Premeditated Genocide By Lack of Health Care Insurance

The False Health Debate: Shall We Be Forced To Buy Corporate Insurance By Law . . . Or By Necessity?

2010-02-27T11:04:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-False-Health-Debate-S-by-thepen-100227-884.html

February 27, 2010
By thepen

By the time you read the next couple paragraphs the veil will be lifted from your eyes and you will finally understand what is really going on with the health care "debate", which up to this point has been a total fraud on the American people.

On the one hand we have the Republicans. They are for privatization, deregulation and the "free market", all deceptive synonyms for giving all power to, and putting us totally at the mercy of, the corporations. In the Republican world view, we will be forced to buy corporate medical insurance if we can afford it, and simply die if we cannot (or if they cheat us out of our coverage).

On the other hand we have the Democrats. They serve the SAME corporate contributors. But where the Republicans would force us to buy corporate medical "care" by direness of necessity, the Democrats would do it by force of LAW. Hence, they are pushing for a forcible mandate for everyone to buy insurance from an artificial "market" with no options OTHER than corporate insurance. And when the system goes bust from the overhead, and can no longer provide coverage because of unconstrained corporate greed, again people will simply die.

It is a false and ultimately meaningless choice. It is like giving a condemned person a choice of the method of their execution.

But one thing is certain. If the Democrats perversely persist in this it spells the END of the Democratic party. They will be wiped out in the next couple elections and there will be nothing left of them. And if you care whether that happens or not, YOU must tell them that. Because not telling them will not keep it from happening. The only thing that can stop it is if THEY finally understand that they are no longer fooling you.

Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1034.php

This action page has the subject line, "A Forcible Mandate For Corporate Medical Insurance Means The END Of Your Political Career." It will send faxes for you just by submitting the form, you do not need a fax machine of your own.

For those who might find our assertions melodramatic now, consider the source. On September 13 of last year (over 5 months ago), for those of you who were on our list then and remember, just after President Obama's speech to the nation and to Congress on health care, we put out an alert entitled "Obama's New Improved Leech Therapy". Here is a link to the original article, right here on OpEdNews.com

http://www.opednews.com/articles/2/Obama-s-New-Improved-Lee-by-thepen-090913-493.html

As stalwart progressives, it was clear to us from that speech, and we warned, that Obama had NO intention of letting a "public option" of any kind survive in the end. We told you that the so-called public option was never intended to be anything but a bait and switch to get gullible people of insufficient conviction and determination to give up working for true single payer.

To say that many were skeptical about our warnings is an understatement. And we have the shockingly vicious and insulting and foul mouthed hate mail from some of those no longer on our list to prove it, accusing us of being racist and all manner of other utterly irrational and ignorant lunacy, something we would have thought fellow progressives were not prone to. Speaking the truth is tough and sometimes thankless work.

But everything we warned about has now come to pass word for word.

Indeed, it is clear to all by now the degree to which Obama is fighting AGAINST any alternative to a complete corporate takeover of health care. First they told us that we could not have anything even remotely in the ball park of single payer because we did not have 60 votes. And yet, even as they are gearing up to force through the most despised bill in American political history by some parliamentary trick that only needs 51 votes, suddenly they can't even muster THAT many for a real alternative.

President Obama was happy to selectively discuss today the various isolated selling point proposals that poll well. But these are just the most thin of sugar coatings on the most gigantic bitter pill the American people have ever been asked to swallow. Try polling the forced mandate and see what those numbers are if you dare look. And if they try to force it down our throats as is, the political careers of any of those who vote for it are FINISHED, in which case we will all suffer the more.

If YOU speak out in sufficient numbers we can stop this from happening. If not, it will all transpire just as we have warned . . . again. Those are the stakes. Just so we are clear.

Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1034.php

The above are the regular action pages, for Facebook use this link:

[Facebook] Action Page: http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1034

And this is the Twitter reply for this action

@cxs #p1034

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at http://www.millionfaxmarch.com/in.htm

Donors Reward Dems Who Pushed Public Option

2010-02-20T11:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/05/donors-reward-dems-who-pu_n_449859.html

February 5, 2010 by Huffington Post
Donors Reward Dems Who Pushed Public Option
by Ryan Grim

Liberal bloggers have quietly raised nearly $90,000 in the past few days to reward three freshman House Democrats for organizing an effort to put the public health insurance option back into the Senate health care debate.

The three representatives -- Alan Grayson (Fla.), Chellie Pingree (Maine), and Jared Polis (Colo.) and -- have so far received more than $20,000 each, with the rest going to Howard Dean's Democracy for America group and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), which organized the campaign and set up website to raise funds.The three representatives -- Chellie Pingree (Maine), Jared Polis (Colo.) and Alan Grayson (Fla.) -- have so far received more than $20,000 each, with the rest going to Howard Dean's Democracy for America group and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), which organized the campaign and set up this website.

"It was easy to raise money for [the three members] because they did exactly what voters consistently say they want Democrats to do," said PCCC co-founder Stephanie Taylor. "They fought for bigger change instead of smaller change, and by fighting for the public option they showed they were willing to directly challenge corporate power on behalf of everyday people."

Grayson delivered a petition with tens of thousands of names to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) calling on him to re-insert the public option if he planned to make changes to the Senate bill using the majority-rule process known as budget reconciliation.

Pingree and Polis, meanwhile, circulated a letter calling on Reid to do the same. Some Democrats privately worried at the time that the letter would garner fewer than the 65 signatures that an earlier demand letter had pulled in and indicate fading support.

Instead, 117 members signed the letter, thanks in part to thousands of calls generated by PCCC, DFA and Credo Action to Democratic offices, urging them to sign. The action is an example of the kind of inside-outside coordination that progressives in Congress rarely engage in.

Still, it likely won't be enough to sway the Senate, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on a conference call with bloggers this week. Instead, she said, the Senate is most likely going to conform to the deal that was struck between the White House, the Senate and the House before the Senate Democratic caucus lost its 60th vote.

"They have to do what they have to do to get whatever they need to move the process along," Pelosi said. "I totally respect the process that they are going forward with and I also respect my members' enthusiasm for initiatives that we felt strongly about in the House bill. I don't know that that enthusiasm was shared across the board in all three elements of the negotiation."

The enthusiasm for the freshman effort does show, at least, that there is a reward -- beyond public support -- for Democrats who push policies favored by the progressive base.

"The $60,000 we raised in 24 hours for these Healthcare Heroes is an example of how the Democratic base rewards bold leadership and those willing to fight for a public option," said DFA's political director Charles Chamberlain. "It's time for Washington insiders to wake up to the fact that following Joe Lieberman's lead will depress the Democratic base in 2010 and result in big losses, while following the lead of these Healthcare Heroes will fire up Obama voters who still want real change."
© 2010 Huffington Post

Greed Trophy Goes to Health Insurance Companies

2010-02-18T13:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.commondreams.org/print/52897

February 17, 2010 by Creators Syndicate
Greed Trophy up for Grabs
by Creators Syndicate
by Jim Hightower

By gollies, the top executives of health insurance corporations are not giving up without a fight! To paraphrase every high school football coach who ever lived, "When the going gets ugly, the ugly get going."
During the past several months, the Barons of Wall Street had established themselves as the vilest and most reviled corporate team in the land. They've been lavishing bonuses on themselves even as their firms continue to benefit from government bailout measures and even as ordinary Americans continue to struggle with the economic collapse caused by the bankers' arrogance and avarice. Wall Streeters were widely considered a shoo-in to take the coveted Corporate Greedhead Trophy this year — but, holy cow, what a comeback bid we're now seeing from the Giants of Insurance!

Let's recap their amazing charge: Last week, the news broke that America's five largest health insurance companies (United Health, Wellpoint, Aetna, Humana and Cigna) had scored record profits in 2009, totaling $12.2 billion. This was a stunning 56 percent hike over the previous year, a drive made all the more impressive by the fact that these gains came during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

As American families struggled financially last year, Team Insurance was able to boot 2.7 million more people out of their private health plans, leaving those folks in the corporate dust. In an even slicker, hidden-ball play, three of the five giants cut the proportion of premiums they spent on their customers' medical care, shifting those premium dollars into corporate salaries, profits and administrative overhead. Even Wall Street's Barons had to shake their heads in disbelief and marvel at the audacity of that play.

By the way, buried in that increase for the insurers' administrative overhead was a little statistic that often gets overlooked: lobbying expenses. The Big Five spent $16.8 million last year to lobby against comprehensive reform of our health care system.

The recession-time surge in insurance profits, the shedding of older and sicker customers, the lateral of more premium dollars into things like executive pay — these maneuvers alone would've moved health insurance up in the top tier of ugly industries. But then the industry ratcheted up its game another notch. One of Wellpoint's subsidiaries heaved a "Hail Mary" pass that shocked everyone and catapulted insurance into a serious contender for the Greedhead Trophy.

In the same week that Wellpoint acknowledged that its 2009 profits were up by $2.3 billion over the previous year (a 91 percent increase), its Anthem Blue Cross subsidiary in California caused a sensation by seeking to raise the premiums on its customers' policies by as much as 39 percent this year.

As befits a true Greedhead striver, Wellpoint neatly stiffed critics by asserting that this price hike was necessitated by the general increase in America's health care costs — never mind that the corporation's rise in premiums is actually 10 times more than the rise in the overall cost of health care. What a move!

However, whether Wellpoint's daring California score will be allowed is in question, for there was a flag on the play. State insurance zebras are questioning the legitimacy of the increase, causing a company executive to argue heatedly that while tens of thousands of customers would indeed be socked with a 39 percent jump in their premiums, the average rate increase would be a mere 25 percent, so the play should be OK.

Come on, sports fans, ya gotta give 'em some style points just for trying to get away with that.

Still, can the upstart Insurance Giants hope to out-ugly the more-sophisticated Wall Street Barons? The great thing about Corporate America is that competition is always fierce for the national greedhead title, and insurance is now in the running. As sportscasters can tell you: Only time will tell, it's not over 'til it's over, tomorrow's another day, winners never quit/quitters never win, wait'll next year, and it's deja vu all over again.

Medicaid is Failing, and Nothing Short of Health-Care Reform Can Fix It

2010-02-18T13:15:00.000-08:00

The evil puppet masters want the poor children to die! Otherwise, they'd do more to save them including funding more medicaid. There's plenty of money for the bankers but none for the children...

By Naomi Freundlich, Health Beat
February 5, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145540/

Health-care reform may be stalled in Congress, but you need only look to the overburdened Medicaid program to find evidence of the continued toll the current economic crisis is taking on Americans' ability to afford and access medical care.

At the same time that states are experiencing huge budget deficits, more and more of their residents are unemployed; more and more are joining the ranks of the uninsured and clamoring for Medicaid benefits. The result: Even with emergency federal infusions of funding, state safety nets are being stretched dangerously thin.

On December 1, for example, Tennessee closed enrollment in CoverKids, the state program that provides health coverage to uninsured lower-income children. Despite Gov. Phil Bredesen's promise in 2006 to provide health benefits for "every kid in Tennessee," this year coverage is frozen at 49,000 children; leaving Tennessee's other 150,000 uninsured kids without benefits.

According to Michele Johnson, an attorney with the Tennessee Justice Center, "Tennessee is the last state in the nation that can afford to neglect the health of its children. Infant mortality in Tennessee is worse than in many developing countries, and the rate of infant deaths in Memphis is the worst of any city in America…A state this unhealthy for kids should be striving hard to improve children's health coverage. Instead, Tennessee has just become an island of neglect, in terms of the health of its children."

Tennessee is not alone in limiting health coverage for some of its most vulnerable citizens. In Arizona, Gov. Jan Brewer, struggling with a $1.4 billion deficit this fiscal year (and a projected shortfall of $3.2 billion in fiscal 2011), ordered the state to stop enrolling children in KidsCare, that state's CHIP program that provides coverage for 47,000 children. Brewer has also introduced a ballot measure that would roll back a 10-year-old expansion of Arizona's Medicaid program, resulting in 310,500 -- more than 4 percent of all Arizonans -- losing their coverage.

Meanwhile, Medicaid in Arizona has seen enrollment increase 18 percent from a year ago, while facing the prospect of more than $200 million in cuts for the next fiscal year.

A report by Families USA states that in the current economic climate, more than 1 million people are at risk of completely losing health coverage in Medicaid and CHIP because of cuts that have been enacted or are under consideration in just eight states -- including Arizona, California and Florida. Some 39 states are planning to cut or freeze provider reimbursement rates in 2010 and 15 states have announced benefit cuts and increased cost-sharing; actions that ultimately reduce access to care. According to Kathleen Sebelius, Health and Human Services Secretary, "Every state in the country is looking at a huge gap."

According to the National Association of State Medicaid Directors, states will face a $140 billion budget shortfall in FY 2011. Meanwhile, the group also found that total Medicaid spending increased by an average of 7.9 percent in 2009 as more people became eligible for coverage.

This year, an infusion of $87 billion from the federal government's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act prevented some of the most draconian cuts in state Medicaid programs. This funding is scheduled to expire at various points this year and early in 2011, but the White House announced today that President Obama's budget will include a $25 billion extension of the Medicaid funding program -- giving the states another six months to help keep their programs solvent.

That's good news for the short term. This emergency life-line for Medicaid faces little opposition, even from states like Arkansas, North Carolina and Utah whose legislators fought hard against the program's expansion under health care reform. (Ironically, those same states -- with highest numbers of uninsured and lowest projected cost of Medicaid expansion -- stand to gain the most from reform.)

According to the Wall Street Journal , "Some states were so confident Congress would pass a health bill that they included the extra Medicaid funds in their state budgets." Without this stop-gap measure, they'd be scrambling to find ways to make up for the shortfall." From WSJ:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called the health bill a "trough of bribes, deals and loopholes" in his Jan. 6 State of the State address. Two days later, he included a $1.2 billion increase in federal funding for the state's version of Medicaid, called Medi-Cal, in his budget proposal for the 2010-11 fiscal year. That figure was based on funding in the House bill.

Faced with a glum economic outlook, states of both the red and blue variety increasingly see bolstering Medicaid as an important issue. With the nation's unemployment rate at 10 percent, more Americans have lost their employer-provided insurance coverage. As insurance premiums continue to increase, more small businesses will drop coverage for their employees. These newly jobless, along with people who have pre-existing medical conditions, the chronically ill, and of course, old people who have maxed out their savings paying for long-term care, will desperately need coverage. In the absence of health reform, their only option is to apply for existing Medicaid benefits.

Of course, the House and Senate versions of health-care reform would do far more to help permanently shore up Medicaid finances, as well as expand coverage to 15 million of the nation's uninsured -- including childless adults who aren't eligible for benefits in most states. Under the House bill, individuals with incomes up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level, or $16,245, would be eligible for Medicaid. Under the Senate bill, eligibility would reach 133 percent of poverty, or $14,404 for individuals.

Medicaid expansion is an important feature of health care reform -- despite the need to rejigger some financing mechanisms to be fairer to states like New York that already provide generous benefits to residents. (And we need to get rid of the Nebraska pay-off that secured Senator Ben Nelson's vote on the Senate bill.)

Depending on short-term financial fixes is only a stop-gap measure. Without reform, Medicaid will remain a deeply inequitable and financially unstable program. In past years, for example, individual states have responded to budget concerns by increasing cost-sharing fees, instituting more frequent re-enrollment procedures or requiring new identification documents -- all with the ultimate goal of reducing their Medicaid rolls. States vary significantly in how much their Medicaid programs pay providers and in optional benefits like dental care, mental health services and smoking cessation programs.

These inequities are harshest in coverage of low-income parents. Some 34 states limit Medicaid eligibility to less than 100 percent of the government's official poverty line; and 17 of these states limit eligibility to less than 50 percent of poverty line. More than half of all states do not provide coverage for childless adults, no matter their income levels. Of the states that do, most provide coverage that is far more limited than standard Medicaid benefits.

For working parents, the inequities are equally stark, according to the New York Times:

Existing Medicaid coverage varies widely. Arkansas, for example, extends Medicaid to working parents who earn up to 17 percent of the federal poverty level, and Alabama offers coverage for those making up to 24 percent of that level. Minnesota covers working parents making up to 215 percent of the federal poverty level, and New York, up to 150 percent. New York also covers childless adults up to 65 making up to 100 percent of the federal poverty level.

In the end, the $25 billion that the administration wants to provide for Medicaid will help staunch the bleeding in state programs for a short while. But as Jocelyn Guyer, co-director of Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families writes on her center's blog, "If reform fails, we not only lose a valuable chance to stabilize and strengthen these programs, but face the prospect of states cutting back on Medicaid when fiscal relief runs out at the end of this year. We could see more states try to solve their state fiscal problems, in part, by putting uninsured children on waiting lists for coverage, as already has occurred in Tennessee and Arizona."

This short-term fix, although welcome, does not make for intelligent health policy. It might prevent some vulnerable Americans from losing their benefits today. But it won't make a dent in covering the 46 million Americans who continue to remain uninsured. And it is certainly no substitute for comprehensive health reform.

Naomi Freundlich is the associate editor of HealthBeat.

Here Comes Single-Payer Healthcare in Another State

2010-02-17T13:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Here-Comes-Single-Payer-He-by-David-Swanson-100217-52.html

February 17, 2010
By David Swanson

A bill to create single-payer healthcare in California has passed that state's senate for the third time now. Californians just need to persuade a governor to sign it. Single-payer healthcare bills are advancing in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and a growing list of states, including New Mexico, where State Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino, a long-time supporter of single-payer healthcare, is running for Lieutenant Governor.

Now North Carolina house candidate Marcus Brandon has pledged to introduce a bill to create single-payer healthcare in that state. Brandon, whom I know and like and who worked for Congressman Dennis Kucinich's 2008 presidential campaign, is a candidate in North Carolina House District 60. That's near Greensboro, where I can just picture Marcus sitting at a lunch counter and refusing to be provoked.

Brandon has promised that if he is elected, the first piece of legislation he will introduce will be the "North Carolina Healthcare Act" which will provide universal single-payer healthcare to every citizen of the state.

Brandon says that he remains a supporter of national single-payer healthcare and will continue lobbying for passage of HR 676, Congressman John Conyers' bill:

"The HR 676 fight is definitely not over, but we must now strategically shift the focus to the state level. When other states see that we can cut the cost of healthcare, streamline our medical industry, and still provide universal coverage to all North Carolinians, then all of the sudden, single-payer health care doesn't look so bad."

Brandon argues that a single-payer system could save over $1.5 billion per year in reduced bureaucracy in the state of North Carolina alone. And he speaks confidently about making this happen:

"North Carolina is poised to be the first state to adopt single-payer, once I am able to introduce it. North Carolinians are ready for real solutions to healthcare. North Carolina has the third highest healthcare cost of any state, while it sags at 37th in average income. This is a disparity that most North Carolinians feel when they have to think about healthcare. Every day, as I am knocking on doors to talk to voters, I hear stories of people who cannot afford insurance and become victims of this for-profit industry."

Brandon says his bill is similar to other states' initiatives such as the "Minnesota Health Act" or the "California Universal Healthcare Act." Brandon points to these two bills as excellent examples of how a single payer healthcare system could be both fiscally sound and provide full coverage.

Brandon served in 2007 and 2008 as Dennis Kucinich's National Finance Director and Deputy Campaign Manager. He says that Kucinich inspired him:

"Dennis urged me to run for office so we could build a state-by-state grassroots movement for single payer and other progressive issues. My campaign for the North Carolina House is an extension of the work I did with Dennis Kucinich."

While Kucinich has struggled unsuccessfully thus far to pass federal legislation facilitating the state creation of single-payer healthcare systems, states are pressign ahead and will deal with lawsuits from "health" corporations when and if they arise.

Marcus Brandon's website is at
http://www.marcusbrandon.com

He has a primary on May 4th. Those who want a real healthcare system in this country would be wise to pour money into his campaign and those of other state leaders across the country.

Alternatively we could keep putting all our eggs in the basket of fantasies about the United States Senate getting its act together.

Pharma Giant Gets Cozy With Congress, Spends $100 Million in Advertising to Cash in on Health Reform

2010-02-16T05:40:00.000-08:00

By Paul Blumenthal, Sunlight Foundation
February 16, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145685/

More than a million spectators gathered before the Capitol on a frosty January afternoon to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, who promised in his campaign to change Washington’s mercenary culture of lobbyists, special interest influence and backroom deals. But within a few months of being sworn in, the President and his top aides were sitting down with leaders from the pharmaceutical industry to hash out a deal that they thought would make health care reform possible.

Over the following months, pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and executives met with top White House aides dozens of times to hammer out a deal that would secure industry support for the administration’s health care reform agenda in exchange for the White House abandoning key elements of the president’s promises to reform the pharmaceutical industry. They flooded Congress with campaign contributions, and hired dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders to push their case. How they did it—pieced together from news accounts, disclosure forms including lobbying reports and Federal Election Commission records, White House visitor logs and the schedule Sen. Max Baucus releases voluntarily—is a testament to how ingrained the grip of special interests remains in Washington.

In the 2008 campaign, Obama declared his intention to include all stakeholders as he sought to reform the nation’s health care system, but also supported key Democratic health reform policies. Among these were several that targeted the pharmaceutical industry: Allowing re-importation of drugs from first world countries with lower drug prices and providing Medicare with negotiating authority over prescription drug prices in the recently enacted Part D program. These weren’t just promises, Obama had already voted for both of them as a senator in 2007. (Roll Call Vote 132 and Roll Call Vote 150.)

Set to carry out this agenda were two Capitol Hill veterans, schooled in the monied Washington culture, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and deputy chief of staff Jim Messina. Emanuel was a former fundraiser, Clinton administration official, investment banker and member of the Democratic leadership in Congress. Messina was the former campaign manager and chief of staff to the powerful Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus. Both were known for their unparalleled legislative abilities.

Because of Obama’s decision to develop a plan operating through the legislative process, members of Congress also played key roles. Early on, the pharmaceutical companies were told to deal directly with Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus. Baucus would be the vehicle for the deal worked out behind the scenes by the White House and PhRMA.

Central to this effort was PhRMA president, CEO and top lobbyist Billy Tauzin, a longtime Democratic member of Congress who switched party affiliations after Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994. By switching parties Tauzin was able to maintain his influence and even rose to be Chairman of the House Committee on Energy & Commerce. Tauzin became the poster child of Washington’s mercenary culture. He crafted a bill to provide prescription drug access to Medicare recipients, one that provided major concessions to the pharmaceutical industry. Medicare would not be able to negotiate for lower prescription drug costs and reimportation of drugs from first world countries would not be allowed. A few months after the bill passed, Tauzin announced that he was retiring from Congress and would be taking a job helming PhRMA for a salary of $2 million.

Tauzin’s job change became fodder for a campaign ad that then presidential candidate Barack Obama ran in the spring of 2008 simply titled “Billy.” It featured the candidate, sleeves rolled up, talking to a salon of gasping Americans about the ways of Washington. “The pharmaceutical industry wrote into the prescription drug plan that Medicare could not negotiate with drug companies. And you know what, the chairman of the committee, who pushed the law through, went to work for the pharmaceutical industry making $2 million a year.” The screen fades to black to inform the viewer that, “Barack Obama is the only candidate who refuses Washington lobbyist money,” while the candidate continues his lecture, “Imagine that. That’s an example of the same old game playing in Washington. You know, I don’t want to learn how to play the game better, I want to put an end to the game playing.”

Aiding PhRMA in their outreach to Congress would be a squadron of lobbyists to push their health care reform priorities. Over the course of 2009, the drug industry trade group spent over $28 million on in house and hired lobbyists. Aside from PhRMA’s massive in-house lobbying operation, the trade group hired 48 outside lobbying firms. The total number of lobbyists working for PhRMA in 2009 reached 165. Some 137 of those 165 lobbyists representing PhRMA were former employees of either the legislative or executive branches. Of these dozens were former congressional staffers including two former chiefs of staff to Max Baucus.

According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, drug makers contributed huge sums to congressional campaign committees during the same period—from January to the end of October (4th quarter numbers are still being totaled), industry political action committees, employees and their family members flooded lawmakers with over $8 million. Those contributions tilted heavily to Democrats over Republicans by a 57 to 42 percent margin—the first time in any election cycle going back to 1990, the first year that the Center for Responsive Politics began tracking industry giving, that Democrats were so favored. Given their majorities on Capitol Hill, and the new President’s intention to reform America’s health care system, the new tilt was perhaps not surprising.

***

On March 5, the White House held a meeting with major health care industry leaders to try to bring them to the table and see what could be done to gain their support. In attendance were Billy Tauzin, president, CEO and top lobbyist for PhRMA, Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler, America’s Health Care Plans (AHIP) Chairman Karen Ignani, Tom Donohue of the Chamber of Commerce and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations’ Risa Lavizzo-Mourey. A day before the White House meeting Tauzin appeared on CNBC touting health care reform and promising to work closely with the Obama administration. In the interview he touted it as an “optimistic plan”, acknowledging that the industry did have a few problems but was glad to have a chance to discuss these. Some were caught dumb-founded by this apparent change of heart on behalf of an industry long adverse to health care reforms.

On April 15, Jim Messina and Jon Selib, chief of staff to Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, convened a meeting at the headquarters of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) with leaders of organized labor and health care groups, including PhRMA. At the meeting, the groups decided to form two nonprofit entities to promote reform efforts, Healthy Economy Now and Americans for Stable Quality Care, that would be almost entirely funded by PhRMA. The two groups spent $24 million on their advertising campaigns; the contract to produce and place ads went to White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod’s former firm, AKPD, which owed Axelrod $2 million.

