.
Why? Simple. They know that such a healthcare system would be so successful - and so overwhelmingly popular - it would spell the end of the GOP for at least a generation.
The Democrats are just as firmly opposed to a publicly funded health plan as the Republicans are. In fact, Obamacare was modeled on a Republican plan that was first formulated at a right-wing think tank.
.(In the critical 2008 election cycle, Obama raked in $16 million from the health sector, two and a half times as much as McCain and more than all the other presidential candidate combined; the Congressional Democrat took in more than the Republicans from the health vultures in 2008--see opensecrets.org for all the ugly data).
For example, in 2008 de Moro's National Nurses Union campaigned vigorously for Obama, despite the fact that he openly stated his intention to push for just the sort of private-insurance boondoggle that was eventually passed. Their default position is still to call for votes for Democrats--the very Democrats who systematically crushed first single payer and then even a feeble public option during the critical national healthcare debates of 2008-2009. The entire Congressional Progressive Caucus scuttled single payer and the public option to line up behind Obama's Republican-inspired "free-market" nonsolution to the healthcare crisis.
To achieve any true progressive change in this country, we must break from both wings of the single corporate party that rules the country.
Congress had the chance to pass Medicare For All but chose this corporate plunder mess instead. I shall continue to withhold my votes and support until we have Universal, Singlepayer Healthcare, Medicare For All.
The White House has already puked on it.
Medicare for All only deals with half the problem, The other half is excess costs due mainly to 'fee for service' and drug company gouging. The former would be solved by Medicare paying only comprehensive health care organizations, such as the Mayo Clinic and Kaiser, whose doctors are on salary. Drug company gouging is soluble but too much to get into with this brief shot.
Too bad "single payer" has no chance of passing in our congress as currently constructed and we all know the reason why ... MONEY. It was a Ben Nelson staffer who largely wrote the Affordable Heath-care Act ... a staffer who had worked for an insurance company and was likely to go back to work for an insurance company. THE MONEY is THE PROBLEM that trumps all others and until it is repaired nothing else will get done. I have a REAL PLAN for accomplishing this I'd like you to consider. Please watch this 3 minute video as an introduction to my idea and give it a fair viewing ... even if you don't like the name of the person attached to this ... it's the basic idea I'd like you to see.
http://youtu.be/I9ApEG2NhMs
Obamacare was created to appease the insurance, and health care industry. They will continue to reap their profits. We have to just keep on pushing for Single Payer until we finally get it. We really can't settle for what Barack Obama is trying to foist on to us.
Medicare is NOT Single Payer. Medicare does not cover dental, vision, or long term care. Medicare supports insurance companies.
It is amazing that Medicare clouds the issue. It is a red herring. Eliminate Medicare after Single Payer for all has replaced it. Insurance companies must be eliminated. They kill more people than all of the terrorists on the planet.
rosemarie jackowski -- Good points!
Single payer is just that--the service providers are paid by a single payer, not a multitude of different private insurers. In this sense, Medicare most certainly is a single-payer system, as is the Canadian system.
Single-payer does not mean "covering everyone 100 percent." It just refers to who is paying the fees. What DeMoro is proposing is "expanding and adequately funding Medicare to cover everyone." That would allow it to do the things you want it to do.
But you are just creating a terminological confusion--you don't really seem to understand the meaning of the term but rather are trying to make it mean what you WANT it to mean rather than what it does mean.
That's why "improved and expanded Medicare for all" is a better, more accessible, and more adequately descriptive slogan than "single payer."
If you had one nonprofit private insurer covering everyone in a state, that would be single payer, but it wouldn't be what you want. That's why the term should be buried-it's a technical wonky term that is not synonymous with universal, publicly funded healthcare.
Medicare is different in each State. Where I live it is administered by several insurance companies.
The term Single Payer is understood by most who have been advocating for it for many decades. I have been writing about it for a very long time. You are correct that it is an often misunderstood term. Most of us agree that it means a health system that cuts administrative costs by eliminating all insurance companies and provides universal comprehensive health care to all.
It is the term Medicare that confuses the debate. Too many don't understand what it really is - especially since it is different in different locations.
Yes basic dentistry is important to health. Very important and millions go without.
I really like hearing that people will refuse to acquiesce to the new health care as an alternative to Single Payer. It isn't, and it will just be a giant expensive batch of red tape on top of the mountain of red tape we already have with the MHI.
We must be ever vigilant not to fall prey to seemingly nice and caring propaganda saying that Single Payer is not obtainable, possible, or the chance for it has passed, dead in the water, dead horse . etc. That's what TPTB would like. We have every right to keep on fighting until we get it and we must do just that.