In the next month, CEO’s from pharmaceutical companies would meet with Baucus and administration officials at least four times. These talks preceded a major public event at the White House, one critical to its strategy to promote health care reform. On May 11, PhRMA and other trade industry groups pledged cost cutting measures to the White House that would save, they claimed, upwards of $2 trillion over the next decade. President Obama announced the deal in the State Dining Room, flanked by leaders of the various trade groups; the administration followed up with a media blitz in the press and on the White House Web site.

The next day, Healthy Economy Now’s PhRMA funded ad campaign ran their first advertisement in support of the health care reform process calling for the government to finally “fix” the nation’s health care cost problems. While many elements of the $2 trillion cost cutting pledge fell apart, the drug industry remained committed to the process in the hopes that they could ultimately win out and defeat the provisions they most feared in closed-door meetings with the White House.

The first occurred on June 2. White House visitor logs show PhRMA’s top executives, including Tauzin, and industry CEOs met with Sarah Fenn from the White House Office of Health Care Reform. On the same day, the publicly available schedule of Senator Max Baucus shows Tauzin and the same industry CEOs met the Senate Finance Committee chairman. What ultimately resulted from these coordinated meetings would be revealed by Baucus on June 20.

In a press release featuring a statement by Tauzin, Baucus revealed that the pharmaceutical industry had accepted $80 billion in cost cutting measures to be included in the Senate Finance Committee version of the bill. According to news reports, Baucus initially proposed $100 billion in cost cutting measures, but the executives and lobbyists meeting on June 2 were able to win the lower figure.

The terms of the initial cost-cutting deal included $30 billion go directly towards closing the “donut hole” in Medicare prescription drug coverage. The “donut hole” is a term for the gap in coverage that occurs within the Medicare prescription drug coverage. For those purchasing prescription drugs through the Medicare program coverage cuts off at $2,700 spent and does not pick back up again until $6,154 is spent by the participant. The amount proposed in the deal, 50 percent coverage for drugs within the coverage gap, however, would not completely close the “donut hole.”

In Baucus’ press release, Tauzin is quoted as saying, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and, working together, we can make this hope for a better tomorrow a reality today.” This “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity also extended to the pharmaceutical industry’s ability to blunt the long-term Democratic agenda of lowering prescription drug prices through Medicare negotiations, re-importation and quicker release of generics onto the market. After making such a grand statement of support through cost cutting proposals it was time for the pharmaceutical industry to finally force the White House and Democrats to take certain chips off the table.

Baucus proceeded with a plan to convene a bipartisan group in an effort to craft the bill desired by the White House. These participants included Democrats Kent Conrad and Jeff Bingaman and Republicans Chuck Grassley, Mike Enzi and Olympia Snowe. Baucus’ decision and the need to solidify deals with groups like the pharmaceutical industry – which were reliant on Baucus producing a bill – slowed down the legislative process making it impossible for Congress to meet the White House’s announced August recess deadline for passing health care reform.

Soon after, PhRMA’s big guns and industry lobbyists paid the White House another visit on July 7 and this time met with Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina (Baucus’ chief of staff Jon Selib is also listed in White House visitor logs for this meeting). In August, The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim reported on an internal memo that was drafted at that meeting that outlined the policies that would not be allowed into any final version of health care reform. These included Medicare prescription drug negotiations, drug re-importation, and the lowering of prices for drugs available through Medicare Part D and Part B. The deal would be $80 billion in cost cutting and absolutely no more.

***

While the $80 billion deal was cut with Baucus’ committee, other congressional committees continued to mark-up their own versions of health care reform without the knowledge that the White House was relying on Baucus to produce the final product. In the House of Representatives, the House Energy & Commerce Committee leveled a direct threat to the $80 billion deal. Energy & Commerce Chair Henry Waxman sought to include all of the provisions that PhRMA had gotten the White House and Baucus to cut out of the reform bill. These included drug reimportation, Medicare negotiating power and speedier release of generics to the market. According to previous analysis of the measures proposed by the committee, these measures would have totaled hundreds of billions in cost cuts, far exceeding the $80 billion cap agreed to by the White House, Baucus and PhRMA.

The cost cutting measures passed in the Energy & Commerce bill spooked the board of PhRMA, which included all of the CEOs involved in the deal-cutting meetings with the White House and Baucus. The board pressured Tauzin to go public with the deal to ensure that the White House would recognize it and not renege. On August 4, the Los Angeles Times, in an exclusive report, featured quotes from Tauzin claiming that a deal between the White House and PhRMA existed and that, as Tauzin put it, “The White House blessed it.” Tom Hamburger wrote in the article, “For his part, Tauzin said he had not only received the White House pledge to forswear Medicare drug price bargaining, but also a separate promise not to pursue another proposal Obama supported during the campaign: importing cheaper drugs from Canada or Europe.”

The White House’s Jim Messina later confirmed Tauzin’s claim, stating, “The president encouraged this approach … He wanted to bring all the parties to the table to discuss health insurance reform.”

Democratic lawmakers were furious. Rep. Raul Grijalva, chairman of the Progressive Caucus, asked, “Are industry groups going to be the ones at the table who get the first big piece of the pie and we just fight over the crust?”

***

On September 7, Baucus’ bill made a private circulation on the Hill; pharmaceutical industry cost-cutting did not exceed $80 billion. Five days later, the New York Times reported that PhRMA planned to spend up to $150 million in an advertising blitz in support of Baucus’ bill. The Times noted that the ad spending “…would be a follow-up to the deal that drug makers struck in June with Mr. Baucus and the White House.” On September 16, Baucus released the full text of his legislation to the public.

The White House, PhRMA and Baucus still had to fight a few battles to keep the deal intact. The key amendment targeting the PhRMA deal in committee mark-up came from Sen. Bill Nelson from Florida, which has one of the largest Medicare participant populations in the nation. The pull of constituent needs clearly put Bill Nelson into a position to push for further cost cutting in Medicare prescription drug pricing. His target: closing the “donut hole” completely.

Nelson claimed that his amendment would generate $106 billion in revenue, or from PhRMA’s perspective increase their cost-cutting to $186 billion. That would be unacceptable to PhRMA, to Baucus, to the White House and to the pharmaceutical industry who had made the deal. Other Senate Democrats, Tom Carper and Robert Menendez voted with Republicans and Baucus on the committee to defeat the amendment. It is little surprise the Carper’s Delaware is home to AstraZeneca and Menendez’ New Jersey is home to Merck and Bristol-Myers-Squibb, all of which lobbied for the $80 billion cap.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced the final bill, with the cap in place, on November 19. Debate began on Dec. 3, and with it come one more attempt by members to change the terms of the deal. Senator Byron Dorgan introduced an amendment that would allow for drug re-importation, but as the date for voting drew near, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) released a letter objecting to the proposal that echoed pharmaceutical industry talking points: “…as currently written, the resulting structure would be logistically challenging to implement and resource intensive. In addition, there are significant safety concerns.” Dorgan’s amendment was defeated with numerous Democrats previously in support of reimportation switching to “no” votes.

On Christmas Eve, the bill passed the Senate with the PhRMA deal fully intact.

***

New Year’s Eve passed with no further action on health care reform. Public opinion regarding the health care reform bill had been slipping throughout 2009. It reached a fulcrum in the special election to replace the deceased senator Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts on January 19, 2010. Newly minted senator Scott Brown campaigned that he would be the senator to provide Republicans with the votes to filibuster the final health care reform bill. Democrats ran for cover. Despite having the largest majorities of any party since the 1970s, Democrats put the brakes on their agenda, particularly health care reform.

In the end, the pharmaceutical industry’s support for health care reform would be left up in the air. After spending $100 million in advertising in support of legislation that Tauzin and key executives hoped would be a windfall for the pharmaceutical industry, the legislative process had flat-lined. In February, the board of PhRMA, split over the deal cut by Tauzin, pushed Tauzin to resign his post.

In an interview with Diane Sawyer, President Obama owed up to failures in the process of passing health care reform, “[T]he health care debate as it unfolded legitimately raised concerns not just among my opponents, but also amongst supporters that we just don’t know what’s going on … And it’s an ugly process and it looks like there are a bunch of back room deals.”

Paul Blumenthal is the Senior Writer at the Sunlight Foundation.

How Shopping Carts May Be Our Greatest Weapon in the Health Care Fight

2010-02-10T13:20:00.001-08:00

By Robyn O'Brien, AlterNet
February 8, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145582/

"The less we spend on food, the more we spend on health care," said Michael Pollan on Oprah.

Today, Americans spend almost 20 cents of every dollar managing disease -- diabetes, allergies, asthma, cancer, obesity -- and only 10 cents of every dollar on food.

The jury is still out on what exactly may be causing all of these epidemics, but genetics don't change that quickly, the environment does. And increasing evidence points to the role that diet is playing in the onset of disease.

In a perfect world, we'd all be growing our own organic vegetable garden, but most of us don't yet live in that world. With picky eaters, limited time and a limited budget, we are trying to do the best we can with what we've got and are frustrated by the price discrepancy between conventional food and "organic" food at the grocery store.

But have you ever wondered why organic food costs more?

Organic food costs more than its conventional counterparts because our taxpayer dollars are not used to support organic farms to the same extent that our dollars are used to support conventional farms. Under our current system, it is more profitable for farmers to grow crops laced with chemicals than organic ones because they will receive larger government handouts from the USDA Farm Subsidy program, more marketing assistance and stronger crop insurance programs.

If farmers do choose to grow organic crops, it costs them more because not only do they not receive the same level of financial handouts from the government, but they are also charged a fee to prove that their crops are safe and then on top of that, they are then charged a fee to label their crops as "organic." As a result, organic farmers have a higher cost structure -- with added fees and expenditures required to bring their products to market -- while our taxpayer dollars are used to subsidize the crops with the chemicals.

Wouldn't it make more sense to use our taxpayer dollars to subsidize the crops without chemicals given the increasing evidence pointing to the impact that these environmental insults are having on our health? What if our most powerful weapon in the war on health care is a farm subsidy?

Health care reform could begin at the USDA, with an equal allocation of our taxpayer dollars between organic and conventional farming. The USDA could continue health care reform by providing equivalent marketing assistance and crop insurance programs for organic crops and by eliminating the organic certification fee farmers are required to pay in order to label their crops as "USDA Organic."

If we invite the US Department of Agriculture to be part of health care reform, the USDA could level the economic playing field for the farmers, enabling more farms to grow crops free of chemicals, synthetic and genetically engineered ingredients which would, in turn, increase the supply of these crops in the marketplace -- which, as any good economist knows, would drive down costs. Organic food would be more affordable to more of us.

Safe food is a social justice issue that our taxpayer dollars could be used to support. Perhaps it's time to invite the USDA into the health care debate and address the current system under which our taxpayer dollars are being used to externalize the costs of these chemicals onto the health of our families. With the USDA at the table, health care reform could begin on the farm allowing the most powerful weapon in the health care debate to be a grocery cart.

Robyn O'Brien is founder of AllergyKids Foundation and author of the book, The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It.

Insurer Denies Life-Prolonging Treatment To Five-Year-Old Boy With Cancer

2010-02-10T06:12:00.000-08:00

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/02/09/insurer-boy-cancer/

Zaid Jilani on Feb 9th, 2010 at 12:15 pm

One of the worst abuses of private insurance companies is the practice of using spurious reasons to deny claims for medical treatments, which are often necessary for saving patients’ lives.

Kyler Van Nocker’s story shows that even 5-year-old kids are not exempt from this insurance company abuse. Van Nocker has neuroblastoma, which is a very rare form of childhood cancer that targets the nervous system and creates tumors throughout the body.

Due to successful treatment in 2007, Van Nocker’s cancer went into remission, giving him 12 months of pain-free life. Unfortunately, in Sept. 2008, the cancer returned, and Van Nocker was once again in need of treatment. Unfortunately, his health insurer, HealthAmerica, refused to pay for one form of treatment doctors believe could save his life (MIBG treatment) because they consider it “investigational/experimental” since it has yet to be approved by the FDA.

Yet in April 2008, the insurer approved cheaper treatment for Van Nocker that was also “experimental,” prompting Philadelphia Daily News columnist Ronnie Polaneczky to ask, “So why, pray tell, is HealthAmerica playing the ‘experimental therapy’ card in the case of the MIBG treatment Kyler now needs? Gee, money couldn’t have anything to do with the decision, could it?”

Van Nocker’s parents are suing HealthAmerica, citing the fact that the company has apparently been dishonest about its criteria for the types of treatment it will cover and is denying payment for treatment in this case because of the high cost of the procedure — $110,000 pays for only two rounds of MIBG treatment. “These companies have to be brought to the courthouse to get them to do the right thing,” says the VanNockers’s family attorney. “This child needs this treatment, or else.”

The sad truth is that Van Nocker is certainly not alone in having his claim denied by a major health insurer. The California Nurses Association (CNA), a nurses’ union and health care advocacy group, recently released a comprehensive study of claims denials across California. The study found that the six largest insurers in California rejected 47.7 million claims in the first half of 2009, nearly 22 percent of all claims submitted.

The United States is the only industrialized nation without cradle-to-the-grave, universal health care. In no other developed country would a child with cancer have to go without care because an insurance company decided it was not profitable enough to cover him.

Hospitals Ravaged by Recession Pile More Work on Staff

2010-02-10T06:11:00.003-08:00

By Mischa Gaus, Labor Notes
February 10, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145621/

Hospital work is thought to be recession-proof. No matter what the economy, people get sick and need care.

The work is there, but at a cost: hospital workers and researchers say some hospitals are churning through a round of reorganization, strapping on more work, skimping on training, and trying to stuff contract concessions through.

Increased hospital workloads are linked to bad economies: the last big push started in the early '90s downturn, says Judy Shindul-Rothschild, who researches nursing at Boston College.

That episode was about "de-skilling": management consultants substituted lower-cost, less-skilled workers for higher-cost nurses. Today's squeeze is especially strong at hospitals with many uninsured and underinsured patients. Worse, Shindul-Rothschild says, the national health care reform now stuck in Congress might intensify the problem.

Do More With Less

When Temple University Health System closed its Northeastern Hospital in Philadelphia last year, patients flooded into the flagship Temple facility, overloading the ER. Patients sit in wheelchairs while nurses scramble to evaluate them and find increasingly scarce rooms.

"You have to just push, push, push," said Patty Eakin, a Temple emergency room nurse and president of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, a union for health-care workers. "It's exhausting and worrisome. You always wonder if you did enough."

The pressure for "patient turnover" is higher, she said, while the number of hands on deck hasn't changed -- Temple hasn't hired more staff.

In Kalamazoo, Michigan, critical care nurse Shawn Shuler sees similar problems developing at Borgess Medical Center. The Michigan Nurses Association won a staffing system in the hospital's 2006 contract that assigned nurses based on how sick patients were, a ratio that could be as high as one-to-one.

But with the state's economy in a tailspin and Borgess bleeding money, the facility cut training for new nurses in half and lowered the number of nurses per shift. In certain units, if one patient requires a nurse's full attention, the other now takes all the rest, regardless of how sick they are.

Shuler, who heads the local union, says the overwork and disorientation quickly drive new hires out. The hospital lost 52 critical-care nurses last year.

Even as a matter of a hospital's financial self-interest, squeezing workers makes little sense, Shuler says. Patient complications that develop when overworked staff miss a problem cost the hospital more than a proper staffing policy would. Management has refused meetings with the union for seven months.

In Philadelphia, Temple (unsuccessfully) sought to fine the union $250,000 if a worker spoke out about hospital conditions. Temple has demanded a "non-disparagement" clause -- along with wage freezes and 50 percent pension cuts -- in talks since the September contract expiration. Nurses are saving up, anticipating that a strike is inevitable.

Hospital bosses hate workplace actions that interfere with their carefully manufactured image, said Marsha Martin, a nurse and local union president at a University of Florida hospital. Administrators at her facility still bring up a 15-year-old "brown ribbon" action, the "don't shit on me" campaign, which resisted management's reorganization scheme in the consultant-crazed '90s.

Nurses handed out ribbons and cards with their demands to patients and staff. They blanketed the hospital. "It lasted two days," said Martin, until administrators halted mandatory OT.

Follow the Misleader

Cost-cutting and ballooning workloads are creating more problems for patients, too. Inexperienced nurses thrown into unfamiliar jobs at the Michigan hospital insert chest tubes incorrectly. Falls, bed sores, and failures to rescue patients are all up.

Having too many patients makes it hard to "pick up on signs and symptoms that should have been picked up on," Shuler said.

Shindul-Rothschild said rising rates of complications for patients indicate a pervasive problem at some hospitals.

She says "caregivers of last resort," hospitals that serve large populations of uninsured and underinsured patients, are laying off advanced-practice nurses who train workers and track effectiveness. Budget-strained hospitals are reducing headcount, she said, at the cost of losing veterans best suited to battling systemic patient problems like infection and fall rates.

Those difficulties could worsen under the health-care reform bill, she said. As it stood in mid-January, the national legislation resembled a 2006 Massachusetts law that forced most of the population to secure insurance and provided some subsidies to do so.

Those subsidies came from an "uncompensated care pool" in Massachusetts, state reimbursements that "last resort" hospitals previously had relied on to cover the cost of treating many uninsured patients.

The reimbursements disappeared but patients kept coming -- and now, many had substandard insurance that wouldn't pay for adequate treatment. The "last resort" hospitals had to eat more costs and began to cut services and overload workers.

"The health care dollar can only be divided so many ways," Shindul-Rothschild said, noting that both Massachusetts and the nation have yet to tackle the "real inefficiencies in the system": insurers that capture one-third of health care spending.

"If we don't find a way either at the state or federal level to once and for all put the private insurance companies out of business," she said, "we will see more of these cyclical efforts to squeeze the workers who provide care."

Mischa Gaus is an editor of Labor Notes, the country's largest cross-union magazine writing from a workers' perspective.

Hospitals Ravaged by Recession Pile More Work on Staff

2010-02-10T06:11:00.001-08:00

2010-02-07T15:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2010/02/01/does-president-obama-really-want-a-bette

Does President Obama Really Want a “Better Approach” to Fix Health Care?
02/01/10
By Kevin Zeese

Obama keeps saying he wants better ideas, but then will not meet with doctors desperately trying to let him know a better approach.

Last Friday when President Obama vanquished the entire Republican Caucus in question time in Baltimore he said:

“Now, what I said at the State of the Union is what I still believe. If you can show me and if I get confirmation from health care experts, people who know the system and how it works, including doctors and nurses, ways of reducing people's premiums, covering those who do not have insurance, making it more affordable for small businesses, having insurance reforms that ensure people have insurance even when they've got preexisting conditions, that their coverage is not dropped just because they're sick, that young people right out of college or as they're entering in the workforce can still get health insurance -- if those component parts are things that you care about and want to do, I'm game.”

Outside two doctors were arrested for trying to tell the president a better way to really solve America’s health crisis. The president wants a system that doctors confirm works – well this one is supported by 60% of U.S. doctors. He wants a system that nurses will confirm works. This approach is supported by the National Nurses United – the largest nurses union in the country. And, two-thirds of Americans support their better way.

For more than a year advocates of expanding Medicare so it covers all Americans have been trying to tell the president how to fix health care. They have faxed, emailed, telephoned, visited Washington, attended town hall meetings . . . they’ve even gotten arrested protesting their exclusion at hearings. Even the president’s own doctor, David L. Scheiner, has urged him to adopt a national health care program with Medicare for All at its foundation. In every way they know how they have tried to tell the president.

The president claims he will listen to all ideas. Why will he not listen to the idea with the widest public support?

Back in Baltimore when the president showed the country that the Republicans were straw men putting forward false facts and phony arguments, Dr. Margaret Flowers and Dr. Carol Paris stood outside in the cold. They were holding a sign, responding to the president’s request in the State of the Union that said: “Letting You Know: Medicare for All.”

Dr. Flowers had a packet of materials for the president. It included a letter she wrote to him the night of the State of the Union. When the president said: “if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know,” Dr. Flowers started writing.

The day before the Baltimore event, Dr. Flowers tried to deliver the letter to the White House. They would not take it. So, when the pediatrician heard President Obama would be in her home town she mentioned it to Dr. Paris. Paris immediately agreed to go with Flowers to try and get the information to the president.

In fact, making Medicare available to all Americans would do more than the president is seeking. Unlike any Democratic proposal: it would cover everyone in the United States; truly control costs and not require additional spending by the government by saving at least $400 billion annually wasted by the insurance industry.

On top of all the good it would do for health care in America, a study published in 2009 found that Medicare for All would spur the economy and create jobs. A national single-payer style healthcare reform system would provide a major stimulus for the U.S. economy by creating 2.6 million new jobs, and infusing $317 billion in new business and public revenues, with another $100 billion in wages into the U.S. economy.

Debating the Republicans was easy. President Obama knew their arguments were based on falsehoods and phony rhetoric. Is he avoiding the advocates of Medicare for All because he knows they are right? Because he knows their arguments are fact-based and not easily dismissed? In 2003 he declared himself "a proponent of a single-payer universal healthcare program." In fact he used the issue as an excuse to get people to vote Democratic saying: “first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

The health care reform process has fallen apart. It is politically unpopular. It is practically not feasible. It does not confront the urgent health issues facing America.

The approach Dr. Flowers and Dr. Paris are trying to convey to the president is a win, win, win – politically popular especially among doctors and nurses, confronts the critical problems in the American health care crisis and spurs the economy, creates as many jobs as were lost in 2008.

President Obama, there is still time to do the right thing. There is new opportunity with health care in confusion to meet with Dr. Flowers, Dr. Paris and other advocates of Medicare for All and then tell the American public you support the solution the majority of Americans support: Medicare for All. Turn the mess of “insurance reform” into an opportunity for “real” reform.

Kevin Zeese is executive director of Prosperity Agenda (www.ProsperityAgenda.US). He was arrested with the Baucus 8 protesting the exclusion of single payer health care before the Senate Finance Committee.

More Information:

Dr. Flowers Open Letter to President Obama responding to the State of the Union can be read at: http://www.prosperityagenda.us/node/3271

The arrest of Dr. Flowers and Dr. Paris outside the Republican Caucus meeting in Baltimore can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53RbYauyv_8

President Obama saying he supports single payer health care in 2003 can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpAyan1fXCE.

Income Inequality Bad for Your Health. And the Nation's

2010-02-07T02:45:00.001-08:00

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/30/832076/-Surprise!-Income-Inequality-Bad-for-Your-Health.-And-the-Nations

Surprise! Income Inequality Bad for Your Health. And the Nation's
by Meteor Blades
Fri Jan 29, 2010

We all know what inequality in wealth and income means when it comes to political clout. And for weathering economic adversity. And for the kind of lifelong head start or hold back that can be given to offspring. The effects are gigantic and extend everywhere. In more economically equal societies, as British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out in their new book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, people do better on every metric, much better, whether it’s drug addiction, teen pregnancies, homicide or life-span.

What possible good can come from epidemiologists poking around in economics, and in the United States, well outside their usual scholarly arenas? Quite a lot, writes Sam Pizzigati, a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and proprietor of the on-line web-site Too Much:

"If you want to know why one country does better or worse than another," as Wilkinson and Pickett note simply, "the first thing to look at is the extent of inequality."

The United States, the developed world’s most unequal major nation, ranks at or near the bottom on every quality-of-life indicator that Wilkinson and Pickett examine. Portugal and the UK, nations with levels of inequality that rival the United States, rank near that same bottom.

Japan and the Scandinavian nations, the world’s most equal major developed nations, show the exact opposite trend line. They all rank, on yardstick after yardstick, at or near the top.

And we see the same pattern within the United States. America’s most equal states — New Hampshire, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Vermont — all consistently outperform the least equal, states like Mississippi and Alabama.

People in more equal societies simply live longer, healthier, and happier lives than people in more unequal societies. And not just poor people in these societies, Wilkinson and Pickett emphasize continually, but all people.

If you have a middle class income in an unequal society, you’re going to be more stressed and less healthy — mentally and physically — than someone with the same income in a more equal society.

Earlier this month the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation calculated that about one million taxpayers will have an income of more than $500,000 this year. They will collect $200 billion more in income than the 80 million American taxpayers who make $40,000 or less. Not surprisingly, executives at the top corporations figure prominently in that elite group of a million.

Click for a larger image.

According to economist Emmanuel Saez, who has made a career of studying the impact of income inequality, in 2007, the most recent year for which we have full data, the ratio of CEO pay to the average paycheck was 344 to one. Because of the recession, it’s estimated that the ratio will decrease to 317 to one in 2010. In the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, the average ratio fluctuated between 30 and 40 to one.

The slight decrease in inequality we’ve seen during the Great Recession will be only temporary unless significant changes in regulations and progressive taxation are imposed. And that won’t be easy given the brainwashing visited on America by right-wing think-tanks that have propagandized us for three decades with soothing talk about the benefits of deregulation, privatization and what Pizzigati so aptly calls "wealth worship."

Just how bad the trend has been over the past 30 years can be seen by comparing with an earlier era:

• In 1955, tax records showed that the 400 richest people in the U.S. were worth an average $12.6 million (adjusted for inflation). In 2006, the 400 richest were worth $263 million.

• In 1955, the richest Americans paid an average of 51.2% of their income in taxes under a system with a top rate of 90%, but with lots of loopholes. By 2006, the top tier paid 17.2% of their incomes.

• At the same time, wages for most Americans stagnated from 1979 to 1998, and by 2000 the median male wage was below the 1979 level, despite productivity increases of 44.5 percent. Between 2002-2004, two years of the "jobless recovery," the inflation-adjusted median household income declined $1669 a year.

• To cover this loss, households in the aggregate boosted their credit-card debt 315% between 1989 and 2006.

"Over the past 30 years, the income of the top 1%, adjusted for inflation, doubled: the top one-tenth of 1% tripled, and the one-one-hundredth quadrupled," says Pizzigati. "Meanwhile, the average income of the bottom 90% has gone down slightly. This is a stunning transformation."

Inevitably, any attempt to curb executive compensation will be decried as class warfare, that all-purpose charge never invoked by the powers-that-be when we’re talking about the destruction of poor and middle-class Americans. Reversing the inequality ratio by means of regulation and progressive taxation, however, will not only help curtail the risky behavior that ran the economy into the ground, it will be healthier at every level for our entire society, even those now pulling down those 11-digit compensation packages. That makes it not only the wise thing to do, but patriotic as well.

The Decline of St. Vincent’s Hospital

2010-02-03T13:37:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/nyregion/03vincents.html?pagewanted=print

February 3, 2010
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

For more than 150 years, St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan has been a beacon in Greenwich Village, serving poets, writers, artists, winos, the poor and the working-class, and gay people.

It has treated victims of calamities: the cholera epidemic of 1849, the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, the 9/11 attack and, just last year, the Hudson River landing of US Airways Flight 1549. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay got her middle name from the hospital, where her uncle’s life was saved in 1892 after he was accidentally locked in the hold of a ship for several days without food or water.

But today the hospital is struggling, and last week, in what could mean the death knell of the last Roman Catholic general hospital in New York City, a chain of hospitals proposed to take over St. Vincent’s, shut down its inpatient beds and most of its emergency room services, and convert it into an outpatient center tied to hospitals uptown and on the East Side.

Gov. David A. Paterson’s office said on Tuesday the state was extending a $6 million emergency loan to help St. Vincent’s meet its payroll, an indication of how dire its finances had become.

How St. Vincent’s went from a cherished neighborhood institution to one threatened with extinction is a chronicle of increasingly troubled management whose problems were made worse by the economics of the health care industry, changes in the fabric of a historic neighborhood and the low profit potential in religious work.

It was once part of the Roman Catholic Church’s social and political network in New York City, a cradle-to-grave embrace of parishioners who were born in Catholic hospitals, educated in parochial schools, married in the church and given last rites by a priest.

Last week, a day after the announcement of the proposed takeover, members of the Sisters of Charity, the Catholic order of nuns that founded the hospital in 1849, gathered for a noon Mass at St. Vincent’s second-floor chapel and vowed to fight. “We are not going away,” said Sister Jane Iannucelli, vice chairwoman of the hospital board, standing in the light of stained glass windows.

“One of the things that’s so crucial to the Sisters of Charity is serving the poor,” she said.

It was that very calling, some industry executives suggested, that may have helped make the hospital obsolete.

“Helping the poor is indeed the mission and the cause célèbre,” said Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospitals Association, a trade group. “Therein lies the dilemma.”

Other hospitals emphasize high-tech care and rush to invest in the fancy equipment and celebrity doctors that attract patients with the means to pay for them; St. Vincent’s sticks to its motto of “compassionate care,” rooted in its origins as a place that trained nurses and that was under the auspices of nuns.

As the Village changed, becoming home to more middle-class families, by many accounts St. Vincent’s failed to change with it. In 2007, several years after an ill-fated merger with other Catholic hospitals, St. Vincent’s management proposed selling off its maze of outdated buildings around Seventh Avenue and 12th Street to build a state-of-the-art high-rise building across the street, to be designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects, famous for cutting-edge projects like the glass pyramid expansion of the Louvre museum in Paris and the John Hancock Tower in Boston.

But some said it was too late. In an indication of how St. Vincent’s reputation had fallen in the neighborhood, during a fierce debate over whether to demolish a low-rise Modernist building to make way for the new hospital, the actors Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins suggested that St. Vincent’s no longer served the neighborhood well.

“I would not want to bring my children there,” Ms. Sarandon declared at a landmarks preservation hearing.

At the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, St. Vincent’s ministered to those affected, and was bursting at the seams. But by the 1990s, drugs and public awareness helped bring AIDS under control, and the Village’s wealthy newcomers were choosing other hospitals.

From 1996 to 2007, the most recent year for which figures are available, the number of patients the hospital admitted went down by 10 percent, while the rate for hospitals citywide was flat, state records show.

And its emergency room volume has been growing faster than the citywide rate, suggesting that it has the worst of both worlds — more emergency room patients and fewer inpatient admissions, which are where the money is.

St. Vincent’s is a major city contractor for homeless services, and hospital administrators said that homeless people from all over the city find their way there for treatment.

In short, many of the patients who frequent St. Vincent’s are part of the old Village rather than the new Village, as was clear from a tour of the emergency room last week. It was electric with activity, every bed filled. Many of the patients were elderly, from Chinatown, or grizzled remnants of the Village’s old working class. Nuns from Mother Theresa’s order hovered about.

The room, like other parts of the hospital, had a homey feeling, more like a place television’s kindly Dr. Marcus Welby would have taken his patients rather than the overly caffeinated environment of “House.”

“There’s a sense we’re here for the mission, and it truly permeates,” said Dr. Eric Legome, the chairman of emergency medicine.

Despite 62,000 emergency visits, nearly 1,800 births, almost 22,000 hospital admissions and 263,000 outpatient visits a year, according to St. Vincent’s officials, the hospital is bleeding red ink, and has been for years.

Hospital officials, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of negotiations with Continuum Health Partners, the chain that has offered to take over the hospital, said the hospital was close to having to declare bankruptcy for the second time since 2005. It is about $700 million in debt.

Officials blamed a high rate of poor and uninsured patients as well as cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and the hospital’s inability to negotiate favorable contracts with health insurance companies, claiming their fees were 30 percent below the market rate.

Catholic hospitals in some parts of the country continue to thrive, but the New York City hospital field is much different from what it was 100 years ago; New Yorkers with health insurance now can choose from a number of prestigious hospitals.

To remain competitive, in 2000 St. Vincent’s merged with several other Catholic hospitals to form St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers.

Along with the flagship hospital in the Village, it ran seven other hospitals: Bayley Seton and St. Vincent’s on Staten Island; Mary Immaculate, St. John’s and St. Joseph’s in Queens; St. Mary’s in Brooklyn; and St. Vincent’s Westchester, in Harrison, N.Y. It was also affiliated with St. Vincent’s Midtown, formerly St. Clare’s, in Midtown Manhattan.

The merger was conceived as a way to streamline management and give the hospitals pricing leverage, but it was troubled from the beginning. After closings and sales, the network was left with just one New York City hospital, the flagship; a psychiatric and substance abuse treatment hospital in Westchester; and several nursing homes and other outpatient facilities. Some of St. Vincent’s debt was inherited from the closed hospitals.

Over the last few years, St. Vincent’s has tried to polish its image, recruiting the Giants quarterback Eli Manning and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to raise money and attract customers.

It has traditionally been one of the beneficiaries of the Alfred E. Smith Foundation Dinner, an annual charity roast at the Waldorf-Astoria, where John McCain and Barack Obama traded jabs just before the 2008 election. The hospital’s chairman is Alfred E. Smith IV, a prominent Wall Street investment banker and the great-grandson of the New York governor who ran for president in 1928. Mr. Smith did not respond to a request for an interview.

In 2004, St. Vincent’s turned over management to Speltz & Weis, the first in a series of turnaround consultants. It paid the firms millions of dollars a year to run the hospital and hired their officials as hospital executives. The system filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early July 2005, when it appeared, according to court papers filed by hospital creditors, that it would be unable to make its payroll.

In a lawsuit filed in 2007, some of the hospital’s creditors painted a picture of a hospital system trapped between unscrupulous consultants and a passive or gullible board. The lawsuit accused David E. Speltz and Timothy C. Weis, the hospital system’s former chief executive and chief financial officer, of delaying the bankruptcy organization while they and their consulting firm collected millions of dollars in fees.

The lawsuit accused them of hiring high-priced contractors and padding their fees, instead of using hospital employees to do work. And it says they leveraged their positions with the hospital to negotiate the sale of their consulting company to Huron Consulting Group, in Chicago, also a defendant in the case.

From 2004 until the lawsuit was filed, St. Vincent’s paid Speltz & Weis, which was based in New Hampshire, $30.8 million and Huron $1.2 million in fees and expenses, according to court papers.

The expenses included a personal membership in a private university club; trips to New York for spouses; hundreds of dinners in Manhattan restaurants’ opera tickets; groceries, dry cleaning and laundry bills; and travel and housing fees for consultants from outside New York, according to court papers.

Lawyers for Mr. Speltz and Mr. Weis did not return calls for comment. But they said in court papers that the creditors had written a “revisionist” history of events that unfairly blamed their clients for a bankruptcy that was actually caused by a $60 million shortfall in accounts receivable that had not been detected by auditors. Their firm had to bring in contractors for important jobs because previous St. Vincent’s managers had unwisely eliminated key positions, the lawyers said. The lawsuit is headed for mediation.

The current chief executive, Henry J. Amoroso, is its fourth since 2004. He did not respond to requests for comment. St. Vincent’s board announced last weekend that it had retained another crisis management firm, Grant Thornton.

Sister Jane, the vice chairwoman, acknowledged that the hospital was on the precipice. “We have had enough money to pay our salaries,” she said, but added, “The cash flow has gotten tighter and tighter, and yes, we are in a very vulnerable position.”

Last Thursday night, more than 500 people crowded into a basement meeting room at Our Lady of Pompeii Church on Carmine Street to protest the proposed takeover. One man, Mark Leonard, spoke of how a nurse offered to come to his house and baby-sit after he took home his very fragile twins from the St. Vincent’s intensive care unit.

“You guys must be exhausted,” he remembered the nurse calling to say. “You need a night out with your wife.”

Nancy Spannbauer, a program director for the Penn South senior citizens’ program in Chelsea, told of how she had been in the home of a 91-year-old woman a few days earlier while a doctor tried to get the woman to go to the hospital.

“Eventually she gave in,” Ms. Spannbauer said. “And she said, ‘Well, I suppose if I have to, I’ll only go to St. Vincent’s.’ ”

Health Care Babbaloney

2010-02-02T12:57:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Health-Care-Babbaloney-by-allen-finkelstein-100129-165.html

January 29, 2010
By allen finkelstein

The savage battle for healthcare reform, waged so valiantly in the "bloody" halls of the Congress, but carefully crafted in the cowardly confines of the lobbies, is about to hit a watershed moment. Something must be done. The manufacturing base of an entire nation is at stake. The undeniable fact is that this country's already failing industrial infrastructure is in serious danger of total collapse without some sort of reasonable national health care. To many people's utter amazement, many of our automobile factories were lost, not to third world countries where wages were cheaper, but to Canada, where wages, taxes,and currency were all more expensive! Canada, however, has national health care and companies can save fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars per vehicle produced!

Yes, forty eight million uninsured Americans, daunting as the figure seems, is not as shocking as the impending collapse of the entire economy and eventual establishment of a single payer system, desirable as it may be, is not as important asimmediate reform of private insurance. Nine years ago, I watched an arrogant and largely incompetent president and Republican Congress proclaim that they possessed a "mandate," allowing them to dictate to the lowly minority what legislation "mandated" passage. Eight years later, equally shocked and dismayed, I witnessed Ms. Pelosi and an incompetent Democratic Congress turn, condescendingly, to the minority party with their mandate. The result, although not as blatantly psychotic, was still, very clearly, dysfunctional. The Democrats, unable to convince their own party members that the country was ready for a single payer system, were willing to compromise with the lowly Republicans and substitute a "public option," knowing that it was almost as odious to legitimate conservatives as "socialized medicine." In this way, they could placate President Obama's plea for "bipartisanship" without risk of such a "repugnant" gesture succeeding.

Understand that I am and have always been a strong proponent of a single payer system for health care delivery. Eventually, despite the best efforts of the insurance industry, of legitimate as well as "convenient" conservatives, of lobbyists and other special interest groups, virtually every free society will choose "socialized medicine." In fact, virtually every free society will become ever more socialistic as it progresses. It is the nature of a free society, with a responsive government, toask that government to be its agent, to negotiate for its people, for their health, for their security, for fair prices and, yes, evenfair taxes. The operative word, of course, is "ask." It is not the way of a democratic government to decide, for their people, that it is time to turn to a single payer or initiate a public option or arbitrarily attack a foreign country or loot their Social Security/Retirement fund to pay for such a pointless attack. All represent an inappropriate presumption of power, usually reserved for dictatorships.

There is, I feel, only one practical approach to "health care reform," one issue, and "national health care," a second, related issue. First, observing a long neglected, but previously time honored tradition, try to pass legislation that both parties are forced to agree upon. The most obvious bill, of course, is "portability of insurance" from state to state. The Republicans, despite millions of insurance dollars to the contrary, wereforced to offer up the concept, blessed by both Bernie Sanders and Howard Dean, but it was rejected by the Democratic leadership. In fact, most of the Republican platform, sparse as it may be, is dedicated to saving money and will not hurt anything. The minority party can be easily embarrassed into various reforms in insurance practices, including easing of "preexisting illness" policies and "cancellation" policies. Why not pass such "bipartisan" reforms immediately? Or, are House leaders much more comfortable maintaining the opposition as "The Party of No?"

Second, since 2003, the Republicans have been trying to introduce competitve bidding in Medicare, for durable goods, oxygen products and laboratory testing. Obviously, the associated lobbies for these entities "own" various Democratic Congresspeople. The Democrats, ever since Tom Delay and Billy Tauzin asked Pharma to author Medicare Part D in exchange for thousands of dollars in campaign contributions and added millions in direct bribes, have tried to establish competitive bidding in that area of Medicare. What would it really take to "force" both parties to acquiesce to each others quite reasonble requests? I mean, why not agree to save a total of at least one hundred billion dollars a year between the two parties, for a program that is almost bankrupt, especially without sacrificing any member benefits? Perhaps, more than one trillionreal dollars, saved in a decade, might give citizens some palpable faith in their government's ability to actually "clean up its act."

The election of Mr. Brown, an "anti-health care reform" Republican, in a state in which a Republican Governor had established a "universal" healthcare program, must be considered as a "wakeup call" to progessives. Most of the dissatisfaction in Massachusetts regarding their health care program can be traced to the inability of the state bureaucracy to manage the program. The federal bureaucracy, with the help of a truly bipartisan effort by Congress, has nearly bankrupted Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security,the United States' and the entire world's economies. Somehow, I don't think the federal bureaucracy has proven itselfready for a brisk public option (as much as I love the idea) let alone a single payer system involving three hundred thirty million members!

As usual, there is an added pest, constantly interfering with obvious facts and figures. The Congressional Budget Office was established in 1974. Its job, ostensibly, is to estimate government revenue and effects of various programs on the national debt. In the past, the agency has had "good" years and "bad" years. In recent years, apparently under serious pressure from various "educational equality" groups, hiring has been restricted only to those students who have failed college math courses. As a consequence, the Democratic plans in House and Senate are predicted to save enormous amounts of money over the next decade, despite their propensity for bankrupting every mismanaged agency they involve. The Republican proposal to allow portability across state lines, involving individual policy savings as great as fifty percent and forcing competition inall fifty states, is predicted to save six percent for employer sponsored policies and only three percent for individual policies. What did you say? You were born at night, but not last night?

Sticking it to the Man at the private medical insurance company

2010-01-30T05:18:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Sticking-it-to-the-Man-at-by-Kanuk-100125-818.html

January 27, 2010
By Kanuk
Reprint from Open.Salon.

Following my most recent post, I realized that I forgot to discuss two things about the private medical insurance industry in the U.S.

Remember how I said that unless an American is self-employed, they pay half the monthly insurance costs and the other half is paid by their employer? Well, the main role of American private medical insurance companies is to manage this money. That is, to assign where it can be used. They obviously do this for a fee in order to make a profit.

And even though the insurance companies manage the money they get from us, they don't always want to assign the money where we want them to. When this happened to my wife and me, I stumbled on a way out of the problem by accident. I'll get to that a little later.

In the third post, I compared benefits and drawbacks with the health care systems here and in Canada. I also gave an example of a time when our private medical insurance refused to cover a medical expense. To recap, my wife and I decided to go for genetic counseling to ensure that she was not a carrier of a genetic disease I have, since that would give us a one in four chance of passing it on to our children. At that appointment, the genetics counselor told us that there was only one laboratory in the entire U.S. that could test for my specific disease. The problem with that, of course, was that the one laboratory in the entire U.S. was 'out of network' for our insurance company, which meant in that case that we would have been forced to foot the entire bill ourselves. So our counselor kindly offered to write a letter for us pointing out that since we had no choice about where the blood samples were sent, our insurance company should cut us some slack, so to speak. The letter was addressed to the insurance company and attached to our reimbursement form, since we had to pay the bill upfront--a whopping $650.00.

A few weeks went by while we're waiting in comfortable expectation that our insurance company will see reason, and then we got a letter back saying that our claim was rejected because the lab was out of network. Okay, we think, maybe they just didn't get the letter. So we contacted the company by phone to explain our situation. And the minion at the other end of the phone told us, sorry, the laboratory was outside their network.

All right, we figured, time to call in the big guns. We contacted the genetic counselor again. She told us that the 'front line' workers (as in, the ones actually dealing with the irate phone calls) sometimes lack a certain amount of knowledge about these issues and very kindly wrote another letter. This time she sent it directly to the insurance company. My charming and talented wife also wrote a letter, gently reminding the insurance company that the out of network lab was the only one in the United States that could test for this particular genetic disease. She also mentioned that if we hadn't got the testing and our child was sick, it would end up costing the insurance company a hell of a lot more than $650.000. We sent that letter by registered mail.

Another few weeks go by and we received an actual letter--not a statement this time but an actual letter--addressed to me personally. And saying that the claim was still denied.

Now out of options and pretty upset by this turn of events, I casually mentioned what had happened to the Director of Human Resources at the university where I work.

That's when he told me that since medical insurance companies only manage the money the employer and its employees contribute for health care coverage (which I hadn't known), it's the employer that has final say about where the money can and can't be spent.

This had possibilities.

Even better, my colleague said I could ask a special committee, which would include employees of the university as well as some independent medical professionals, to convene and hear my case against my insurance company. He also told me that he himself had sat on this special committee for many years, and that often the individuals were successful in convincing the committee members to pay for their treatment, therefore overruling the insurance company.

Right on, I thought. My wife and I decided to go ahead and ask the special committee to hear our case.

Interestingly enough, about two or three weeks later (oh yes, the timeline spanned months at this point), we received yet another letter from our insurance company, indicating that lo and behold, they agreed to cover the costs associated with the genetic testing. Apparently--get this--despite the three letters explicitly saying so, they had somehow remained completely innocent of the fact that there was only one laboratory in the entire U.S. where the such testing could be performed.

It turns out, when you ask the special committee to convene, the insurance company is also notified that a claim is being disputed. I'm assuming that at that point our insurance company realized that the case was against them and decided to pony up.

The main lesson I learned from this experience--aside from the fact that apparently some of the people at our insurance company can't read--is that if your claim is repeatedly denied, contact your head of the human resources where you work and see whether they can help you. As I mentioned above, in the end, it is your money.

Dying for Health Care

2010-01-28T15:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Dying-for-Health-Care-by-Hollis-Polk-100124-344.html

January 25, 2010
Dying for Health Care
By Hollis Polk

What's the difference between the outpouring of support for the Haitians after the earthquake, and the inability of our Congress to support American citizens with a bill providing health care for all?

It's the video, stupid.

We are deluged with videos of Haitians dying on the streets of Port-Au-Prince, their screams heard around the world. We see bodies piled by the side of the road, and mass graves being dug by backhoes. In the midst of this, doctors talk about preventable deaths.

There are 46,000 preventable deaths each year in the US, too. When the US story is told, however, all we see is town hall meetings -- people talking in a hearing room, tearfully telling stories about how their mother, or brother, or daughter, died because they couldn't get health care. Yes, their emotion carries, but it does not have the gut wrenching impact that it would have if those deaths were seen.

What we need is uninsured people dying on the Capitol steps, both in Washington, DC and in every state capitol, as well as the Federal Buildings in New York City and Los Angeles, to shame our government into passing universal health care. We need brave people, who want their deaths to count for something, to volunteer to die in public. (I realize this may be thought macabre, but the idea was born more of desperation than anything else.)

We need their families there with them to tell their stories, because the dying probably can't.

We need videographers to document these deaths, and put them up on YouTube, because the corporate media won't carry these stories until they are shamed into it by the viral nature of the 'amateur' videos.

We need an attorney to write a statement for the dying to sign, that they are volunteering to die in public, of their own free will, in order to protect those supporting them from any prosecution. We will probably need other attorneys to support these families, in case they are arrested for their civil disobedience. (Though it's difficult to imagine the police arresting a dying woman.)

We need other volunteers to support these brave souls, to provide care for the dying, and to provide logistical assistance.

So, if you know someone who is dying because of their lack of health insurance, ask that person, "Do you want your death to count for something?" and get into action.

"If the people lead, the leaders will follow."
Mahatma Gandhi

Insurer Steps Up Fight to Control Health Care Cost

2010-01-26T06:47:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/health/policy/25insure.html?pagewanted=1&ref=nyregion

January 25, 2010
Insurer Steps Up Fight to Control Health Care Cost
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

A front in the national health care battle has opened in New York City, where a major hospital chain and one of the nation’s largest insurance companies are locked in a struggle over control of treatment and costs that could have broad ramifications for millions of people with private health insurance.

The fight is between Continuum Health Partners, a consortium of five New York hospitals, including Beth Israel Medical Center and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, both major teaching hospitals, and UnitedHealthcare, which includes Oxford health plans and has 25 million members across the country, one million of them in New York.

While Congress has been haggling over covering as many as 15 million uninsured Americans, the prestigious hospitals and the major health insurer have been in bitter contract negotiations, not just over rates but also over UnitedHealthcare’s demand that the hospitals notify the insurance company within 24 hours after a patient’s admission. If a hospital failed to do so, UnitedHealthcare would cut its reimbursements for the patient by half.

UnitedHealthcare says the proposed rule is meant to improve the quality of care and cut costs by allowing insurance case managers to jump in right away. The hospitals say that having their reimbursement cut in half is too much to pay for a clerical error, and that the revenue drain would ultimately hurt their patients.

UnitedHealthcare is negotiating or imposing similar rules at hospitals across the country, and often meeting fierce opposition. Tennessee passed a law saying the penalty would not apply on weekends or federal holidays, when hospitals are short-staffed. Florida hospital officials said that the new rule could play a role in coming contract negotiations there, and that the state hospital association had asked Florida’s insurance regulators to monitor the situation.

The dispute signals a “ratcheting up” of a long tradition of insurers trying to cut costs, said Jeffrey Rubin, an economics professor at Rutgers University.

But Dr. Rubin said UnitedHealthcare’s approach is particularly aggressive and might be part of a wave of pressure insurance companies feel from employers to cut costs and to keep premiums lower to avoid penalties, like the “Cadillac tax” on expensive insurance plans.

“It’s an example of the insurance company getting between you and your doctor,” Dr. Rubin said.

Disputes between insurers and providers have flared up before, and it is rare for them to ultimately part ways. But the negotiations in New York have become especially tense. UnitedHealthcare has sent letters over the last few weeks to tens of thousands of patients, warning that they could be cut off from coverage at Continuum hospitals and affiliated doctors, and advising them to start shopping for new ones. Last year, 85,000 UnitedHealthcare customers received treatment from Continuum.

The hospital system went to court and got an injunction preventing the insurance company from cutting access to Continuum doctors until the matter could be arbitrated. And the Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group, has complained to the state attorney general that the 50 percent penalty would be “confiscatory.” The attorney general’s office said it was reviewing the matter.

Health care analysts say that such battles could become more common if federal policy promotes competition among insurance companies, perhaps including insurance exchanges, as an important engine for driving down health care costs.

The fate of health care reform in Congress is unclear now that Democrats have lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The House and Senate have not reconciled their disparate bills, but both proposals would prevent health insurers from excluding people with pre-existing conditions, which is one way they hold down costs.

So the insurers will need to find other ways to control expenses, said Sean Cavanaugh, an analyst for the United Hospital Fund, a New York-based research institute. “That means you try to negotiate price reductions and control utilization, which is the hardest way for insurers to hold down costs,” he said.

The UnitedHealthcare-Continuum dispute may also be a sign of the times, a showdown between corporate oligopolies reminiscent of the recent fight between Time Warner Cable and the Fox Broadcasting network, only with the spoils being doctors and patients rather than cable television subscribers and “American Idol.”

UnitedHealthcare’s New York chief executive, William Golden, said in an interview that the tension had been fanned by a greedy and intransigent hospital system that had been seeking unseemly rate increases of more than 40 percent. Mr. Golden said it was the toughest negotiation he had seen in 13 years.

“This negotiation is really coming down to affordability,” Mr. Golden said. “These are kind of unique circumstances for all of us involved. It’s probably not surprising in this economic climate. There are tremendous pressures on all of us to make health care more affordable.”

Kristin Binns, a spokeswoman for WellPoint, which runs Blue Cross plans in more than a dozen states and has more subscribers than any other company, said, “We are not enforcing any sort of penalty” like UnitedHealthcare’s, and a spokeswoman for the American Hospital Association said that it knew of no other major insurer that did so.

Officials from Continuum Health Partners acknowledge that they are looking for rate increases to pay for rising costs of technology, drugs, overhead and union contracts.

The hospital chain said that after initial tough-guy posturing — including a demand from UnitedHealthcare for a 7 percent to 10 percent cut — both sides have narrowed the gap in their demands. But Continuum says the crux of the standoff is its refusal to bend to UnitedHealthcare’s notification rules.

Some plans already ask patients and hospitals to notify their insurance companies of hospital admissions, but officials at Continuum and some other hospital systems say the penalty for noncompliance is either minimal or rarely enforced. In memos outlining the new policy, UnitedHealthcare officials have said that patient compliance with notification rules is erratic.

Dr. Sam Ho, UnitedHealthcare’s chief medical officer, said the company wanted to work with hospital staff to reduce the amount of time patients stay in the hospital, which is associated with complications like infection, and to prevent readmission, a major cost.

“If you had a car that needed to be repaired and then it had to go back in the garage within a week, then a month, then again in two months, then perhaps the original quality of the work that was done was substandard,” Dr. Ho said. He said that UnitedHealthcare’s push for notification was not motivated by money and that it would be happy if it never had to impose a penalty.

“Absolutely, honestly, sincerely, this is a genuine attempt to try to improve outcomes for patients,” he said.

But Ruth Levin, Continuum’s chief contract negotiator, said that the hospital chain did not believe that UnitedHealthcare could do a better job of reducing readmissions than its own medical staff could. Her account of negotiations on this point shows just how caustic they have become: “When we say, ‘Show me where you went to medical school,’ then they back down,” she said.

”It’s the ridiculous punitive nature of this,” she said. “If we provide a medically necessary service, we should be paid at the medically necessary rate.”

UnitedHealthcare has been rolling out a similar policy across the country since 2007, but has repeatedly postponed deadlines and penalties in the face of opposition. Most recently, it postponed a Jan. 19 deadline to begin imposing the 50-percent penalty. (UnitedHealthcare documents suggest that in some cases, the full penalty would kick in only after 72 hours, but Continuum officials say that UnitedHealthcare is forcing them to negotiate such terms.)

Integris Health, an 11-hospital system based in Oklahoma City, has tried to meet the notification requirement and has been frustrated by the administrative burden, even using electronic notification, said Greg Meyers, vice president for revenue integrity. “That doesn’t feel to us like cost control, it feels like a revenue stream enhancement to the insurance companies,” Mr. Meyers said.

Continuum officials say that cutting reimbursement in half would mean the loss of at least $25,000 for a patient who had bypass surgery and $15,000 to $20,000 for elective joint replacement.

Dr. Gary Burke, a doctor affiliated with St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, said the letters warning that coverage with Continuum doctors could be cut off left some of his older patients panicked at the prospect of losing a long-term relationship with a doctor they trusted.

“They’re kind of like, ‘If I get sick, does this mean I can’t see you?’ ” Dr. Burke said.

Continuum says it believes that some larger hospital systems have been able to negotiate immunity from the penalty. UnitedHealthcare officials refused to say whether that was true, saying that their contracts were subject to confidentiality agreements. Likewise, several other hospital systems, including the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs its public hospitals, and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, declined to discuss the terms of their contracts with UnitedHealthcare.

“When all the other hospitals are doing it, we’ll do it,” Ms. Levin said. “If you go out there and succeed with NewYork-Presbyterian, we’ll do it. Then I think it’s unreasonable for me to stand out there and say, ‘Well, I can’t.’ ”

Health Insurers Spent $38 Million Lobbying Congress in 2009

2010-01-26T06:46:00.000-08:00

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/01/25/health-insurers-spent-38-million-lobbying-congress-in-2009/

zaidjilani at 10:34 pm
January 25, 2010 REPLIES: 0
Health Insurers Spent $38 Million Lobbying Congress in 2009

The Hill reports today that insurance companies — who have fought hard against health reforms like the creation of a new public health insurance plan – spent $38 million in 2009 to influence the direction of the health care debate. Here are some of the biggest spenders:

WellPoint: The Indiana-based insurer spent $4.7 million lobbying Congress last year, an increase of 21 percent from its expenditures in 2008.

UnitedHealth Group: The largest of all health insurance companies spent $4.5 million on lobbyists last year, an increase of 7 percent from 2008.

Humana: The insurance mega-company “showed the biggest increase in its lobbying spending among … insurers.” It spent $3.2 million lobbying in 2009, which is an 80 percent increase from 2008.

America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP): The health insurance industry’s lobbying group spent $8.9 million on lobbyists in 2009, a 20 percent increase from the previous year.

The Art of the Possible in Universal Health Insurance

2010-01-25T10:16:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Art-of-the-Possible-in-by-Siegfried-Othmer-100123-674.html

January 23, 2010
By Siegfried Othmer

The hope for an inclusive system of health insurance is fading, accompanied by a mixture of disappointment and relief. We had ended up with badly "gerry-mandered' legislation. There is, however, one option for moving the puck forward that would be difficult for Republicans to oppose. The proposal is simple: Those who are turned away by insurance companies are given the option of purchasing Medicare coverage. Surely we should not leave any of our citizens without any health insurance option. If the private market will not provide it, the government must step in. Insurance companies will not be able to argue that the government option is under-cutting their market. The government option would only be offered to those whom the private market abandoned.

The immediate counter-argument is simple also: The government would end up covering only the most costly patients, and that would drive up rates. In fact, however, we have history here so that we don't need to speculate. The Medicare system came into existence on exactly the same principle. The government offered coverage for the people over 65 whom the insurance companies did not want to cover. Of course the elderly have always been our most expensive patients. Still, a health insurance option for them was the only civilized thing to do. The fact is that more than half of all medical expenditures in the US are already covered from public resources, and state involvement is particularly heavy for the indigent and for the high-cost patient. So it's not as if the government were to be hit with an entirely new burden with which it is not already acquainted.

Of course there is a larger agenda here in what is being proposed. The new regime is unlikely to equilibrate very quickly. At the outset, the government program will simply mop up those who have already been dumped by their insurance companies, as well as those who had their applications rejected at the outset. Over time, however, insurance companies will continue to compete for the most profitable individual clients by raising underwriting standards, and more denials of coverage will ensue. Individual participation in the government insurance program will continue to grow, and the private insurance market will increasingly shift to handling Cadillac plans for the high-end, lower-risk client. The large employer-based and institutional market will remain in the private sphere.

For all practical purposes, we would have a robust public option without having sold our soul to the insurance and drug companies. What we would not have, of course, is an individual mandate for insurance coverage of one kind or another, and this indeed presents a problem. In the absence of a mandate, young people will take their chances and pass on the health coverage. There is a soft remedy here as well, however, and it is taxation for the free-loaders. In all of insurance, there must be a risk pool that includes those who are not at high risk for medical care. The existence of the tax will be an additional incentive to bring people into the risk pool. If a good portion of the financial burden has to be borne anyway, why not pay just a bit more to actually get the coverage? Anyone with private coverage would be exempted from the additional tax.

The above would be a uniquely American solution, and it would take us to near universal coverage at a pace that would not be wrenching to existing institutions. All would have time to adapt. All would move toward their ideal role. The government would be offering a more complete safety net in health care, and the existing insurers will maintain their position in employer-paid health care, complemented by high-end coverage for the well-to-do.

Author's Website: www.eeginfo.com

Author's Bio: Siegfried Othmer is a physicist currently engaged in the development of neurofeedback as a brain-training strategy for mental dysfunctions and for enhanced cognitive and emotional functioning.

How Wall St Destroyed Private Medicine

2010-01-23T11:58:00.001-08:00

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/100121_wall_st.htm

Paul Craig Roberts
VDare
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:06 EST

At my annual check-up, my doctor handed me a sheet explaining the reasons for office fee increases for Medicare Patients. It is worth reporting at length.

Medicare fixes the prices for Medicare patients' health care. All office charges for Medicare, including office visit charges, have been set by the Federal government since 1984. In real terms (adjusted for inflation), these fixed prices are less today than they were three decades ago.

During the last four years, there have been large decreases in Medicare reimbursements for laboratory services provided in-house by private physicians. Payments for in-office blood work, for example, have been cut 35 to 47 percent. Yet, a physician's overhead continues to increase as a result of uncontrollable costs, such as property taxes, building insurance, electricity, maintenance, malpractice and workers compensation insurance.

As one result, my doctor had to close both the x-ray unit and the state and federally licensed medical laboratory on his premises. Now patients are inconvenienced by having to go to other locations for services that formerly were provided by the doctor at lower cost. A one day medical check-up is now a multiple day event and more expensive.

While Medicare payments to doctors have been cut, regulations have been increasing: "Almost every outside diagnostic procedure (CT, MRI scan, sonogram) ordered by this office now has to be pre-approved by some outside agency. Many medications are now requiring pre-approval or step therapy. Each requires filling out 1-2 pages of forms and/or two or more phone calls. This requires personnel time and therefore more cost. Consultant referrals are requiring more paperwork and time to schedule."

My doctor has more people employed doing paperwork than he does delivering health care.

While Medicare payments for in-office services to private doctors, including those for blood work and x-ray units, were drastically cut, payments to outside corporate facilities for the same services were increased. It is obvious what is afoot. Corporate lobbies are using their whores in Congress to shift income from physician offices to corporate labs, corporate medical service providers, and hospitals that are owned by national corporations.

Legislation that cuts payments to private physicians and increases the payments to large corporate entities is intended to destroy private practice and to create in its place corporate bureaucracies in which doctors are wage slaves. The physician's income is diverted to shareholders, CEO bonuses, and Wall Street. Health care is being replaced with health business.

As a result of the way American medicine is being reconstructed, patients will cease to have a doctor whom they know and who knows them. Important information is lost in a system of bureaucratized "health care" in which a patient sees whatever face happens to be on duty at the corporate provider. Impersonal health care thus brings a cost of its own, and its quality can be low compared to private practice. Indeed, the U.S. is creating a "health care" system that is more costly and less efficient than single-payer national health systems. But it will enrich corporations and provide play for Wall Street.

It turns one's stomach to watch libertarians and "free market economists" defend bureaucratized impersonal health care as "free market medicine." There is no free market present. Corporate lobbies and campaign contributions use government power to create bureaucratized monopolies that destroy medicine for the practitioner and the patient. Wall Street pushes for greater shareholder earnings, which are achieved by denying care.

Just as independent businesses have been destroyed by corporate chains from Wal-Mart to auto parts to fast food, medicine is being destroyed by monopoly capital. The risks of starting a private business today are many times higher than they were a half century ago. Chains have turned Americans who once were independent business men and women into employees.

The fate of the health care bill demonstrates the power of private lobbies. What was to be health care for Americans was instantly transformed into 30 million new patients for the private health insurance industry. The "solution" to tens of millions of Americans being unable to afford health care is a law that requires them to purchase a private health care policy or be annually fined. As most of these uninsured Americans cannot afford to purchase a private policy, the plan is for the federal government to use taxpayers' money to subsidize their purchase of a policy from private companies.

In other words, tax money is being diverted to the pockets of private businesses. This is par for the course in "capitalist" America.

In today's America, Karl Marx's criticisms of capitalism are understated. Wherever one looks, the scene is one of the government using taxpayers' money to enrich private interests. Taxes are collected from people who can barely make it, and the revenues are transferred to multi-millionaires and billionaires. The federal government piles debt on the backs of heavily-burdened and dispossessed Americans in order that investment banksters can pay annual bonuses that exceed the lifetime earnings of most Americans.

Every aspect of the US military has been mined for private profit. Supply and other functions for the military, such as those provided by Halliburton and Blackwater, services once provided by the military itself at low cost, have been privatized. These services now cost many multiples of the cost to taxpayers of in-house military provision.

The "war on terror" enriches the armaments/security industry and enables Israeli territorial expansion. The Israel Lobby and the munitions industry are major sources of funding for U.S. political campaigns.

Prisons have been privatized in order to create profits for private corporations. The prisons require high incarceration rates in order to be profitable. Consequently, "freedom and democracy" America not only has the highest incarceration rate and the highest absolute number of prisoners in the world, but also a prison population comparable in size to the prison population of Stalin's Gulag Archipelago.

Congress allows private companies run by hardline Republicans to count electronically without paper trails the votes in elections. It has been proved over and over that the electronic voting machines, with proprietary undisclosed codes, can rig any election, especially if there are no exit polls or the captured media can find a way to discredit the exit polls.

And now we have private health care destroyed by the greed for profit. There are many reports of health care corporations, but not private doctors, rationing and even denying health care to policy holders in order to maximize profits. There are reports of people with treatable forms of cancer who were not told by their corporate health care providers in order to avoid the cost of their treatment. These reports are in compliance with capitalist America's emphasis on profits uber alles, to hell with people, the environment, honor and integrity.

Wall Street is romanticized by libertarians and "free market economists." They believe, entirely on the basis of their ideology, that Wall Street finances venture capitalists who bring economic progress and higher living standards. Wall Street does no such thing, especially since financial deregulation turned Wall Street into a speculative hedge fund.

Wall Street is concerned with annual bonuses. It will do anything to get them.

Today the interests of American capitalists are as far removed from the interests of the population as the bureaucrats of state owned firms under socialism. Neither can fail, no matter how incompetent or inefficient, as they have the public purse as their backup.

The Wall Street investment banks, which created with the compliance of the regulatory authorities and the credit rating agencies, "toxic" instruments that were sold world wide, thus destroying the prospects of people in many countries, are devoid of integrity and honor. Their only god is greed. And they control the US government, which is too dependent on campaign contributions to restore regulation.

The lobbies of greed rule America. The White House, Congress, even the federal judiciary are impotent in the face of capitalist greed.

There is no government of the people, for the people, by the people, only the rule of private interests.

MY PERSONAL MEDICARE SCAM: SIMPLE BUT EFFECTIVE

2010-01-22T15:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/MY-PERSONAL-MEDICARE-SCAM-by-Jim-Fetzer-100119-961.html

January 22, 2010
MY PERSONAL MEDICARE SCAM: SIMPLE BUT EFFECTIVE
By Jim Fetzer

Madison, WI (OpEdNews) Let me begin with the observation that, in offering evidence of a scam that takes advantage of Medicare, I am not thereby implying that the actions involved are therefore illegal. It may be the case that, due to a loophole or the way specific legislation was written, an entity like Home Health United can take advantage of its opportunities under the law to make profits that, by any reasonable standard, appear to be excessive. In this case, the numbers indicate that HHU is making more than 100% profit per year through the rental of a medical device, where I have been told that there are more than 1,000 others in the Madison area with my condition, suggesting that, on the national scale, this practice may be costing taxpayers billions --or more!

Here's my story. In February, a visitor with a medical background was a guest in our home. When we arose the next morning, he told me I suffered from "sleep apnea", which is a condition during which there is a discontinuation of breathing while sleeping. His observation led me to arrange for a "sleep study" to determine whether I was, indeed, in need of some form of remedial assistance. This infuriated my wife, who had been telling me for fifteen years that I stopped breathing in my sleep. Sometimes it takes an outside source to see things that our spouses have known all along. The sleep study showed that I was experiencing 92 "premature ventricular contractions" each hour, but that with a breathing apparatus, that number was reduced to 2.

That sounded serious to me, so I made an appointment to determine the equipment that would work best for me. I visited the heath care company, Home Health United, 4639 Hammersley Road, Madison, WI 53711, and met with a breathing care specialist. After discussion, she recommended a machine known as the BiPAP Auto M Series with Bi-Flex, which, it turns out, retails from Respironics for $1,439.

She asked me if I wanted to purchase the machine, but even though the retail price included the humidifier--a shaped plastic insert that is about 7.5"x3"x2.75", which fits snugly in a compartment of the BiPap machine, which is about 8"x8"x3.5"--that still sounded like a lot of money to me, so I was relieved when she said I could rent it, instead. When I asked if I could do that, she told me that Medicare would pay for it.

So I signed on the dotted line, took my machine with me, and began to experience the joys only a BiPap can bring, including the face mask and hose that connects to the machine, shaving at night to create a tighter fit (so leaking air would not awaken my wife), and transporting it when I traveled abroad. I wondered how many were in a similar state and was told that there were around 1,000 who used them in the Madison area alone. I didn't think much more about it until, toward the end of the year, my wife shared with me Medicare Summary Notices that showed Home Care United Inc, 2802 Walton Commons W, Madison, WI 53718, had been charging Medicare a rental at the rate of $385 for the BiPap and $55 for the humidifier each month since February. That sounded like a lot of money to me.

The problem I had was interpreting the Medicare Summary Notice, since there were four columns of figures, which were laid out like this:

Medicare Summary Notice for BiPap w/humidifier Rental

I am not terribly good with numbers--I often have trouble balancing my check book--but it seemed to me that, if Medicare was being charged $440.00 per month to rent a machine that retails for $1,439, someone--Home Care United Inc., in particular--was getting a good deal, since every ten months that would add up to $4,400.00 and, on a yearly basis, $5,280.00, for a profit that looked a lot like $3,841.00.

I figured I must be doing something wrong, so I called Medicare and the woman very patiently explained that Medicare only pays 80% of the Amount Approved, so I should be using the third column, not the first, to make my calculations. So instead of $440.00 per month, the actual cost to Medicare was instead $206.13, which, multiplied times 12 months, meant a rental fee of $2,473.56. And my supplemental insurance with Dean Health Care was picking up the extra charge of $51.53. So United Health Care Inc. was actually receiving $206.13 plus $51.53 per month or $257.66 per month or $3,091.92 per year.

Since it seemed to me this might go on interminably, I asked how many payments were involved and learned from Medicare that there would be 13 payments for the machine but only 10 for the humidifier before I would own them--compliments of Medicare. So the total for my $1,439.00 machine with humidifier turns out to run $2,679.69 (at $206.13 x 13) plus $510.30 (at $51.53 x 10) or $3,189.99, for a profit of $1,750.99, which is $3,189.99 less retail price of $1,439.00. That, I take it, is a profit ratio of about 122% over a 13 month interval. And if you consider that the actual manufacturing price of the machine may be, say, closer to $439.00 instead of $1,439.00, the actual profit ratio may be far closer to 400%, which is not bad for 13 months of billing!

Bear in mind that I have been told there are 1,000 others like me in the Madison area alone. Since Madison has a population of around 250,000, if we assume that this is a random sample, then since the population of the United States is more than 300,000,000, there may be as many as 1,200 Madison-equivalents in the United States for machines like mine alone. The profit from 1,000 in Madison, given the assumption that my experience is typical, would therefore run a profit of 1,000 x $1,750.99, which is $1,750,990.00 for Madison alone. Assuming there are 1,200 Madison-equivalents in the United States, profits run around $2,101,188,000.00 for this one kind of care every 13 months. That may explain why the health care industry has such an enormous stake in health care reform, not because it might benefit the American people but the truly extravagant profits involved.

Neither the Medicare specialist nor my Dean Health Care advisor questioned the charges from Home Care United Inc. and they were both very helpful in making sure that I understood the numbers.Let me emphasize again that I am not suggesting that Home Care United Inc. is doing anything remotely illegal. Slavery used to be legal, too, but it was morally wrong and we eventually straightened that out. But these numbers strongly suggest why our health care expenses are devouring the nation's wealth and why a government-run health care system of the quality and success of Medicare must be administered on the basis of competitive bidding --where contracts are written and managed with extreme care in order to contain the insatiable quest of contractors for greater and greater profits-- is in the nation's interest. It may be perfectly legal, but something is definitely wrong

Those without healthcare should make it a point to die on the Capitol Steps

2010-01-22T15:48:00.000-08:00

But they'd probably get tasered to death!!!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Those-without-healthcare-s-by-Mary-MacElveen-100122-756.html

January 22, 2010
By Mary MacElveen

As I sat staring at this image of corpses from Haiti which have horrified and have captivated us so, many thoughts came to mind seeing how any healthcare reform has died in our country. While I do not wish to politicize the deaths in Haiti, it will not hold me back from politicizing deaths that occur here in the United States due to a person's lack of health insurance.

Let's face it, health care for ONE and ALL is dead in this country. We will never-ever have universal healthcare. The politicians failed we the people. Not that that phrase "we the people" means anything anymore given the fact that the Supreme Court gave unbridled powers to the corporations of this country in their most recent decision.

We are no longer "we the people" but merely customers of this new country if one can call it that with corporations calling the shots from now on. They with their deep-deep pockets will decide for you and me who will represent us in any seat clear across this country. Oops, did I say represent us? No, I mean represent them. We are from now on are drones of the state.

Will these corporations care who dies from a lack of healthcare? No, they will not. They will only care of their bottom line. The all-might dollar: And that is if it survives into the future given the fact that other economies around the globe have surpassed ours. They have a lot of catching up to do.

The latest estimates have been that 40,000 or so have been buried in mass graves in Haiti due to this earthquake and I find that figure interesting given the fact that it is estimated that the same number dies each year due a lack of health insurance in this country.

Do politicians and celebrities have to see the pictures of the uninsured to finally get it? Do these uninsured people have to die in the open for anyone to give a damn?!

Given the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court gave these unbridled powers to the corporations without any protest coming from the American people, those without health insurance should make it a point to die on the Capitol Steps right at the politician's feet. That to me would be the ultimate protest. Make sure you can die when both houses are in session.

You may be thinking, she has finally lost it meaning me, but I am serious in my suggestion that ALL who know they are going to die and cannot be cured due to a lack of insurance stipulate in their wills (if they can afford them) their remains be placed on the steps of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. It may be illegal, but think of all the illegality that has gone on within that city throughout the decades.

Maybe, just maybe several mass graves have to be dug right here in the United States of America to drive home the point to the American people and especially our newly bought politicians. Hmm, who is the Senator for Aetna? Ah, yes, Senator Joe Lieberman. As for Lieberman: You are no longer a person held in great regard where your vote is of any importance. Senator-elect Scott Brown is. Take that.

Author's email address is, xmjmac@optonline.net

"I Don't Want to Pay for Somebody Else's Health Care"

2010-01-22T15:37:00.002-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/-I-Don-t-Want-to-Pay-for-S-by-Richard-Wise-100121-971.html

January 21, 2010
"I Don't Want to Pay for Somebody Else's Health Care"
By Richard Wise

One of the criticisms of the health care bills passed by the House and Senate is that people who already have health insurance may have to pay for coverage provided to the uninsured. "I don't want to pay for somebody else's health care" is a common complaint.

This complaint resonated with some Massachusetts voters in the weeks before Tuesday's special election. Massachusetts already has a state-mandated health insurance program (Health Connector) and those voters saw themselves having to pay for the uninsured in their own and in other states.

The "I don't want to pay for somebody else's health care" mantra tells me these people do not understand much about the bills approved in Congress.

They also do not understand much about insurance.

People who say, "I don't want to pay for somebody else's health care" will be surprised to learn: you already do. That's because it's insurance, and that's the way insurance works.

Here is a specific example from an unnamed (but real) New England couple, both in their early 60s and in generally good health.

The couple's total health care bill was $15,975 in 2008. Their insurance premiums were $14,575 (84% paid by an employer) and they paid $1,400 in co-pays themselves.

Where did all that money go? Here's an accounting.

The $1,400 in co-pays went directly to healthcare providers, of course. The rest went to Wellpoint.

And what did Wellpoint do with the money?

The insurance company paid $3,805 directly to the couple's healthcare providers on their behalf (so the couple's actual total healthcare costs in 2008 were $5,205). The company also paid $3,215 to itself -- $2,472 for administrative costs and $743 in profit (based on figures in Wellpoint's 2008 annual report).

The rest of the money -- $7,555 -- was used to pay for other people's health care costs. All this is shown in the pie chart.

So, of the couple's $15,975 in total health care spending, just 33% went to their own direct medical care. Another 20% went to the insurance company for its own uses. And a whopping 47% subsidized other people's health care costs.

Imagine that: this couple spent more money on other people's healthcare than they did on their own.

How could that be? Easy: that's the way insurance works. When the couple bought health insurance, they put both their money and their risk of needing health care into a pool. In 2008, neither one got sick -- lucky them -- but somebody else in the pool did. And the couple's premiums helped to pay for that somebody else's health care.

Are they outraged by this fact? Not really. The notion of two healthy people spending nearly $8,000 per person per year for health care is plainly outrageous -- no other country in the world spends close to that much per person. But the notion of paying into an insurance pool that pays many people's health care bills is not outrageous at all.

This couple knows that what goes around comes around. In some future year, one or both of them may get sick themselves. The cost of just one major surgical procedure could exceed several years worth of premiums, and the couple realizes that. So they pay for others now, expecting that others will pay for them later. That's the way insurance works. That's the way societies work (funny thing, how "society' and "socialism' have the same root word).

There may be much to criticize in the health care bills, especially the Senate bill. But one of those criticisms should not be that you will be forced to pay for somebody else's health care.

If you have health insurance at all, you already do that.

Is President Obama Throwing Real Health Reform Under The Bus?

2010-01-22T15:37:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/President-Obama-Is-Throwin-by-Daniel-Tilson-100120-288.html

January 22, 2010
Is President Obama Throwing Real Health Reform Under The Bus?
By Daniel Tilson

What a difference a Massachusetts special election can make, eh? Now President Obama is telling Democratic leadership not to jam a health care bill through Congress.

Sadly but no longer unsurprisingly, this doesn't signal the opening salvo in a re-calibrated battle plan to enlist public support for a new health reform bill with the teeth sharp enough to take a big bite out of health insurance industry prices, profits and practices run amok.

No, quite the opposite, in fact. The President and Democratic leadership seem to be doing the tail between the legs thing, running scared, cherry-picking a few regulatory reforms they think might still gain passage.

Of all the lessons to learn from the Massachusetts slap-down, the one that might actually turn the tide for the National Democratic brand is: You can't talk the talk of reform without a bold willingness to also walk the walk.

As the Obama administration, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and all the other usual suspects do their finger-pointing damage control on Massachusetts and talk about moving forward on health reform, one gets the feeling not only that they live in an out of touch, insulated echo chamber of a beltway bubble, but also that they're so frightened of failure they've forgotten what winning strategy is all about.

While affordability is supposed to be one of the three linchpins of effective health reform (access and accountability being the other two in the words of Pelosi), you may have noticed that for months most of the White House and Democratic leadership chatter about cost has revolved around the cost of the legislation itself, and how to pay for it - not around any concerted effort to force insurance companies to lower their costs, limit their profits and pass along the savings to consumers in the form of reduced premiums.

I'm no genius, but it seems like simple, winning political strategy - and the highest standard of public policy - to make the gut-level issue of reducing the crushing costs of health insurance for millions of struggling individuals, working families and small businesses the absolute do-or-die focus of any legislative health care reform legislation.

Of course, Democratic leadership would explain that they're doing just that by offering generous subsidies to those who can't afford to pay the outrageous prices charged by private, for-profit insurers. Never mind that these subsidies also add to the cost of the bill, helping offset any savings the bill may generate through Medicare cuts and other measures. Never mind that this approach only addresses people's ability to afford the crazy cost of insurance, not the cost itself.

Now that he appears to have discarded the idea of getting a truly transformational health reform bill through Congress, the President's newest call to "action" seems to revolve around trying to gain passage of things like higher subsidies, eliminating coverage barriers for people with pre-existing conditions, and giving people "portability" of coverage when they change jobs. These are not insignificant reforms, and they'll help many people - but they do nothing about lowering the cost of health insurance, and if done outside a broader reform context, they could easily end up raising costs for millions.

Here are a few obvious ways - without a public option health plan - and even without a complete health care bill, Mr. President - of forcing competition and real cost reduction onto the out-of-control health insurance industry.

Bust their monopolies by repealing their anti-trust exemption
Don't let individual states overrun with insurance lobbyists and money to have primary regulatory oversight of the industry
Make insurance companies spend more of every premium dollar on actual medical care
Makes you wonder why the Obama team and the Democratic leadership team were together quite content to dither away so many months standing on the sidelines of the debate about a public option - knowing this would let evil spin doctoring about government takeovers and death panels gain steam - instead on focusing on those three game-changing insurance industry reforms and rallying populist sentiment around them.

Hmmm, think that maybe more than a few in the ranks of the Democratic leadership are a little too concerned with maintaining the flow of insurance company money into their political action committees and campaign coffers?

By now, most voters of every affiliation from all over the country have seen through this cynical, cowardly con game. Think that could be one of the reasons that public support for health reform has plummeted? A correlated con game is the Democratic cover story that this trend is all about the well-heeled opposition campaign to make this "landmark" legislative effort dead on arrival.

Yeah, right. If only it had been a landmark legislative effort - If only it could be.

If someone in the highest ranks of Democratic leadership doesn't know enough to now pull the emergency brake on this train wreck of a health reform effort, admit their original miscalculations and tactical errors to the public, and seize the moment to resurrect their brand by leading a real health reform effort, than the election of Republican Scott Brown to succeed Democratic legend Ted Kennedy is no doubt only the beginning of a disastrous election year - not only for the Democratic brand, but also for the American one.

Calif. Democrats revive single-payer health care

2010-01-22T14:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/21/AR2010012104845.html

By DON THOMPSON
The Associated Press
Thursday, January 21, 2010; 9:49 PM

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- A key legislative committee in California revived a bill Thursday to create a government-run health care system in the nation's most populous state, two days after Massachusetts elected a senator who opposes the president's national health care plan.

The Senate Appropriations Committee released the bill for a vote by the full Senate next week. The legislation had been held over from last year because of the state's ongoing budget crisis.

Creating a single-payer system would cost California an estimated $210 billion in its first year. That's roughly double the size of the total state budget, but about what the state and federal government and residents cumulatively spend now on California health care, said Sen. Mark Leno.

Leno, D-San Francisco, introduced the bill after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger twice vetoed similar legislation. The Republican governor negotiated his own $14.7 billion health care reform bill with Democratic leaders two years ago, only to see the measure fail in a Senate committee amid concerns over paying for the measure.

Leno's bill would create a commission to decide how to pay for the system, at a cost this year of more than $1 million.

Leno said the system could be funded with a payroll tax along with existing state and federal money and increased efficiencies from a state-managed system that eliminates the insurance middleman. Voters would have to approve the commission's funding plan, he said.

Republicans mocked majority Democrats for reviving the bill as health care reform flounders in Washington, and California struggles with a new $20 billion deficit.

"California Democrats are either tone-deaf or delusional," California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring said in a statement.

Senate Minority Leader Dennis Hollingsworth, R-Murrieta, also criticized the timing, though Democrats can send the measure to Schwarzenegger without Republican votes.

Leno said voters may dislike the hybrid health care plan being debated in Congress, but polls have shown support for a state-run plan in California. The appropriations committee had to act Thursday for the bill to be considered by the full Senate before a Jan. 31 deadline for passing bills introduced last year.

"Whatever comes out of Washington is much less certain, which only gives greater incentive for leadership coming from state legislators because somehow, some way, health care reform must be addressed," Leno said in a telephone interview. "We're drowning. We can't keep up and it's killing our economy and it's harming our employers and it's harming our employees. It's harming everybody."

Sick-care America now needs another $1.9 trillion increase in debt limit just to stay afloat

2010-01-22T05:29:00.001-08:00

http://www.NaturalNews.com/z027995_debt_spending_America.html

January 21 2010
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) The US government is running out of money... again. So Democrats want to increase the debt limit by trillions of dollars... again. The newly requested debt limit increase is a jaw-dropping $1.9 trillion, which would put the total national debt at $14.3 trillion.

These are more than just numbers on pieces of paper. It's easy to get lost in the numbers and not realize the significance of what's happening here, but as I've explained many times here on NaturalNews (and on www.CounterThink.com as well), what you are watching is the financial crumbling of the American empire.

No nation can support endless, increasing debt. It is a law of economics, much like gravity is a law of physics. America is testing that law by pushing the boundaries of debt spending with each passing day, but it's going to find that no nation can fiscally defy gravity for long. America's debt spending is spiraling out of control and cannot be sustained.

Much of this debt spending, as you well know, stems from the poor health of the nation. The sick-care spending on pharmaceuticals, chemotherapy, unnecessary surgeries, and of course the immense loss of economic productivity due to people prematurely dying from pharmaceuticals and junk foods.

I've said this a hundred times before, and now even author Michael Pollan is saying it: Our toxic food supply will bankrupt our nation with health care costs.

What will happen to the money supply
America cannot sustain its current path of poisoning its people with toxic foods, poisoning them further with pharmaceuticals, and borrowing trillions of dollars from the world to pay for our disease, debt and war. The numbers just don't add up.

Sure, you can sneak by for a little while, borrowing money from other countries to support your own debt addiction. But now we are watching an accelerating blowout of U.S. debt that can never be reversed. Mark my words: The U.S. national debt will never be paid back. The voters won't tolerate it! (Because it would mean spending less and consuming less today.)

And that means all those countries who have loaned money to the United States should be prepared to lose that money. When lenders lose money, they aren't very happy about lending more money. And that means countries will reduce or halt their purchases of U.S. debt -- which is how debt spending money is typically raised.

It's already happening, in fact. China is already shifting its purchases of debt away from the U.S. dollar and towards other currencies. Many other countries are following suit. Because of this mass exodus away from "investing" in U.S. debt, the total amount of debt that the United States can sell off in a year is strictly limited -- to under $400 billion right now and probably much less in years to come.

Yet at the same time, the annual gross deficit of spending by the U.S. government is roughly $1 trillion a year, meaning that the total national debt increases by a trillion dollars a year, too. (These are really rough numbers. To see more detailed figures, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United... )

The great counterfeit machine: $600 billion a year
The upshot of all this? If the U.S. needs to borrow $1 trillion a year, but other countries will only buy roughly $400 billion a year, the U.S. must print $600 billion a year in new money just to keep itself afloat. This is massive money creation and it leads to the obvious destructive effects: Currency deflation (the dollar becomes worth less) and price inflation (goods and services cost more dollars).

This means the dollars you're earning or saving will become increasingly worthless as all this kicks in.

We are now late in the game on this debt situation. If the U.S. government were a cancer patient, it would be a stage-four patient, breathing on a respirator and barely conscious. And yet somehow most of the American people take absolutely no notice of the extremely precarious financial situation.

There is a mass hallucination under way in America right now, where people think we can all go on consuming natural resources, feeding our children junk food, poisoning our bodies (and rivers) with pharmaceuticals, polluting the DNA of our crops with GM seeds, and ignoring the healing powers of herbs, nutritional supplements and super foods.

This mass hallucination has created what Dr. Gabriel Cousens calls "a culture of death" where people are invested in industries of death and philosophies of death. The sick care industry, in particular, is an industry of death. The food industry is an industry of death (because they sell mostly dead foods). The meat industry is an industry of death, as is the pesticide industry, too.

This culture of death pervades American culture -- a culture preoccupied with imperialistic expansion, the destruction of nature through unlimited urban development, and endless pursuits of "economic activity" through corporations whose profits depend on sickness, disease and death. So much of the U.S. economy is now invested in disease and death that transforming the U.S. economy into one based on health and happiness would devastate the economy with job losses. It's really that bad...

Optimism, or just gullibility?
There are those who believe that America can somehow pull itself out of this spiral of disease and debt. They think that somehow, some future political leaders will magically discover a conscience and guide America to live within her means. Some even believe that members of Congress will be suddenly and magically imbued with a sense of health awareness and sustainability, and they will overthrow the corporatocracy by voting against their own self-interests and instead voting to defend the interests of the people.

To believe that such things might occur is foolish. I have no such illusions. I've been around enough to know that when it comes to corporations and politicians, short-term greed always wins out over long-term sustainability. People want their debt spending NOW. They want their junk foods NOW. They want their "free" sick care system NOW. Very little thought is given to the concepts of what might be better for the long-term sustainability of a family, a community or a nation. Or the world, for that matter.

There is no saving America from its self-inflicted financial demise. It is now only a matter of time before the financial blowout takes its course, leaving Americans diseased and bankrupt, sitting on piles of useless paper dollars and wondering how it all happened...

Why America needs to fail before it can succeed
But this is good news in the bigger picture, because America actually needs to learn a tough lesson about health and finances in order to have a brighter future. The day the federal government goes broke and can no longer pay the salaries of FDA employees is a great day for health freedom. The day that the whole system of government-sponsored Big Pharma medical tyranny goes broke is the day that America might finally set a new course for a healthier future based on health freedom and safe, affordable natural medicine rather than monopoly-priced chemicals sold by criminally-operated corporations.

America needs to fail before it can succeed because the lessons of sustainable civilization have not yet been learned by America's leaders (or most of its people). The sooner this corrupt, broken system of disease and debt fails, the sooner we can all get on with the business of structuring a new society based on healthy food, honest money and health freedoms.

So don't mourn the coming financial death spiral of the United States of America. From its impending failure and rebirth, we (and our children) can learn important lessons about how to structure a more successful society in the future. I can tell you this: No successful society can sustain a huge pharmaceutical sector because pharmaceuticals cause both death and debt -- the two very things that destroy a society at its core.

In order for America to have a future, Big Pharma needs to be put out of business. And it will be when the federal dollars run out. After all, if given a choice of how to spend their own money, virtually no one would choose a $200 bottle of chemical pills over a $10 bottle of natural supplements that are safer and more effective. Big Pharma's very survival, in other words, depends on the financial survival of the U.S. government, and that's a bet the pharmaceutical industry will eventually lose.

Health freedom will always win in the end because no government that denies its people access to healing foods and natural medicines will survive for very long.

Sick-care America now needs another $1.9 trillion increase in debt limit just to stay afloat

2010-01-22T05:29:00.000-08:00

House Progressive Won't Back Senate Healthcare Bill

2010-01-21T14:57:00.000-08:00

http://www.salon.com/src/pass/sitepass/spon/sitepass_website.html

January 20, 2010 by Salon.com
The co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus says Senate healthcare bill won't fly
by Mike Madden

WASHINGTON -- The co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus says he won't support a plan to have the House pass the Senate healthcare bill, then change the legislation through budget reconciliation.

"It has to be the whole thing" done through reconciliation, Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., told Salon Wednesday morning. "The whole issue of parallel -- do this or do that later -- I don't believe that will occur." Getting the House to agree to pass the Senate bill -- without changing even a single comma -- is the only way to send healthcare legislation to President Obama without the Senate having to vote on it again. But Grijalva thinks that option is virtually impossible. "If it is the Senate bill that we're asked to just merely vote on [and] send to the president's desk for his signature, I think it's going to be difficult to round up a majority," he said.

House progressives will meet with leadership later Wednesday. If they won't go along with the Senate bill, it's just another reminder of how complicated the healthcare process is going to be after Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts Tuesday night.

But Grijalva said Congress should just find a way to ram healthcare through the budget reconciliation process, which only needs 51 votes in the Senate. The rules in the Senate might make it impossible to get most of the bill past that process; anything considered policy, rather than budget-trimming, would still need 60 votes. But Grijalva thinks that's the Senate's problem, and if the Senate, which still has a wide Democratic majority, can't get its act together, then it's time to pull the plug on the bill. "The Senate, through their rules, could say none of this is possible, but I think if we want to pass something, I don't think it's going to be their version," he said. "If it all fails, then we're down to [former Democratic National Committee chairman] Howard Dean's point."

And as panicked Democrats try to figure out what to do after losing an election they thought was basically guaranteed a few weeks ago, progressives don't want their colleagues to come to the wrong conclusions.

"Rather than retreat and go hide under the covers, I think what's important for Democrats -- particularly in the House -- is to push the envelope," Grijalva said. "It's time for some good old-time religion. And start talking to the base -- we need the base. If they stay home, we're in trouble."

What will keep them from staying home, Grijalva thinks, is more action, not less.

"One of the things that I heard more and more [about] deals that were made [in the Senate healthcare debate] -- 'It's the same old ballgame, Raúl, you guys haven't changed,'" he said. "I think we underestimate that attitude. We won because people were tired and they were cynical about their government, and we need to energize them and make them begin to trust that we're doing the right thing. Just act like Democrats. Let's go work for what we're supposed to work for, and if we have to drag this White House with us, that's fine."

Reforming Health Care is Not Optional

2010-01-21T13:34:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Reforming-Health-Care-is-N-by-LindaForThePeople-100119-770.html

January 21, 2010
Reforming Health Care is Not Optional
By LindaForThePeople

Americans opposing health care reform do not grasp the fact that we will eventually be forced to reform. The United States is simply on an unsustainable course. Healthcare costs are rising at just under 10% per year. So, in 10 years, costs will double. They will double for corporations, small businesses, unions, pension funds, individuals, and our government.

Foreign state involvement in health insurance coverage is one reason why laying off U.S. workers and hiring overseas is cost effective. As U.S. companies increase global hiring and U.S. workers lose their jobs and thus their health insurance, as fewer small employers are able to afford insurance for their workers, as increasing numbers of those who pay for their own health insurance can no longer afford it, as taxpayers must pay more and more to insure government workers and those on government pensions, our system will break. The money will not be there to sustain the current path. Eventually, enough Americans will see the problem because they will experience the problem.

It would be much better to act now to head off a crisis. But too many Americans have their heads in the sand. They take for fact the disinformation coming into their Inbox. Too few are willing to look at the facts themselves, to read the health reform legislation, and to follow the money trail of reform opposition that leads directly to the huge health insurance cartel. The money this cartel has spent to pay lobbyists, influence congress, and sway public opinion is without precedent. But it's been money well spent; the cartel has been very effective. People look to those who have very specific agendas and assume they're getting facts. It's so sad, and so detrimental to our citizens and the prosperity of our country. Unfortunately, people are going to have to suffer in order to wake up. And by then, the costs and the mess will have dramatically increased in magnitude.

From looking at how other countries handle health insurance and health care, it's quite clear that having a public health insurance option is the best and most effective way to maintain a high level of quality and control costs. No other method proves as effective. And the proof is there. When I hear people say we need a uniquely American solution, the hair on my neck stands up. When the entire rest of the industrialized world is a laboratory that we can study, why on earth would we refuse to look at how other countries have done things? What did this country do, what are the positives and negatives? What did that country do, how did it work, what were the pitfalls? Because we are the only - note, the only - industrialized nation that does not universally cover its citizens, the rest of the wealthy nations have kindly run pilot projects for us. And when you look at them, a public health insurance option is #1 in effectiveness.

Germany, by most criteria, is the gold standard of health systems. Yes, it ranks higher than the U.S. by all qualified measures. But then, no matter what independent organization you look at and no matter what they measure, the U.S. does not rank even close to the top. The European systems to which we love to think we're superior all rank above the U.S. All these systems spend less than we do as a percent of GDP; all have universal coverage, all rank higher in quality, and all have slower growth in health care costs. But do we care? No. We're content to leave things the way they are because for most Americans, it's working today. And most Americans are afraid to upset the apple cart, even though the apple cart is tipping whether we realize it or not. Most Americans just aren't being hit in the head with the apples yet. We do not need to fear change. Studying what has worked for our fellow wealthy nations should give us confidence to move forward with reform. If we don't, we walk a perilous course.

One of my favorite arguments against reform is that we can't handle the influx of newly insured people. What an amazing lack of compassion this displays, not to mention a lack of economic acumen. When a market expands, be it for some new widget or health care, does capacity increase? Or do those who stand to benefit from the expansion say, naw, we don't want to make additional money, we won't expand to take advantage of the market. Capacity increases to meet market demand, every time!

Just for the sake of argument, let's say capacity doesn't increase or takes awhile to increase. Universal health coverage would add 15% to the rolls of the insured. And the uninsured are disproportionately young so they're also disproportionately healthy. But, again for the sake of argument, let's pretend they'd put the same load on the health care system as those currently insured. Appointments in my health system run from 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. with an hour off for lunch. That's seven hours per day. An increase of 15% more patients would cause me to wait one hour and five minutes longer for an appointment. Can I live with that to care for my fellow Americans? You bet I can and shame on anyone who can't.

We need reform. We need a public health insurance option. And we need it today. The unsustainable train is flying down the track. If you look, its lights can be seen in the distance. If we do not change course, the train will hit us.

Florida attorney general threatens suit to halt healthcare mandate

2010-01-21T13:33:00.001-08:00

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/southflorida/story/1434594.html

Marc Caputo
The Miami Herald
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:02 EST

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum said Tuesday that Congress has no constitutional right to force people to buy health insurance -- and he'll sue to stop the proposal if it becomes law.

"Never before has Congress compelled Americans, under threat of government fines or taxes, to purchase an unwanted product or service simply as a condition of existing in this country,'' McCollum wrote in a legal opinion to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

McCollum said the commerce clause of the Constitution doesn't allow Congress to tax or penalize someone for not doing something -- in this case, not buying insurance. His office said it would sue the enforcing agency for the legislation, which is currently the Internal Revenue Service but could change if the legislation changes.

McCollum, a Republican running for governor, was accused of playing politics by the two Democrats running for his seat, Sen. Dave Aronberg of Greenacres and Sen. Dan Gelber of Miami Beach.

''Florida has an insurance crisis -- 20 percent of our citizens have no insurance,'' Gelber said. ''I have no clue what McCollum will do to solve this crisis, other than threaten to sue Congress when it tries to solve the problem.''

Asked about what he'd do to help the roughly 4 million uninsured Floridians as governor, McCollum said it was a ''political question'' and ''that's not what I'm here about today.''

''During the course of the campaign, I may well lay out something [regarding healthcare]. I may well not,'' McCollum said Tuesday. ''I don't know yet.''

McCollum said he would prefer to address health-insurance problems by offering more tax incentives, reducing government mandates or by requiring more physical education in schools to keep children healthy.

Called the ''individual mandate,'' the congressional proposal McCollum opposes is designed to make it tougher for uninsured people to show up at costly emergency rooms and stick taxpayers with the tab.

The mandate also guarantees big profits for insurance companies.

ear President Obama: Time to Stop Letting Corporations Write the Health Care Bill

2010-01-21T12:03:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Dear-President-Obama-Time-by-Jane-Hamsher-100120-751.html

January 20, 2010
Dear President Obama: Time to Stop Letting Corporations Write the Health Care Bill
By Jane Hamsher
(originally published at HuffPost)

When Max Baucus unveiled an early version of the Senate bill in September, an ex-WellPoint VP named Liz Fowler was listed as the author. Only a few weeks earlier, the Huffington Post exposed the sweetheart deal negotiated between the White House and PhRMA in exchange for $150 million in political advertising. And Harry Reid kept Byron Dorgan's popular drug reimportation amendment off the floor of the Senate until PhRMA could whip enough votes to defeat it because it violated that deal.

Dorgan accused the White House of tanking the amendment and retired shortly thereafter. And last night, Martha Coakley paid the price for those deals too. The only real question this morning is, how more Democrats will lose their seats before they decide to stand up to the corporations?

Reports on the Death of Health Care Are Premature

In the wake of Martha Coakley's defeat, both Representative Barney Frank and Senator Jim Webb have said that jamming a health care bill through before Scott Brown can be seated is not the right thing to do. And they're right. Any attempt to do so will look like an effort to bypass the will of the public to facilitate a giant corporate giveaway.

But many on the Hill are also saying that the Massachusetts defeat means that health care reform is dead, fearful that what happened to Martha Coakley will happen to them, too, in 2010.

That's about as feasible as Wile E. Coyote trying to turn around and run back across the bridge that is crumbling behind him. There's only one way to go.

As Jerome Armstrong says, "The Democrats have less than 10 months to start governing as a people-powered party, or they will lose both the House and the Senate." The damage is done. Unless the Democrats move aggressively to right the perception that they are the party of backroom deals and massive corporate bailouts, 2010 will be more of the same.

Step One: Stop Letting Joe Lieberman Run the Party

There will certainly be no shortage of those ready to extract the wrong lessons from the Coakley loss. Joe Lieberman, Mr. 31%, says it's a sign that people "don't like all the partisanship and deal-making here in Washington" and that "they're really skeptical about this health care bill." He doesn't mention that it's his health care bill they don't like, or that making the bill was made unpopular as the price of his vote.

Step Two: Independent Approval in Swing Districts Soars With Addition of a Public Option

A new FDL/SurveyUSA poll of NY-01 shows how Lieberman's bill is affecting the race in that district, one of many that the Democrats are at risk of losing in the next election. Incumbent Tim Bishop would have a narrow lead over GOP challenger Randy Altschuler if the race were held today in a contest that was rated "lean Democratic" by Cook's Political Report.

People were pretty evenly split when asked if they supported a bill with a mandate to buy private insurance, with 50% saying it's a good idea and 44% saying it's a bad idea. Support fell dramatically when they were told that they would be fined up to 2% of their income for failure to comply, with 40% saying it's a good idea and 57% saying it's a bad idea. But when the option to buy into a government-run Medicare program was added, 63% of likely voters (66% of independents) supported it and 33% opposed even with the fine. Even support among Republicans shot up 23%.

Polling done for HCAN last September found similar results nationally, indicating that likely 2010 voters "oppose a mandate to purchase private insurance by 64% to 34% but support a mandate with a choice of private or public insurance by 60% to 37%."

Joe Lieberman was personally responsible for killing the public option/Medicare expansion in the Senate bill.

Step Three: Be Bold, Take On the Corporations With "Sidecar Reconciliation"

The good news? Nobody needs Lieberman's vote to pass either one any more. The non-budgetary "fixes" like banning the exclusion of those with pre-existing conditions have already passed the Senate. A public option -- or an expansion of Medicare -- can be added through reconciliation, which takes 51 votes. The Republicans certainly had no fear of using reconciliation when George Bush was in office. And the Democrats are going to need to do so in order to make good on their promise to fix the excise tax to benefit of the middle class, which will cost roughly $60 billion. But their options for doing that are limited by the process itself: they can pay for it by the savings from a government program like a public option or an expansion of Medicare. Or, they can piss everyone off and raise taxes.

That looks to be where Gerald Nadler and Anthony Weiner are headed. They indicate that "the only way they could sign on to the Senate bill is if it was accompanied immediately, or even preceded by, a separate bill, making a number of major preemptive changes to what they regard as an inferior package," per Brian Beutler.

It's called sidecar reconciliation. And the 65 members of the House who have pledged to vote against any bill that does not have a public option should be looking into it seriously tonight.

Ezra Klein says that "a Democratic Party that would abandon their central initiative this quickly isn't a Democratic Party that deserves to hold power." I would add that if they don't stick to the principles they profess to hold and stand up to the lobbyists they've kowtowed to from the start, "holding power" won't be anything they have to worry about.

Author's Website: firedoglake.com

Whistleblower reveals how insurers can game healthcare bill

2010-01-21T11:49:00.000-08:00

http://rawstory.com/2010/01/whisteblower-reveals-health-insurers-game-insurance-bill/

By Brad Jacobson
January 20th, 2010

Though Senate bill cuts 'pre-existing conditions,' it still allows insurance companies to create 'pre-existing' categories to raise rates

The Democrats' healthcare overhaul, billed as a monumental game-changer for Americans' health insurance coverage, provides numerous loopholes for health insurance companies which will allow them to raise rates to protect profit margins, a health insurance whistleblower says.

Wendell Potter, a twenty-year veteran of the insurance industry and former vice president of communications for Cigna, warns that current healthcare legislation does nothing to prevent the insurance industry from continuing its ongoing practice of increasingly shifting healthcare costs to consumers.

A form of bait-and-switch, such practices often set up individuals, families and small businesses for inadequate or unaffordable access and a continued looming threat of financial ruin. The overlooked element, Potter says, is that insurance companies will be able to claim they are reducing premiums by forcing more Americans to pay higher deductibles and offering less coverage.

“We talk a lot about affordability, and we talk about affordability of insurance premiums,” Potter told Raw Story in a nearly hour-long interview. “But when you talk about affordability, you need to talk about affordability of premiums plus out-of-pocket expenses.”

He said that there’s been a lot of discussion on how the Congressional Budget Office scored this legislation and what it says this legislation will cost the country in the long run, but little to no focus on how the legislation will directly impact individual Americans.

Potter pointed out, for example, that many plans -- even after consumers received proposed government subsidies to help pay for them -- would come with high deductibles that prohibit people from using their insurance or cause them the kind of financial hardships that healthcare reform was purported to prevent.

“What worries me,” he said, “is people who are forced to buy coverage and all they can afford to buy is a high deductible. And if they get really sick then they have to pay so much out of their own pockets that they’re going to be filing for bankruptcy and losing their homes.”

In the Senate bill, in particular, Potter noted, some people will be buying insurance that will only cover roughly 60 percent of their medical costs if they get sick.

“There are a lot of people who don’t have insurance now because they can’t afford premiums,” he said. “They certainly couldn’t afford premiums plus the out-of-pocket expenses in today’s market.”

Potter asserted that the current legislation will, in large part, simply move millions of people from being uninsured to underinsured, or from insured to underinsured. Citing a 2007 study by the Commonwealth Fund, he said there are already over 25 million Americans who fall into the category of the underinsured.

Potter also noted the deleterious effect of cost shifting on small businesses. Many small business owners will earn just enough to be denied subsidies.

“After a certain income level, there are no subsidies,” Potter explained. “But you still have to buy coverage. And I’m concerned that after you get above the median level of income, you’ll find that a lot of people who don’t get subsidies will probably be forced to buy coverage. But the only coverage they’ll be able to buy will make them underinsured.”

There’s also no prohibition in the legislation against insurance companies moving more and more people into high-deductible plans. Such plans, Potter argued, will help insurers' bottom lines because fewer policyholders will actually avail themselves of their insurance.

“When you have a benefit plan that requires people to pay a lot out of their own pocket, a lot of these people will never get to the point of using their insurance because they won’t go to the doctor or pick up their medicines to satisfy the deductible,” Potter told Raw Story.

“I see nothing in this legislation that essentially would protect people from losing their homes or filing for bankruptcy,” he added.

How insurance companies can still game the system

While prohibitions on such practices as denying healthcare to people with pre-existing conditions remain in the legislation, Potter noted that the Senate bill, in particular, provides the insurance companies with “all the flexibility they need” to more than make up for any profits lost due to new reform measures and to prevent people from accessing coverage.

He pointed out, for example, that “health factors” such as chronic diseases and age would continue to play into how much individuals can be charged in premiums and how many of them may be forced into high deductible plans.

“What they will be doing, what they can in the Senate bill, is charge people significantly more if they have certain health factors,” Potter said. “And it would be pretty much up to the industry to decide what those health factors are. You could have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes. You could be overweight, have a history of tobacco use. There definitely would be a wide range of things that the insurance industry would be able to look at and determine whether or not to charge you more.”

He also noted that the Senate bill would allow insurance companies to charge people who are older up to three times as much as those who are younger and, in the House bill, two times more than a younger person.

“And of course when people get older they develop more health factors,” Potter said. “So that is another way to get around the loss of revenue. Plus, of course, they would be able to get new revenue coming in from people who are younger and don’t have health factors that they charge more for.”

Moreover, he said, “They still would be getting a new revenue stream from people who are younger. So they’ll be getting significantly more in revenue. And those people are quite profitable too because they don’t file many claims.”

To justify this practice, Potter explained, insurers would claim that they’re providing lowered or discounted premiums to healthier people. But, in reality, premiums across the board are set so high that healthier people wouldn’t actually be receiving anything that could be considered a discount.

“Healthier people would be paying pretty much a standard rate at the end of the day,” said Potter, while the chronically ill and the aged would be paying exceptionally more on top of the already pricey standard rate.

Medical-loss ratio

The former insurance executive also says another element of the healthcare overhaul is receiving too little attention: the medical-loss ratio, which determines what percentage of health insurance premiums are spent on actual medical costs. The difference of just a few percentage points can mean billions of dollars to the insurance industry.

“We’re talking about big-time money here,” said Potter. “The insurance industry doesn’t want to have any restrictions on the medical-loss ratio. So they’ll be doing all they can to keep it from being enacted if possible.”

Some members of Congress, led by Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), proposed an amendment to require that 90 percent of consumer premiums go to medical costs, but Potter doesn’t think that’s likely to happen and said insurers will fight tooth-and-nail to set any minimum as low as possible. The Congressional Budget Office said that the 90 percent figure was too high and would basically drive insurers out of business, recommending 80-85 percent instead. Democrats are expected to embrace the lower figures in their final bill.

Potter cautioned that legislators need to keep an eye on how insurance companies define medical and administrative expenses. And he said that legislation should require companies to explain what they’re spending money on and what percentage in dollar amounts they’re spending.

“You can set the medical-loss ratio, but you need to make sure that it’s clearly understood what the components of the administrative expenses are,” Potter explained. “Because they can shift stuff around from one bucket to another and claim that what they’re actually spending is beneficial to the patient when it may not be.”

For example, he said they can easily meet an 85% standard if the definition enables them to categorize such items as disease management programs as paying for medical care. Currently, money spent on disease management programs is counted toward administrative costs.

Potter also noted that insurance companies have kept the issue of the medical-loss ratio -- something little understood by the American public -- “pretty much just a conversation between them, their shareholders and the analysts who cover them. They don’t talk about it anywhere else.”

Potter raised this complex but critical issue during his Senate testimony in June.

“Every decimal point makes a big difference,” he added. “We’re talking in the billions.”

C-SPAN wants to televise healthcare compromise talks

2010-01-20T06:28:00.000-08:00

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/1411315.html

BY LESLEY CLARK
lclark@MiamiHerald.com

A Florida Republican gained a high-profile ally Tuesday in his effort to prod congressional leaders to open up healthcare negotiations to the public.

In a letter to President Barack Obama and House and Senate leaders, the chief executive officer of the cable television network C-SPAN urged greater openness, and said his network was prepared to cover talks with the ``latest digital technology to make the cameras, lights and microphones as unobtrusive as possible.

"President Obama, Senate and House leaders, many of your rank-and-file members and the nation's editorial pages have all talked about the value of transparent discussions on reforming the nation's healthcare system,'' C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb wrote. ``Now that the process moves to the critical stage of reconciliation between the chambers, we respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American.''

U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Sarasota, who has filed a resolution calling for open negotiations, praised C-SPAN and called on Congress to accept the offer. Congressional leaders appeared reluctant to do so.

House and Senate negotiators are set to resolve differences between bills passed by the two chambers. Buchanan noted that news reports suggest a compromise will be hammered out in closed-door talks involving a handful of people, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and White House officials.

House leaders did not commit to cameras Tuesday. Asked about the letter Tuesday -- and Obama's pledge on the campaign trail for greater transparency -- Pelosi first laughed and said, ``There are a number of things [said] on the campaign trail.''

Her top lieutenant, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said the legislation already has been ``subjected to an unprecedented degree of public scrutiny and input'' -- including last summer's town hall meetings and congressional hearings. ``So we will continue to have that kind of open process as we go through this next phase,'' Van Hollen said. ``There will obviously be discussions between members of the House and Senate, but we will continue to keep the American people informed as we have in the earlier stages.''

A Wake Up Call

2010-01-19T13:46:00.000-08:00

I was for the health bill until it BECAME OBVIOUS that it was welfare for insurance companies. Big wal-street banks own most of the insurance companies and this would have been another bailout for those monsters!

Health Care is a BASIC HUMAN RIGHT but letting wal-street and the insurance companies write the legislation made it all corrupt! A pox on those filthy, psychopathic bastards of capitalism!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/a-wake-up-call_b_426467.html

Robert KuttnerCo-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect
Posted: January 17, 2010 11:09 PM

How could the health care issue have turned from a reform that was going to make Barack Obama ten feet tall into a poison pill for Democratic senators? Whether or not Martha Coakley squeaks through in Massachusetts on Tuesday, the health bill has already done incalculable political damage and will likely do more. Polls show that the public now opposes it by margins averaging ten to fifteen points, and widening. It is hard to know which will be the worse political defeat -- losing the bill and looking weak, or passing it and leaving it as a piñata for Republicans to attack between now and November.

The measure is so unpopular that Republican State Senator Scott Brown has built his entire surge against Coakley around his promise to be the 41st senator to block the bill -- this in Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts. He must be pretty confident that the bill has become politically radioactive, and he's right.

It has already brought down Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, a fighter for health care and other reforms far more progressive than President Obama's. Dorgan championed Americans' right to re-import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada, a popular provision that the White House blocked. Dorgan, who is one of the Senate's great populists, began the year more than twenty points ahead in the polls of his most likely challenger, North Dakota Governor John Hoeven. By the time he decided to call it a day, Dorgan was running more than twenty points behind. The difference was the health bill, which North Dakotans oppose by nearly two to one. The fact that Dorgan's own views were much better than the Administration's cut little ice. He was fatally associated with an unpopular bill.

So, how did Democrats get saddled with this bill? Begin with Rahm Emanuel. The White House chief of staff, who was once Bill Clinton's political director, drew three lessons from the defeat of Clinton-care. All three were wrong. First, get it done early (Clinton's task force had dithered.) Second, leave the details to Congress (Clinton had presented Congress with a fully-baked cake.) Third, don't get on the wrong side of the insurance and drug industries (The insurers' fictitious couple, Harry and Louise, had cleaned Clinton's clock.)

But as I wrote in Obama's Challenge, in August 2008, it would be a huge mistake to try to get health care done right out of the box. Obama first needed to get his sea-legs, and focus like a laser on economic recovery. If he got the economy back on track, he would then have earned the chops to undertake more difficult structural reforms like health care.

Deferring to the House and Senate was fine up to a point, but this was an issue where the president needed to lead as only presidents can -- in order to frame the debate and define the stakes.

Cutting a deal with the insurers and drug companies, who are not exactly candidates to win popularity contests, associated Obama with profoundly resented interest groups. This was exactly the wrong framing. This battle should have been the president and the people versus the interests. Instead more and more voters concluded that it was the president and the interests versus the people.

As policy, the interest-group strategy made it impossible to put on the table more fundamental and popular reforms, such as using Federal bargaining power to negotiate cheaper drug prices, or having a true public option like Medicare-for-all. Instead, a bill that served the drug and insurance industries was almost guaranteed to have unpopular core elements.

The politics got horribly muddled. By embracing a deal that required the government to come up with a trillion dollars of subsidy for the insurance industry, Obama was forced to pursue policies that were justifiably unpopular -- such as taxing premiums of people with decent insurance; or compelling people to buy policies that they often couldn't afford, or diverting money from Medicare. He managed to scare silly the single most satisfied clientele of our one island of efficient single-payer health insurance -- senior citizens -- and to alienate one of his most loyal constituencies, trade unionists.

The bill helped about two-thirds of America's uninsured, but did almost nothing for the 85 percent of Americans with insurance that is becoming more costly and unreliable by the day -- except frighten them into believing that what little they have is at increased risk of being taken away.

All of this made things easier for the right, and left people to take seriously even preposterous allegations such as the nonsense about death panels. It got so ass-backwards that the other day Ben Nelson, who successfully held out for anti-abortion language and a sweetheart deal for Nebraska's Medicaid as the price of his vote, found himself facing a wholesale voter backlash.

Nelson began running TV spots assuring Nebraska voters that the Obama health plan is "not run by the government." That's one hell of a slogan for a party that relies on democratically elected government to offset the insecurity, inequality and insanity generated by private commercial forces. If not-run-by-government is the Democrats' credo, why bother?

So we went from a politics in which government is necessary to provide secure health insurance -- because the private insurance industry skims off outrageous middlemen fees and discriminates against sick people -- to a politics in which Democrats, as a matter of survival, feel they have to apologize for government. Thank you, Rahm Emanuel.

The budget-obsessives around Obama also insisted that most of the bill not take effect until 2013, so that all of the scary stuff gets three years to fester before most people see any benefit. Call it political malpractice.

Finally, the health insurance battle sucked out all the oxygen. When Obama made time to work the phones personally, it wasn't to enact serious financial reform (this was left to the tender mercies of Tim Geithner) or to fight for a real jobs program (deficit hawks Peter Orszag and Larry Summers got to blunt that one). No -- Obama got on the phone and met with legislators to round up the last vote or two for a sketchy health reform that crowded out far more urgent issues.

As a resident of Massachusetts, in the last two days I've gotten robo calls from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Martha Coakley, and Angela Menino, the wife of Boston's mayor -- everyone but the sainted Ted Kennedy. In Obama's call, he advised me that he needed Martha Coakley in the Senate, "because I'm fighting to curb the abuses of a health insurance industry that routinely denies care." Let's see, would that be the same insurance industry that Rahm was cutting inside deals with all spring and summer? The same insurance industry that spent tens of millions on TV spots backing Obama's bill as sensible reform?

If voters are wondering which side this guy is on, he has given them good reason.

Looking forward, one can imagine several possibilities. Suppose Coakley loses. Obama and the House leadership may then decide that their one shot to salvage health reform after all this effort is for the House to just pass the Senate-approved bill and send it to the president's desk. They can fix its deficiencies later. This is an easy parliamentary move. But the bill passed the House by only five votes; many House members are dead set against some of the more objectionable provisions of the Senate bill; a Coakley loss would make the bill that much more politically toxic; there will be Republican catcalls that Congress is using dubious means to pass a bill that has just been politically repudiated; and the House votes just may not be there this time.

Alternatively, let's say Coakley narrowly wins, the Democrats have a near death experience, and the House and Senate stop squabbling and pass the damned bill.

Either way, the Massachusetts surprise should be a wake-up call of the most fundamental kind. Obama needs to stop playing inside games with bankers and insurance lobbyists, and start being a fighter for regular Americans. Otherwise, he can kiss it all goodbye.

Misleading claims about Safeway wellness incentives shape health-care bill

2010-01-17T10:59:00.000-08:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/15/AR2010011503319_pf.html

By David S. Hilzenrath
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 17, 2010; G01

It's a seductively simple solution to rising health-care costs. Require workers to pay higher premiums if they flunk tests for measures such as weight, blood pressure and cholesterol. Then, bingo: You not only get a fitter workforce, you slash medical expenses.

Politicians of both parties have embraced that idea and expanded upon it in the Senate reform bill, inspired largely by the claims of Steven A. Burd, Safeway's chief executive. Burd says he has set an example for employers nationwide by rewarding employees for healthy behavior.

"Safeway designed just such a plan in 2005 and has made continuous improvements each year," Burd wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "The results have been remarkable," he declared, adding that "our health care costs for four years have been held constant."

If only that were true.

In a legislative debate filled with misconceptions, few rival the myth about Safeway, which has become the poster company for a provision that big employers and insurers covet. The supermarket chain's story shows how the untested claims of interest groups can take on a life of their own and shape national policy.

As the House and Senate work to meld their bills, the Senate's "Safeway Amendment," which would more than double the potential rewards and penalties tied to wellness tests, has become a point of contention.

Business groups have pushed for the increase, arguing that financial incentives encourage workers to take responsibility for their health. Opponents such as the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society say the provision would undo a central element of reform -- the promise that people's insurance premiums would no longer be influenced by their health status.

Rewarding or penalizing people based on wellness tests may save money over the long run, but Safeway hasn't proved it. In the meantime, based on 2009 data, if the Safeway Amendment becomes law, American families with average health benefits could have $6,688 a year riding on blood tests and weigh-ins.

But a review of Safeway documents and interviews with company officials show that the company did not keep health-care costs flat for four years. Those costs did drop in 2006 -- by 12.5 percent. That was when the company overhauled its benefits, according to Safeway Senior Vice President Ken Shachmut.

The decline did not have anything to do with tying employees' premiums to test results. That element of Safeway's benefits plan was not implemented until 2009, Shachmut said.

After the 2006 drop, costs resumed their climb, he said.

Even as Burd claimed last year to have held costs flat, Safeway was forecasting that per capita expenses for its employees would rise by 8.5 percent in 2009. According to a survey of 1,700 health plans by the benefits consultant Hewitt Associates, the average increase nationally was 6.1 percent.

Today costs are slightly higher than in 2005, Shachmut said.

So when Safeway said it had flatlined costs since 2005, "we defined that, you might say, loosely," he said. "Perhaps a more precise way to say it is that our costs today on a per capita basis are essentially the same as they were in 2005.

"But by our internal definition, that's, that's flatlining."

As for the steep increase in Safeway's expenses last year, the first year of its "Healthy Measures" incentive program, "we frankly did not have as much control over things as we should have," Shachmut said.

Burd's assertions about the program's success made him a rock star on Capitol Hill. He pressed his case in briefings for Senate Democrats and Republicans and in a May meeting with President Obama. Leading policymakers have cited Safeway as a model.

Take Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

"The Safeway program has proven so successful that the company wants to increase its incentives for rewarding healthy behavior. Unfortunately, current laws restrict it from doing so," McConnell said in a June speech on the Senate floor.

And then there is Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), a co-sponsor of the Safeway Amendment.

Safeway "figured out how to incentivize people to take better care of themselves, and they have flat-lined their health-care costs for 200,000 employees in the last four years," he told the Senate Finance Committee in September.

And Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), in an August town hall meeting: "You know, there's a guy who's gotten pretty famous lately, and he's the CEO of Safeway. . . . Safeway's health-care costs have gone down. Why can't we adopt that on a national scale? Why can't we reward people for practicing wellness and fitness?"

Obama has repeatedly invoked Safeway's approach.

"It's a program that has helped Safeway cut health-care spending by 13 percent and workers save over 20 percent on their premiums," he said in a June speech to the American Medical Association. "And we're open . . . to doing more to help employers adopt and expand programs like this one."

When Obama delivered those remarks, the program was less than six months old, and by Safeway's own analysis the spending in question was on the upswing.

* * *

Today, employers can give workers any amount of money for participating in wellness programs, such as classes on how to lose weight or quit smoking. But there are limits on incentives tied to results -- actually losing the weight or kicking the habit.

Under a regulation advanced during George W. Bush's administration, incentives conditioned on meeting wellness targets are limited to 20 percent of the premium -- including employer and employee contributions to the premium. The Safeway Amendment would allow employers to increase the stakes to 30 percent, and it would give federal officials license to raise the limit to 50 percent. It would also allow insurers to use the same approach -- initially in 10 states and potentially in others.

Employers and insurers would be required to make exceptions for people with extenuating medical circumstances.

Safeway's expanded incentives are rooted in a philosophy.

"I have no problem with a smoker having a 10-pack-a-day habit and killing him or herself," Shachmut said. "I mean, it's a personal choice. It's a free country. I just don't want to have to pay the health-care costs of that personal choice."

"And the same thing is true for obesity," he said.

In the battle over the Safeway Amendment, a central question is: How big must rewards and penalties be to change behavior, and at what point do they merely shift costs?

Safeway is not in a position to answer.

Politicians tend to describe the incentives as rewards rather than penalties. But, as The Washington Post reported in October, some employers sharply raise deductibles for workers and then give them a chance to chip away at the newly inflated charges.

"We structured it as a carrot, but I would quickly tell you that the carrot is nothing more than the mirror image of a stick, and vice versa," Burd told the Senate health committee in June.

It would be difficult for premium incentives to drive overall trends for Safeway's workforce of about 200,000, because, according to company spokesman Brian Dowling, the program has been open to only 28,000 employees -- generally office workers rather than store personnel covered by union contracts. About 17,000 to 18,000 have enrolled.

(Burd's assertions about flatlining costs pertained to those workers eligible for Healthy Measures, as did the projected 8.5 percent increase for 2009.)

Safeway has taken steps to encourage cost savings and wellness, none of which required an act of Congress.

In 2006, it restructured its benefits to make employees more cost-conscious. Under the new structure, the company would pay the first $1,000 of a family's annual medical expenses, and the employee would generally be responsible for the next $1,000. It began covering 100 percent of the bill for preventive measures such as mammograms and colonoscopies. It paid people to complete health questionnaires, encouraged use of generic drugs and in 2008 increased the limit on employees' out-of-pocket expenses.

While expenses soared in other health plans -- by 30 percent over four years, according to Hewitt -- Safeway boasts that per capita expenses for its non-union employees were only 2 percent higher in 2009 than in 2005.

Any number of changes in the company's benefits plan might contribute to the explanation.

Burd and supporters of the Safeway Amendment have emphasized the premium incentives.

"The big difference between Safeway and most employers is that we have pronounced differences in premiums that reflect each covered member's behaviors," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal commentary.

Burd "actually emphasizes very strongly it isn't prevention that saved them money. It's incentivizing healthy behavior, and that's a huge difference. . . . Incentivizing somebody with a lower health-care premium to stop smoking or to lose weight or to control their cholesterol or things like that," Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), a sponsor of the Safeway Amendment, said in September, as the Finance Committee drafted its bill.

In a recent letter endorsing the Safeway Amendment, medical leaders including the Cleveland Clinic's chief executive said more research is needed on the effectiveness of such incentives. "However, we believe the lack of empirical third party data does not preclude moving forward," they wrote.

* * *

Many Healthy Measures participants have now undergone their second annual round of wellness tests, and last week Safeway spokeswoman Teena Massingill said employees showed "pretty impressive" improvements.

According to company statistics, the proportion of employees classified as obese declined by five percentage points, while the proportion who were overweight declined by one percentage point. Meanwhile, 40 percent of workers and spouses who failed the blood pressure test in 2008 passed in 2009, 30 percent of former smokers registered as tobacco-free, and 17 percent who failed the cholesterol test in 2008 passed in 2009.

The financial ramifications remain unclear. In the short term, Safeway's program probably boosts medical expenses because the screenings prompt people to seek treatment for newly detected problems, Shachmut said.

In assessing the economic impact of incentives, it might be helpful to know how health-care expenses for employees in the voluntary Healthy Measures program compare with those for the rest of the Safeway workforce.

Shachmut declined to provide such information. "We frankly haven't been disclosing that," he said. And "I would just prefer not to." Pressed further, he said the data would not be available until April or later-- long after Congress and the president aim to enact a health-care bill.

"I promise you," he said, "we're as eager to know the answer to those questions as you are."

Dems stiffen spines on health bill

2010-01-16T15:25:00.000-08:00

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=20747E5E-18FE-70B2-A889B38B7EA0C56B

By: Carrie Budoff Brown
January 12, 2010 12:18 AM EST

Back home, nervous Democrats sound squishy on health care reform. Some will return to Washington this week demanding changes. A few will almost certainly threaten to withhold their votes.

But through it all — and through what is expected to be multiple near-death experiences for the health care bill in coming weeks — White House and congressional leaders plan to beat back the temptation of “no” with a hardball argument:

Democrats already voted “yes.” And it would be politically disastrous to flip-flop now.

Senior Democratic aides say they aren’t panicking because they believe lawmakers who previously backed the bill understand the Democratic Party is lashed to health reform — even in the face of polls showing tepid public support, compromises that watered down the bill and mounting electoral angst for the party.

Spending a year on health care and coming up empty would be worse for Democrats than passing a sweeping overhaul in a politically hostile environment, aides argue.

“They have crossed the Rubicon,” said a senior Democratic Senate aide, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss political strategy. “They are in.”

“I wouldn’t say passage is a foregone conclusion,” added Drew Altman, president of the independent Kaiser Family Foundation, “but it is close to that.”

Naturally, the likelihood of Democrats holding 60 votes in the Senate and 218 votes in the House won’t always look assured. The glow of the Senate bill’s passage on Christmas Eve faded quickly as the messy realities of merging it with the House bill have firmly taken hold.

On Monday alone, the prospects of completing a bill hit multiple speed bumps.

President Barack Obama sought to quell labor union opposition, calling leaders to the White House to explain why he is siding with Senate Democrats on the need to tax high-end insurance plans. The meeting came hours after AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka gave a feisty speech at the National Press Club vowing to fight the tax.

The Senate bill, Trumka said, “does not deserve the support of working men and women.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), one of Obama’s most important allies in completing a health care bill, fought for his job and apologized again Monday for his comments about the president’s race. At the same time, Democrats scrambled to shore up the election prospects of Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate race, where a loss in the Jan. 19 special election could leave the party one vote shy in the Senate.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) declared during a CNBC interview that health care reform was “hanging by a thread,” given the ability of one or two lawmakers to torpedo the entire effort.

And Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) became the latest Democrat to criticize the special Medicaid funding deal that helped secure the support of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.). “It’s going to get stripped from the bill,” Feingold predicted.

But Democratic leaders and health care advocates say the fact that members of Congress are already on record supporting the bill is their own insurance policy of sorts against defections. The White House strategy of pushing for a Senate vote before Christmas did what it was supposed to do, locking in lawmakers.

As Frederick Graefe, a Washington lawyer and lobbyist for various health care interests, said of the bill: “It’s too big to fail.”

“There is nothing worse for a politician to be for something before they were against something,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a consumer group supportive of the House and Senate bills. “It is the worst of all worlds. You are not trusted by those on the right. You are not trusted by those on the left. And those in the middle think you don’t have principles. There would have to be a major, major change for them to think it is in their political interests to vote ‘no.’”

That is largely Reid’s negotiating stance: A shift too far to the left, in the direction of the House bill, gives wavering Senate moderates reason to vote against the final bill.

But if the package looks largely similar to the version that passed the Senate last month, it will be tough for even the most unpredictable members, such as Nelson and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), or those in the most electoral danger, such as Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), to turn against the legislation, aides said.

That’s bad news for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is still hoping to increase insurance affordability and create a national exchange in the merged bill, even though she’s all but given up on the public option. This political calculation means a small bloc of Senate moderates can exert more leverage over the final bill than dozens of liberal House members and even outspoken labor leaders.

Trumka told reporters Monday that his union will continue to push to remove the tax on expensive insurance plans, and to include a public option and employer mandates in a final bill. But asked if the union could support a bill that lacks a public option if the Cadillac tax was stripped, Trumka — like most House liberals — said he wouldn’t speculate.

Trumka did warn that labor, a key Democratic constituency, may sit out the next election unless they see Democrats championing their issues — health care and jobs.

"Health care is an important issue to them. Jobs is an important issue,” Trumka said. “Those people that don't show a sense of urgency about both of them, I think, are going to face the scorn of workers at the polls."

Client X reveals the secret truth about health care reform

2010-01-16T15:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.tnr.com/print/article/docudrama

Published on The New Republic (http://www.tnr.com)
Docudrama
Jonathan Cohn November 18, 2009 | 12:00 am

Exclusive: Click here [1] to see slides from the McKinsey report.

Ask doctors, hospitals, drugmakers, or insurers for their opinion of President Obama’s health care proposals, and you’ll likely get an earful about how reform will severely hurt their bottom line. Ask many liberals, and you’ll hear the opposite complaint: that the current incarnation of reform won’t affect these industries enough to significantly alter their behavior.

Now there’s a document [1] that suggests both sides are wrong: The medical-care industry would need to make significant, and socially beneficial, changes in response to the bills currently moving through Congress; but such changes won’t come remotely close to destroying the industry’s profitability. Of course, reports on health care come out all the time. But this one deserves special attention--because it was prepared by the nation’s most famous consulting firm and was never meant to see the light of day.

Sometime in August, McKinsey & Company created a PowerPoint document called “Health Care Reform and Implications for Key Stakeholders: What this Could Mean for Client X.” Over the course of 44 slides full of charts and graphs, the firm examines the potential impact of reform on insurers, doctors, hospitals, and the drug industry. McKinsey tells Client X that the presentation’s purpose is to “help inform your understanding of the broader healthcare system impact and what this might mean for your key customers and Client X going forward.” After a source supplied me with the document--which is marked “confidential”--I contacted McKinsey. A spokesperson told me that “Client X” is not a particular company. Instead, he explained, the document is a broad overview of how McKinsey expects health care reform to play out. (It also appears to be a presentation that McKinsey consultants could adapt based on a client’s particular situation.)

Although legislation has evolved, McKinsey’s predictions about reform’s basic design and scope seem right on target, which is no small achievement. Remember that, in August, it seemed entirely possible Congress would pass no health care reform at all. But McKinsey identifies as the “most probable outcome” passage of a bill with somewhere between $750 billion and $1.05 trillion in federal outlays, a functional insurance exchange, a possible cap on the employer tax benefit, some cuts in reimbursements, and a severely watered-down public option. That outline describes, with uncanny precision, the bill Congress will probably pass sometime in the next two months.

But it’s the forecasts about what reform will mean afterward that matter to McKinsey’s clients. And perhaps the most surprising element of McKinsey’s analysis is its prediction that legislation really will force the medical-care industry to change its ways.

The bills moving through Congress use a number of strategies to induce such change. On the one hand, there are relatively heavy-handed efforts that would simply cut (or attempt to cut) the sheer volume of cash flowing into health care: reduced fees to insurance companies that offer private coverage to Medicare enrollees, a tax on the most expensive health insurance plans that would prod employers and individuals to buy cheaper coverage, and a dramatic strengthening of the commission that recommends changes in Medicare payments.

At the same time, the bills include more narrowly focused reforms. There would be bonuses for doctors who organize into integrated group practices, which tend to foster better care. There would be penalties for hospitals that have high rates of avoidable readmissions. And there would be funding for studies of which drugs work better than others, so that Medicare and insurers could stop paying for the less effective alternatives.

McKinsey seems convinced that this entire package of reforms will influence behavior. Over and over again, it tells Client X that the world is changing. Hospitals, McKinsey says, will face “increased requirements to coordinate care across system/care continuum,” “significantly more value-conscious consumer decision-making,” and “intensified focus on performance measurement and improvement.” It has even starker warnings for the drug industry: “Big Pharma faces the largest potential revenue risk,” the document predicts. Partly that’s because of existing trends in the drug industry. But it’s also because studies of comparative effectiveness are sure to reduce the sale of drugs that don’t work as well. McKinsey suggests that the drug industry can survive and even thrive in this environment “by focusing on ‘productive’ innovation (supported by strong evidence), collaborating with payors and providers in new ways, and revamping commercial and R&D models to significantly improve effectiveness and efficiency.”

These are precisely the sorts of changes that the architects of reform want the drug industry--and, more broadly, the entire health care sector--to make. “One generally comes away with the sense that [McKinsey] sees reform as changing incentives, first more modestly and then, potentially, in a more fundamental way in later years,” says Larry Levitt, vice president for special projects at the Kaiser Family Foundation, who reviewed the document at TNR’s request. “That’s a good sign.”

Meanwhile, McKinsey’s analysis suggests that--as long as they adjust to the new incentives--doctors, hospitals, and insurers will be just fine. While predictions carry uncertainty, McKinsey states, “it appears that providers overall (both hospitals and doctors) and payors may be largely unharmed (but with lots of variation across them).” “One comes away with the impression that this is also very manageable for the various sectors and, at least in the case of hospitals, maybe a net positive,” Levitt says.

To be sure, McKinsey’s recommendations track closely with the firm’s self-interest. As a consultant that sells strategic advice on how to adapt to changing markets, McKinsey wants companies to believe, on the one hand, that dramatic changes are coming--but, on the other hand, that they can still prosper if they follow McKinsey’s advice.

Still, McKinsey’s report struck me as well-reasoned, and the conclusions themselves are hardly outlandish. Moreover, everyone--from McKinsey to the Congressional Budget Office to think tanks--has biases, and no one is operating with perfect information. So I don’t think McKinsey’s conclusions can be dismissed out of hand. And if they’re right? Then it’s decent news for Client X, and better news for the rest of us.

Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor of The New Republic.

Mandatory purchase of health insurance becomes an issue

2010-01-16T15:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.sacbee.com/business/story/2452096.html#none

Mandatory purchase of health insurance becomes an issue
bcalvan@sacbee.com
JAN. 11, 2010

Michael Sertic, a college senior studying economics, is young and healthy, and he doesn't want the government forcing him to buy health insurance.

He is among a group of people on both the right and the left ends of the political spectrum who object to proposals in Congress that would compel nearly every American to buy health insurance or face a fine.

"I happen to believe it's unconstitutional. Government shouldn't be forcing someone to pay for someone else's health care," said Sertic, 24, a member of Students for Liberty, a club at California State University, Sacramento, that espouses libertarian values.

The so-called individual mandate, a centerpiece of the sweeping effort to overhaul the country's health care system, seemed a nonissue during most of the early debate just months ago, but in recent weeks it has emerged as another obstacle in the effort to pass legislation providing health insurance to millions of Americans who lack it.

Libertarians condemn compulsory health insurance as unconstitutional, while some liberals argue that it would further allow insurance companies to hold consumers hostage to ever-increasing premiums. That's particularly true, they say, if the final health care legislation does not contain a "public option," or government-run health insurance program, that could provide competition to private insurers.

Insurers, though, support the individual mandate. They say they already have made major concessions in the health care legislation, including a requirement that they issue coverage to anyone regardless of medical history. Mandatory insurance is necessary, they argue, to spread the burden of paying for health services that will surely result from having to cover the country's least healthy.

The individual mandate is just one component of the legislation, which also proposes payroll taxes on employers to help fund subsidies for uninsured people who cannot afford premiums on their own. Proposals in the House and Senate would not require people with extreme financial hardship to buy health insurance.

People who fail to purchase insurance, either through an employer or a proposed government-run insurance marketplace, could be subject under the House bill to a penalty of as much as 2.5 percent of their income. The Senate proposes penalties between $750 and $2,250 a year, depending on income and family size, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Some supporters of the health care legislation aren't wild about the individual mandate but say they're willing to accept it to pass a bill that would extend coverage to most of the nation's 46 million uninsured.

"We're still skeptical of the individual mandate. … The individual should not be left alone at the mercy of the big insurers," said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California. "But it has less to do with the mandate itself than to the question of whether coverage is available, adequate and affordable."

Wright sees an opportunity to bring relief to the uninsured. "The question is: Is this bill better than the status quo right now? I think it is."

Just three years ago, during a failed campaign by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to overhaul the state's health care system, Wright actively lobbied against a portion of the governor's plan that would have required every Californian to purchase health insurance. At the time, he called it "unwise, unwarranted, unworkable."

But Wright and other consumer advocates signed on to the effort after the governor cobbled together compromises that partly addressed issues of access and affordability.

That legislation died when liberals and conservatives in the state Senate found provisions of the legislation they couldn't accept.

"They had trouble accepting something in the middle," said Lucien Wulsin Jr., director of the Insure the Uninsured Project and co-author of a background paper on the individual mandate for the California Research Bureau.

Wulsin said a similar dynamic could surface in Congress, endangering the federal legislation as it nears completion.

"When push came to shove here in California, the liberals who really wanted a Canadian-style single-payer system came together with the conservatives," Wulsin said, and they defeated the compromise deal brokered by the governor and legislative leaders.

In recent months, some early backers of the national health care legislation have turned on the effort – including Jim Dean, who heads Democracy for America and wants the individual mandate stripped.

His brother, former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, a Vermont physician, now opposes the legislation as well, saying that the absence of a government-run health insurance plan would mean business as usual.

Others are taking a more pragmatic stand.

"Our work now is to make this bill, in these final throes, as good as possible," said Jerry Flanagan of Consumer Watchdog, a left-leaning advocacy group.

"If the public option is off the table, you have to have strict regulations on what health insurance companies can charge – or the individual mandate becomes a profit machine for the industry," Flanagan said.

Flanagan would like to see a cap on what insurance companies charge. And he wants insurers to have to justify rate increases, similar to what California's Proposition 103 required for automobile insurers.

While the legislation lays the groundwork for greater oversight, Flanagan said, it is currently short on specifics.

Consumer advocates worry that the insurance industry may be able to pull off a hat trick: legislation that forces individuals to buy insurance, no competing public option, and the pre-emption of state consumer protection laws that go beyond proposed federal rules.

"They've already got the individual mandate, no public option," said Flanagan. All that's left, he said, is a provision that will allow them to "ignore state laws."

Still, insurers aren't satisfied with the legislation, either.

America's Health Plans, the health insurance industry trade group, opposes both versions now in Congress.

"None of the current bills do enough to bend the cost curve," said the group's spokesman, Robert Zirkelbach.

Insurers want stronger penalties against those who refuse to buy insurance, saying that the business model would fall apart if too many people decline to buy coverage until they get seriously ill.

"Without a personal coverage requirement, there's an incentive for people to wait until they're sick to buy coverage," he said. "Health insurance only works when everybody buys into it when they're healthy and when they're sick."

The Cato Institute, a free-market think tank, calls the individual mandate an unprecedented power grab that requires consumers to buy a product they may not want.

That view dovetails with Sertic's perspective. The college libertarian says the individual mandate would just shift the cost of medicine from the sick to young, healthy people such as himself.

"Young people would be paying disproportionately for health care because they are the least likely to reap the benefits," he said.

Sertic said health insurance is not a priority for him at the moment, although he knows he'll eventually need it. "The odds of me getting ill are very slim."

Obama Received $20 Million from Healthcare Industry in 2008 Campaign

2010-01-12T17:21:00.001-08:00

This explains a lot of things like helping out the health care industry with his corrupt obamacare that only enriches corporations at the expense of the regular people...Again, health care is a basic, fundamental HUMAN RIGHT not another thing to be bought and sold on psychopathic wal-street.

http://rawstory.com/2010/01/obama-received-20-million-healthcare-industry-money-2008/

January 12, 2010 by Raw Story
Obama Received $20 Million from Healthcare Industry in 2008 Campaign
Almost three times the amount given to McCain
by Brad Jacobson

While some sunlight has been shed on the hefty sums shoveled into congressional campaign coffers in an effort to influence the Democrats' massive healthcare bill, little attention has been focused on the far larger sums received by President Barack Obama while he was a candidate in 2008.

A new figure, based on an exclusive analysis created for Raw Story by the Center for Responsive Politics, shows that President Obama received a staggering $20,175,303 from the healthcare industry during the 2008 election cycle, nearly three times the amount of his presidential rival John McCain. McCain took in $7,758,289, the Center found.

The new figure, obtained by Raw Story through an independent custom research request performed by the Center for Responsive Politics -- a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics -- is the most comprehensive breakdown yet available of healthcare industry contributions to Obama during the 2008 election cycle.

Currently, the Center's website shows that Obama received $19,462,986 from the health sector , which includes health professionals ($11.7m), health services/HMOs ($1.4m), hospitals/nursing homes ($3.3m) and pharmaceuticals/health products ($2.1m). Miscellaneous health donations (from which Obama received $860,411) are also factored into the current total health sector numbers but are not accessible on the site.

Health insurance industry contributions, however, are not included within the Center's current health sector totals. Rather, contributions from the health insurance industry are contained within the site's finance and insurance sector. Seeking a more complete total, the Center culled health and accident insurance donations from this sector (for which Obama received $712,317) and combined them with his existing health sector total ($19,462,986) to arrive at his healthcare industry total ($20,175,303).

The Center employed the same methodology in its analysis for John McCain and based all of its findings on the latest data released by the Federal Election Commission.

Dave Levinthal, the Center's communications director, noted that Obama out-raised McCain in nearly all business sectors that contributed to the 2008 presidential candidates. In that regard, the healthcare industry figure is not in itself an anomaly.

But Levinthal underscored the significance of the industry's largess.

"What it also means when you look at it just on its own merit is that Obama definitely has a relationship with the health sector," Levinthal told Raw Story. "When you raise $20 million from one group, obviously they've curried some favor with you and you have a lot of people in that sector who support you. So to say that just because he out-raised McCain overall doesn't mean anything in the context of the health sector might not necessarily be true."

"People want to be able to curry favor with those who are in power," he added. "And one way to do that is by making donations to candidates and officials who are represented by the party in power. Or who look like they're going to win."

The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Gary Jacobson, a campaign finance expert and political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, says the healthcare industry saw the writing on the wall and sought to "protect their interests."

"Contributors expect access," Jacobson, author of Money in Congressional Elections, told Raw Story. The healthcare industry "anticipated an Obama victory and they wanted to be in the game."

While experts agreed that there is certainly nothing illegal about receiving such copious contributions from the industry within the current U.S. system of campaign financing, all emphasized the inevitable impact this money has in influencing public policy.

Obama's considerable windfall from the healthcare industry merits attention, they said.

Mary Boyle, spokeswoman for government watchdog Common Cause, said that her organization has been mostly focused on what members of Congress have received in campaign contributions from the healthcare industry. But she called Obama's campaign receipts from the industry "not surprising."

"The healthcare industry has been ramping up in recent years in anticipation of this healthcare debate, giving both to Democrats and Republicans," Boyle explained in an interview with Raw Story.

Some experts who spoke with Raw Story also noted the rather stark evolution from candidate Obama, who once advocated for universal healthcare and was a vocal critic of mandated health insurance, to President Obama, who excluded single-payer advocates from White House healthcare summits and who has since strongly embraced mandates.

Obama delegate now takes umbrage with healthcare position

Historian and media critic Norman Solomon, who was also an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention, called the president's transformation on healthcare since taking office "shameful."

"Overall it's been a very corporate friendly healthcare approach from Obama as president," Solomon said in an interview with Raw Story. "Corporate friendly in a way that I believe is injurious to public health."

He underscored the subtle but substantive change in healthcare language used by Obama and the White House.

"We don't hear so much now about ‘healthcare reform,'" Solomon said. "We're hearing a lot more about ‘health insurance reform.' And that is absolutely in large measure driven by the White House."

He also concurred with Boyle's assessment on the success of the industry's special interests.

"The funding from the healthcare industry to the Obama campaign, in retrospect, was not misplaced," Solomon said. "It appears, based on policy, that those funders are getting what they would've hoped for."

"Let me put it this way," he added. "Single-payer advocates literally couldn't get into the White House. And you have [chief pharmaceutical industry lobbyist and former Republican congressman] Billy Tauzin and Big Pharma and all of these in-depth strategy meetings in the White House in mid-2009 cutting deals. And I think it's shameful."

But Boyle puts the blame more on the campaign financing system than on President Obama.

"It's getting worse every year," she said. "This story line is going to continue until the end of time until we change the way we pay for our political campaigns. It's the system. Everyone's stuck in it. Everyone gets kind of caught up in it."

Yet she believes these new numbers clearly show the industry was "trying to gain access and influence to the president, just as they have tried -- and been quite successful -- at gaining access to members of Congress."

Boyle also noted the industry's success in achieving this goal over the course of the healthcare debate.

"We've seen many examples of the healthcare industry's interests - and we would argue that a lot of it has to do with the money - prevailing over the public interest," she said. "The fact is, we have this broken system that allows interests that want the most out of government to have the loudest voice and to get that loudest voice by contributing the most money and spending the most money."

Brad Jacobson is a contributing investigative reporter for Raw Story.

Advocating personal responsibility in health-care reform: Bullshit!

2010-01-12T13:12:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Advocating-personal-respon-by-Kanuk-100107-501.html

January 9, 2010
By Kanuk
Reprinted from Open Salon.

We have observed a lot of discussions lately about health insurance and the role of personal responsibility. None was more prominent than Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who indicated in his recent WSJ article that many of the health-care problems in the U.S. are self-inflicted and about 70% of all health-care spending is preventable. Basically, Mr. Mackey implied that by changing our eating habits (via buying items at Whole Foods, I assume) and having a more active lifestyle, we don't need to significantly reform our health care system (other than the tax related stuff, such as the useless Health Savings Accounts or HSA). Like so many people on the right, John Mackey is advocating that personal responsibility is a critical component of health care reform.

Before I go into the heart of the matter, I need to point out that I am not disputing that eating healthier food and being more physically active will be very beneficial, as discussed here and here. However, is this enough to solve existing health care problems? So much so that we should keep the status quo about how health care is delivered in the United States?

Well, let's find out, shall we?

According to the University of Kansas Medical Center, there are approximately 13 million people in the U.S. who suffer from a genetic disease (there are 15,500 recognized genetic disorders!). Here is a sample of what researchers at this Center reported (based on peer-reviewed publications):

11.1% of pediatric hospital admissions are for children with genetic disorders.
18.5% of pediatric hospitalizations are for children with congenital malformations.
50% of individuals found to have mental retardation have a genetic basis for their disability.
12% of adult hospital admissions are for genetic causes.
15% of all cancers have an inherited susceptibility.
10% of the chronic diseases (heart, diabetes, arthritis) which occur in the adult populations have a significant genetic component.
It is interesting to note that many cancers and chronic diseases are in fact caused by a genetic propensity. Burgers may not be that bad for your health after all" just kiddin'!

The Center also notes that the lifetime costs associated with some of these genetic diseases could be as high as $1,000,000. Yep, $1M! I am wondering how many servings of fruits and vegetables this amount is equivalent to. On a more serious note, how many Americans could afford these lifetime expenses, even with full (private) insurance coverage?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), non-intentional injuries are considered a serious public health problem. In fact, it takes a toll on the health of the population and imposes important social and economic costs on society.

The CDC conducted several studies on this topic. I therefore decided to showsome of these relevant statistics. Please note that they probably include many people who are vegetarians, vegans oreat healthyas well ashave an active lifestyle.

Below, you will find the total number of people who were injured in 2004 in the U.S.:

Deaths (Fatal Injury): 162,000
Hospital Discharge: 1,903,000
Emergency Visits: 29,529,000
Doctor Visits: 31,128,000
Outpatients Visits: 3,852,000
These statistics show that, in 2004, approximately 66 million people (or about 20% all Americans) were injured in the continental U.S. (note: some of these values may include people who may have been injured more than once). These injuries varied from minor cuts and bruises to those causing the death of a person (which also has societal and other directly related costs). The year 2004 seemed like a fluke? Well, check out this 600-page report published last year by the CDC.

If we add the people who have a genetic disease (aka pre-existing conditions for the insurance industry) to those injured, we have about 80 million Americans who may not have benefited greatly from eating healthy or being a personally responsible human being. I include myself as part of this group.

I can see some of you arguing that non-intentional injuries are actually preventable. In theory yes, but closely examine the report above and you will notice how the number of injuries remains constant over the years, despite numerous efforts made to reduce these numbers (see this recent ad campaign, which apparently won't be shown in the U.S., as an example).

Now, let's put this in perspective!

Given my line of work, I will focus on motor vehicle collisions. Every year, there are about 28 million motor vehicles that are involved in a crash. Since there are approximately 250 million registered vehicles in the US, this means that a little bit more than 10% of all registered vehicles are involved in a collision on an annual basis.

Now, if we require that every driver carries motor vehicle insurance* when only 10% of these vehicles are expected to be involved in a catastrophic event (insurance terminology), why don't we provide health insurance for everybody when the risk of being injured, suffering from a genetic disease or becoming sick (e.g., H1N1, STDs, bacterial infections, etc.) is much higher?

Providing health insurance under a single-payer system is the best way to spread the risk and minimize health care costs.

To conclude, if Mr. Mackey and others are right about the significance impact of personal responsibility, why do all other industrialized countries still provide health care coverage for all? In these countries, the government also tries to improve personal responsibility via policy measures and media campaigns. Nonetheless, all these governmentsstill believe in social justice (without being real socialist countries).

We'll have a great economy if we would all just get sick"

2010-01-12T13:04:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/We-ll-have-a-great-economy-by-Ann-Kramer-100106-464.html

January 8, 2010
By Ann Kramer

Health care is the number one growing industry in our country. So, if you're looking for a career change or dealing with unemployment due to being kicked out of the auto industry, airline industry, manufacturing industries etc., you should become a nurse. The Bureau of Labor statistics shows it to be the number one job for the future economy.

And it is a great career field that is both financially and intrinsically rewarding. Helping people who are sick to get better is a wonderful thing. But of course as we employ more and more in the health care field, they'll only be busy if there are a lot of sick people. And that's the tricky thing about a growth sector of the economy being tied to health care--it's got a very curious feedback loop. In order to make it a growth industry that pays for all the doctors, nurses, specialized equipment, drugs etc., it requires customers who are sick and continuing to be sick. And that creates a secondary feedback loop that we need to examine--a lot of sick people results in a country that is no longer thriving on personal or economic levels.

You can already see the early signs of this as the obesity rates of our country have sky-rocketed and with it a serious rise in diabetes and heart disease throughout the entire population. Chronically ill people work less productively and/or for those who are working, they spend more and more of their income on health care instead of housing, healthy food, technology, and other areas where people might be employed instead of the health care system. You can see over a decade or two this is going to result in a United States that isn't thriving at all.

But there's another option that would shift us from being a nation of sick people with an economy dependent on health care as the largest employment sector. Let's shift the dollars out of the health care system and into the household enterprise system.

Now, bear with me because I'm going to suggest a whole new way of building our economy from the ground up. It starts at home by finally recognizing that the work done in our homes provides the cornerstone setting for a new, vibrant economy. From the raising of our children through to the caring of our elderly, the inclusion of the household as a business enterprise and employment sector that is part of the measured and monetized economy will enable us to build a much stronger economy overall.

I'm not talking about welfare or paying people to stay home and do nothing, I'm suggesting that we need to "professionalize' the work done in our homes to the level that we expect of other industries like health care, business, law, education, or technology. And in doing so, we include it into our economic measurements and monetize it. This would provide a massive new employment sector for our economy. It would also produce far greater outcomes for so many children and families--which ultimately produces far better outcomes for the entire country. As you'll see, to continue to exclude this work as part of the measured and monetized economy is literally to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Here's why--the future belongs to the highly educated and that means we will need humans who are operating at full human capacity. How do we best achieve this? It starts with recognizing that "human development' doesn't just happen--it has to be fostered from pre-natal care through birth and early childhood years to its highest levels. Humans are an interesting species in that they have the longest childhoods of any species on the planet and to be fully capable of being on their own and building optimal lives--they must be taught how to do this. In the 21st century, our childhoods have extended out to almost 24 years because the sheer volume of data and skills that one must learn in order to negotiate life to its utmost. Five thousand years ago the time and energy spent to raise a child to adulthood required significantly less accumulation of data and skill sets by the caregiver to complete the work necessary to enable that child to walk into adulthood ready to take on the world. But today, the knowledge and skills sets that a child must acquire in order to be fully functioning into adulthood requires the adult who is raising the child to have a much higher level of accumulated data and skill sets too. In fact, to achieve this level of data and skill accumulation--we must provide training, schooling etc., equivalent to that which we expect of other professions such as technology, health care and/or financial management.

Because we have not recognized this and raised the bar for the household enterprise to be viewed as a "profession' we've missed out on one of the most important employment sectors available to us to build a thriving economy. To continue to perpetuate this travesty results in a lose-lose for us all and at its worst, it results in the sicker and sicker population that now fuels the ever-growing health care sector of our economy.

If we reframed the economy to include the household sector, we could employ millions of people--though not only in the household enterprise itself. Even more importantly, it would foster a B2B ripple effect out into the greater economy. The market sectors of technology, education, home building, and entertainment to name just a few would all be direct beneficiaries. Dollars will circulate through the household enterprises and spread out into these other areas that are needed in order for the household enterprises to achieve the high level outcomes expected through this new professional sector.

It isn't that difficult for us to come to the conclusion that we need to raise the bar and add the household enterprise to the professional ranks and pay for high quality output. Why is the raising of our children any less a profession than an engineer? We expect an engineer to have advanced training and skill development in order to be capable to produce a set of drawings for a bridge that are engineered correctly and that we would feel confident to drive over. If we want the same level of confidence that our children will achieve full human capacity and be ready to be a part of our economy as they reach adulthood, the household enterprise needs to be given the equivalent professional respect and that will only happen if it is included in our economic measurements and monetization.

As we enter the 21st century's second decade, it is clearly a very different world. We know education is a vital part of every child's potential success and yet we only professionalize this when they leave the home and go to day care and/or enter the school system. As a result, millions of children receive less than optimal care-giving simply because the adult(parent) is either not trained in this work as a professional and/ or forced to be outside the home seeking employment in another area in order to have the funds necessary to live life.

Going to work in the household enterprise sector could be the equivalent of going to work for Hewlett Packard or the Red Cross. Imagine the rise of thousands of small, medium and large non-profit businesses who will be the centers for hiring, training and managing teams of employees who work in this new professional field. Just as a professional at Hewlett Packard works out of their home office yet has virtual connection with team members in their community or across the world, so too could going to work for a Household enterprise business result in an employee who works at home but has connections to a team of other equivalent household professionals. What a great career field--and the outcomes--vibrant children who have, from day one, had the opportunity to engage with a professional whose knowledge and skills ensure optimal human development for this child.

Once you begin to wrap your head around this new way of seeing the work done in the home from the perspective of the household enterprise, it is easy to see how many terrific benefits are created for our children, our communities, our economy and the world. Taking this step now provides the opportunity for a new employment sector to arise just as many of the consumer industries of the past begin to retract. The future looks bright in this employment sector as we redirect the economy to pay for this now vital work.

We will of course, always need health care. But there's a difference between needing health care as a small portion of an economy that supports a generally thriving population of healthy people vs. it being the major sector of the economy that supports a generally marginal population of sick people. We know already that we are on this sick path, but we could turn this around in one generation by adding the household enterprise sector into the measured and monetized professional economy.

Immediately people will ask how this can be funded but this is less an issue of money than an issue of where we want to put our money. Briefly addressing this issue (a subsequent article will go into more detail) some funds will come as we redirect out of health care into household enterprises. Current grant funders may direct their funding for this new sector--seeing that it produces far better outcomes and higher employment than even the current social service system. The rise of local currencies would enable another source of funding since obviously household enterprise businesses are locally centered (finally an employment sector you can't outsource to China!). Another option would be a State bank as a source for long term funding. The money is there--we need only to determine that we want the household enterprise to be included in the economic measurement system--once that happens, the money can flow in, out and around the economy just as it does in any other sector such as health care, engineering or buying a new Smartphone!

C-SPAN wants open hearings

2010-01-10T17:21:00.000-08:00

http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/6340/

Sheila Liaugminas | Wednesday, 6 January 2010
C-SPAN wants open hearings

As it should be.

“The C-SPAN television network is calling on congressional leaders to open health care talks to cameras — something President Barack Obama promised as a candidate.

Instead the most critical negotiations on Obama’s health plan have taken place behind closed doors, as Republicans repeatedly point out. In a Dec. 30 letter to House and Senate leaders released Tuesday, C-SPAN chief executive Brian Lamb asked for negotiations on a compromise bill to be opened up for public viewing, as Democrats work to reconcile differences between legislation passed by the two chambers.

Obama pledged during a presidential debate in January 2008 that he would be “bringing all parties together, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are.”

Why the need for such a plea?

This is one of my chief complaints about this administration. Barack Obama repeatedly and convincingly (to great throngs of admirers) promised transparency in his government. Besides other promises he has broken…..to be post-partisan, ‘bring all parties together’, listen to voices that disagree, etc…….Obama has run an administration and a party in Congress that operates behind closed doors with no access to anyone but cronies and party loyalists.

And actually, the more they obscure, the more the people are beginning to see.

An American emigre speaks to Joe Lieberman

2010-01-08T13:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/populum/print_friendly.php?p=An-American-emigre-speaks-by-Rachel-Gladstone-G-100107-74.html

January 7, 2010
An American emigre speaks to Joe Lieberman
By Rachel Gladstone-Gelman
(originally appeared in the Connecticut Post Online)

How can you criticize it if you've never tried it?

It's a health care facility in Ontario.

Two neighbors walk into the expansive waiting area. They each have a really bad cough, a job and a valid health card due to their employment. One of them has, otherwise, has had a pretty good few weeks. He doesn't feel well at all, but expenses have been fairly regular, if not low. And now he'll have a chance to tackle his horrible cough.

The other neighbor hasn't had it so well. In addition to a horrible cough, expenses have gone through the roof all of this particular month. He doesn't even have money (of his own) for a cup of tea until he gets paid tomorrow. It's a good thing he can walk to his job. Now for the real clincher:

Because they are both employed, both feeding the tax "vat" and both have valid health cards, BOTH can see the doctor, regardless of added expenses this month and whether or not they can both afford a cup of tea.

Taxes. But she pays so much in taxes!

I don't know exactly how much I pay in taxes, but at least that money is there for me when I've got an uncontrollable cough--or need a test or an operation! But what about my neighbors? I mean, they're using my tax money for their health care. Mr. Lieberman, I'm using theirs, too. What I must be thinking when visiting a doctor's office, knowing about this tax vat. Well, I'm not thinking much about it at all. Even with only one of us employed, ALL of my family members are able to see the doctor. That's my primary concern.

In a purely capitalist-minded society, the above-described must really bug people. But socialized medicine enables people who contribute to it (financially) to get something for it. It is certainly less "painful" to consider socialized medicine when you don't think about the numbers, but we're talking about health care, Mr. Lieberman.

By now, both neighbors have seen the doctor and the one who's had huge expenses this month appears to need a specialist. The doctor also wants to do blood work and prints off two sheets: one for the specialist, the other for the on-site nurse to take blood. The patient then puts his name on the list for blood work while still at the facility and sits and waits (unless he comes back for that, in which case, he'll need the form he just received and his health card). When he goes to see the specialist, he will bring his health card and referral form--no money. Hear that, Mr. Lieberman? The tax vat's use is far-reaching.

A valid health card and a referral form. No wallet necessary for your primary doctor or a specialist or blood work. Pretty dreamy, eh?

Very worth noting is the absolute requirement of that health card. Dare you not have it with you, although you're allowed to pay actual money if you don't have one--or be billed, which my doctor's office allows. I did miss an appointment once, because I had remembered the wrong date and my primary doctor's office doesn't call to confirm. But back to that health card, honestly, you show it before you show your face. Hey, it has your photo (if you're 16 or older) on it, anyway.

Who on the planet hasn't heard the raging debate about health care reform in the U.S., and who on the planet hasn't seen families living in storage in the U.S.? Yes, Mr. Lieberman, if you dared and cared to look and ponder it, YOU have/had something to do with people living in storage in the U.S. Because you (and your many friends) so vehemently fight health care reform, people are living in storage in the U.S. Why do I sense fingers in your ears?

Commies and socialism. Is that why? I'm not a fan of communism either, but I find socialized medicine to be a breath of fresh air and I DON'T consider Canada to be a communist regime.

Let's be fair, Mr. Lieberman. You've never tried socialized medicine, and you've never lived health care reform. How can you criticize it?

Calling the Bluff in the Conference Committee

2010-01-08T12:04:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Calling-the-Bluff-in-the-C-by-Paul-Rogat-Loeb-100107-505.html

January 7, 2010
By Paul Rogat Loeb

As the health care bill goes to conference, there's obviously a tension between a pretty decent House bill and a Senate one that's probably better than nothing, but contains some seriously problematic elements and is far worse than what's needed to really move forward. Senate negotiators will no doubt try to keep their version over that of the House by using the specter of Senators Lieberman and Nelson filibustering if the House holds firm on issues like the public option or paying for the bill by taxing the wealthy rather than those with decent health insurance. And if the House negotiators hold firm, Lieberman and Nelson might indeed go with the Republican team and vote against cloture.

But that's not guaranteed, despite all their bluster. At the last moment, Lieberman might just pull back his threat to support a Republican filibuster, for fear of losing his committee or creating more prime footage to be used in Democratic ads in 2012. Nelson may fear a potential primary challenge or exclusion from Democratic fund raising. So far they've backed the rest of the Democrats down at every turn, but they've never really been tested on their threats.

If they do show this fundamental disloyalty, they become branded as allies of Republican obstructionism that in way that's far more lasting than when they could claim it was all a negotiating posture. Their support of a filibuster would also take the heat off all the other Democrats who can then respond, "We fought as best we can for what we think America needs, but the Republicans blocked it, so we're going to pass what we can and then keep fighting for more." It allows them to draw a clear line between the party that supports popular elements like a public option and a health bill based on progressive taxation, and the one that continues to block them. By forcing Lieberman and possibly Nelson to be the ones to make the break to defend regressive an unpopular positions, the Democrats might just begin regaining that populist mantle they've lost through this endless year of caving and compromising and then compromising some more.

At that point, if Democratic Senators can't get it an improved bill past a Republican filibuster, the lines of who is fighting for what will be drawn a lot more clearly to the public than they are at this point. That's a good thing, not something to fear. And if they do still want to pass the remaining core of the health plan, they can fall back to the original Senate bill, or something close to it, and leave the bill's problems far more tied to the Republicans and that handful of disloyal Democrats, than to all the other Democratic Senators who would have voted to back not only what was right, but also what most Americans want.

So there's every policy reason for House Democrats to stand strong, because by doing so, they also help themselves and their Senate colleagues gain political ground. Taking a strong stand might even recover some of the squandered good will they rode in with just over a year ago.

Paul Loeb is author of Soul of a Citizen, whose updated edition St Martin's Press will release April 5, and which HuffPo will be serializing. He's also the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. See http://www.paulloeb.org; To receive Paul's articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles You can sign up for his HuffPo posts, including the upcoming Soul of a Citizen serializations, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-loeb.

Cash-strapped Florida health group stops dialysis for poor patients

2010-01-08T11:48:00.001-08:00

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/81856.html

Posted on Thu, Jan. 07, 2010
Cash-strapped Florida health group stops dialysis for poor patients
John Dorschner and Juan Carlos Chavez | The Miami Herald
January 07, 2010

The financially strapped Jackson Health System has stopped paying for dialysis treatments for 175 poor patients with failing kidneys — a decision that experts say could be deadly.

"It is no game," says Emelina Garcia Cordovi, 67, whose treatments at a South Miami-Dade center were cut off Dec. 31. "We are talking of the lives of persons who depend exclusively on their dialysis."

Jackson, Miami-Dade's government health system intended to be a safety net for the poor and uninsured, said it expects to save $4.2 million by stopping payments for outpatient dialysis treatment for the 175 patients. Of those, other avenues for care have been found for all but 41, says spokesman Robert Alonso. About a third of those are undocumented immigrants, who are not eligible for government programs.

"This decision was not taken lightly," said Eneida Roldan, chief executive of Jackson, which is trying to reduce a projected loss of $168 million for fiscal 2010. She said patients can still get treated in the emergency room.

The situation is so serious that Brian Keeley, chief executive of Baptist Health South Florida, suggested Wednesday that, if Jackson cannot handle the patients, a "public-private partnership" of hospitals be formed to provide care. Jackson officials said they would welcome anything that helped solve the problem.

"These people are going to seek treatment," Keeley said. "They're going to migrate to the nearest emergency room," after they become sick, meaning care will be more expensive. Such a scenario is "very very inappropriate" when they could be kept well at outpatient dialysis centers, he said.

Under the health care reform proposals now before Congress, the emphasis is on getting cheaper basic care for an additional 30 million Americans so that they don't need expensive ER visits.

Protesters Surprised As Maloney Steps Up

2010-01-08T11:21:00.000-08:00

http://www.queenstribune.com/deadline/Deadline_Maloney.html

December 30, 2009
By Domenick Rafter

A group protesting the Senate healthcare bill in front of the office of U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Astoria) received a pleasant surprise when the Congresswoman came out and chatted with them about the bill and their concerns.

MoveOn.org organized what it called a "rapid response action" team to Maloney's district office on 28-11 Astoria Blvd. in Astoria on Dec. 21. Steve Leser, coordinator for the Queens MoveOn.org council, said the goal of the demonstration was to thank Maloney for her work on supporting a public option in the House healthcare bill and for opposing the so-called Stupak Amendment, which banned federal funds for abortion.

The group demonstrated by singing parodies of Christmas and Chanukah songs with lyrics changed to express their opinions on healthcare reform. While demonstrating outside her Astoria office in the cold, the group was taken by surprise when Maloney, herself, came out and talked to them.

"She was extremely gracious," Leser said, "She came out and talked with us for a good 20 minutes and urged us to talk to Sen. Schumer and Sen. Gillibrand."

"She was very supportive," said Astoria resident Janine Melillo, who was among the protestors. "We were really honored to have her there."

Leser said they had faxed Maloney's office the weekend before to let her know that they would be there, but did not expect to actually see the Congresswoman herself.

MoveOn.org has been critical of the current healthcare bill that passed the Senate on Dec. 24, which does not have a public option. They have also sharply criticized the Stupak Amendment, which Maloney opposed. Maloney, who represents Astoria and Long Island City, as well as the Upper East Side and Midtown sections of Manhattan, is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a group of more than 80 Democratic members of Congress who have been fighting for a public option to be included in the bill. Leser said the group also wanted to push Maloney to improve the bill after it passes the Senate and goes to a conference committee to be reconciled with the House bill.

"There are a lot of problems in the Senate bill," Leser said. "We wanted Maloney to know that we want her to keep fighting for a better bill and that we support her in that fight."

Leser said Maloney also talked with them about other issues, including the credit card reform bill that passed Congress and was signed by President Barack Obama in May. Maloney sponsored the bill in the House.

"We were very pleased she took the time to talk with us," Leser said.

Leser said MoveOn.org would probably hold more of these events, especially at the offices of Schumer and Gillibrand. He said, "a lot of people were waiting to see the final text" of the bill before deciding what further action to take.

U.S. Supreme Court: Is healthcare reform constitutional?

2010-01-07T11:13:00.001-08:00

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/01/03/US-Supreme-Court-Is-healthcare-reform-constitutional/UPI-66781262506740/

Published: Jan. 3, 2010 at 3:19 AM

By MICHAEL KIRKLAND

WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 (UPI) -- Republicans fighting a losing battle to stop Democratic healthcare reform in Congress may have a couple of aces up their sleeve -- the Constitution and the conservative bent of the U.S. Supreme Court.

While Democrats have the power to enact reform based on congressional numbers alone, evoking much GOP angst, at least one powerful Republican official is vowing to challenge key parts of the legislation once it is enacted and signed into law.

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum said in a statement last week he is ready, willing and able to take healthcare reform to court.

After criticizing healthcare reform in general, McCollum said: "Most concerning is the individual mandate that a person must pay a fine or tax if he or she does not obtain federally required healthcare insurance. I have grave concerns about the constitutionality of this mandate. Such a 'living tax' is worrisome because it would be levied on a person who does nothing, a person who simply wishes not to be forced to buy health insurance coverage."

He adds: "Given these concerns, my office will conduct a review of the constitutionality of the healthcare bill's individual mandate, specifically in regards to the Commerce Clause and Taxing Power set forth in the U.S. Constitution, and will evaluate Florida's legal options. I have also written to my fellow (state) attorneys general encouraging them to join my office in this review."

McCollum is running for governor of Florida in 2010 -- and as a Republican congressman in the 1990s voted to cut Medicare and Social Security, and was a manager of the Clinton impeachment effort -- but insists his opposition now has nothing to do with politics.

The Commerce Clause, in Article I of the Constitution, gives Congress the authority to "regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes."

Whether McCollum's putative challenge to Congress using the Commerce Clause succeeds largely depends on whether the modern Supreme Court follows the lead of the Supreme Court under the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, which pinned back the Commerce Clause in the 1990s and 2000.

McCollum's argument is strengthened as well by the high court's jurisprudence, which for the most part recognizes that the regulation of insurance, an intangible good, is the province of the states, not the federal government, which can regulate the interstate commerce of tangible goods.

For much of its history, the commerce power of Congress was limited to the regulation of the movement of tangible goods across state boundaries through roads and rivers. That power was vastly expanded in 1942's Wickard vs. Filburn, in which the Supreme Court ruled the Commerce Clause, for the first time, allowed the regulation of goods produced and consumed solely within a state.

The federal government, using the Commerce Clause, had restricted the amount of wheat a farmer could grow on an acre, hoping to drive up the price of wheat during the Depression. The allowed amount of wheat was calculated after "threshing." When an Ohio farmer violated that restriction, he faced a fine and was ordered to destroy his crop, even though interstate commerce ostensibly was not involved.

The unanimous Supreme Court opinion written by Justice Robert Jackson reasoned that since the farmer used the wheat to feed his own chickens, that reduced the demand for wheat on the open market, affecting interstate commerce. By that roundabout reasoning, the government had the power under the Commerce Clause to restrict the growing of wheat, and to fine the farmer and order his crop destroyed.

Wickard opened the floodgates. For more than 50 years, Congress used the Commerce Clause to enact a vast number of laws that only had a tangential connection to interstate commerce.

However, in 1995 the Rehnquist Supreme Court jerked back the reins, unexpectedly limiting the scope of the Commerce Clause. In a 5-4 vote, the justices struck down the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, which forbade anyone from knowingly carrying a firearm in a school zone.

In the majority opinion, Rehnquist said the law was "invalid as beyond Congress' power under the Commerce Clause."

The "possession of a gun in a local school zone is in no sense an economic activity that might, through repetition elsewhere, have ... a substantial effect on interstate commerce," the opinion said.

It adds: "To uphold the government's contention that (the law) is justified because firearms possession in a local school zone does indeed substantially affect interstate commerce would require this court to pile inference upon inference in a manner that would bid fair to convert congressional Commerce Clause authority to a general police power of the sort held only by the states."

Rehnquist said the Supreme Court had identified three broad categories "of activity that Congress may regulate under its commerce power ... : Congress may regulate the use of the channels of interstate commerce. ... Second, Congress is empowered to regulate and protect the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, or persons or things in interstate commerce, even though the threat may come only from intrastate activities. ... Finally, Congress' commerce authority includes the power to regulate those ... activities having a substantial relation to interstate commerce ... i.e., those activities that substantially affect interstate commerce."

A second major blow to congressional commerce power came in 2000's U.S. vs. Morrison, when the same five-justice majority struck down provisions of the federal Violence Against Women Act.

A woman who said she had been raped by two other students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute filed suit for damages under the civil provisions of the federal act. But the Rehnquist majority said the civil provisions of the act "cannot be sustained under the Commerce Clause or section 5 of the 14th Amendment," which allows Congress to use legislation to enforce "the constitutional guarantee that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process or deny any person equal protection of the laws."

The only blip on the steady curtailment of Commerce Clause power came in 2005's Gonzalez vs. Raich when a couple of conservatives apologetically joined the four-member liberal bloc to rule 6-3 that Congress had the authority to regulate home-grown quantities of prescribed marijuana under its commerce power.

The ruling did not invalidate California's medical marijuana law, or those of 10 other states, but meant that someone charged under federal drug laws could not use state law as a defense.

However, despite the ruling in the marijuana case, the weight of Supreme Court jurisprudence seems to favor a Commerce Clause challenge in a healthcare reform case brought by McCollum or anyone else with standing.

Three of the five-member majority justices in Lopez and Morrison -- conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and especially moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy -- are still serving on the high court.

The other two are gone, but their successors are equally conservative, if not more so.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. replaced Rehnquist after the old chief died of cancer in 2005. As a former clerk for Rehnquist, Roberts is not expected to depart from the old chief's jurisprudence.

Justice Samuel Alito replaced retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006. While O'Connor would sometimes act as a swing vote, especially in cases involving abortion, Alito is seen as a solid member of the conservative bloc.

As a federal appellate judge in Philadelphia before ascending to the Supreme Court, Alito questioned the use of the Commerce Clause in congressional regulation of machine guns, and even its use in the enactment of environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.

Obama urges tax on costly health policies

2010-01-07T11:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/01/07/Obama-urges-tax-on-costly-health-policies/UPI-96831262868828/

Published: Jan. 7, 2010

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. President Obama urged House Democrats to include a tax on high-price health insurance policies favored by the Senate in the final version of the bill.

For some time, the White House has said it preferred a tax on high-cost plans, which health economists say could be a key method to control long-term healthcare spending across public and private sectors, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The Senate proposal would levy a 40 percent excise tax on the cost of individual policies more than $8,500 and family policies topping $23,000, the Times reported. The Congressional Budget Office said the tax would raise about $149 billion over 10 years.

The House has been reluctant to endorse the tax, which also is opposed by unions, the Times said.

Obama met Wednesday with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House committee chairmen responsible for portions of the healthcare bill as congressional leaders accelerated efforts to reconcile differences between the House and Senate versions.

Pelosi said after the meeting she expected differences between the two bills to be worked out soon.

"We have had a very intense couple of days with meetings in our leadership, meetings with our staff," the California Democrat said. "After our leadership meeting ... our staff engaged with the Senate and the administration's staff to review the legislation, suggest legislative language. I think we're very close to reconciliation."

You will be jailed if you don't buy private health insurance

2010-01-07T11:06:00.000-08:00

How do you pay for insurance if you have no work or little work? REMEMBER: These laws were written by the 'health' care industries and insurance firms to benefit themselves over people!!! It's all corrupt!!! The corrupt politicians (including Pelosi, 'Lie'berman and Reid) who are in the pockets of these corporations need to be thrown out and a new Health Bill that is fair, affordable and available to all citizens should be enacted!!!

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/779.html

Sick with Terror

2010-01-06T18:33:00.000-08:00

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sick_with_terror_20100105/

January 6, 2010 by TruthDig.com
Sick with Terror
by Amy Goodman

The media have been swamped with reports about the attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now dubbed the "underwear bomber," failed in his alleged attack, close to 300 people were spared what would have been, most likely, a horrible, violent end. Since that airborne incident, the debates about terrorism and how best to protect the American people have been reignited.

Meanwhile, a killer that has stalked the U.S. public, claiming, by recent estimates, 45,000 lives annually-one dead American about every 10 minutes-goes unchecked. That's 3,750 people dead-more than the 9/11 attacks-every month who could be saved with the stroke of a pen.

This killer is the lack of adequate health care in the United States. Researchers from Harvard Medical School found in late 2009 that 45,000 people die unnecessarily every year due to lack of health insurance. Researchers also uncovered another stunning fact: In 2008, four times as many U.S. Army veterans died because they lacked health insurance than the total number of U.S. soldiers who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the same period. That's right: 2,266 veterans under the age of 65 died because they were uninsured.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama was fiery when he made his public statement after meeting with his national security team about the airline breach: In seeking to thwart plans to kill Americans "we face a challenge of the utmost urgency," he said. He talked about reviewing systemic failures and declared we must "save innocent lives, not just most of the time, but all of the time."

This is all very admirable. Imagine if this same urgency was applied to a broken system that causes 45,000 unnecessary deaths per year. Since stimulus funds will now be directed to supply more scanning equipment at airports, what about spending money to ensure mammograms and prostate exams at community health centers?

And then there's the investigation of who is responsible for the attempted Christmas Day attack and getting "actionable intelligence" from the alleged bomber to prevent future attacks. All good.

We actually have "actionable intelligence" on why people die due to lack of health care, and how insurance companies actively deny people coverage to increase their profits, but what has been done about it?

The day before the underwear bomb incident, Christmas Eve, the U.S. Senate passed The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by a vote of 60 to 39. Obama described the bill as "the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act passed in the 1930s." Yet in order to get to that magic number of 60 Senate votes, the already weak Senate bill had to be brought to its knees by the likes of Sen. Joe Lieberman, from the health insurance state of Connecticut, and conservative Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska. The Senate and House versions of health insurance reform now have to be reconciled in conference committee.

The conference committee process is one that is little understood in the U.S. In it major changes to legislation are often imposed, with little or no notice. That's why C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb sent a letter to congressional leaders Dec. 30 requesting access to televise the process. He wrote, "[W]e respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American." Rather than simply grant access, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asserted that "there has never been a more open process."

Yet Pelosi and the Democrats are now saying that the bills won't even go through a formal conference committee, but rather through informal, closed-door sessions with key committee chairs. While this would circumvent Republican opportunities to filibuster, it would also grant a very few individuals enormous power to cut deals in much the same way that Sens. Nelson and Lieberman did. Since the health insurance, medical equipment and pharmaceutical industries spent close to $1.4 million per day to influence the health care debate, we have to ask: Who will have access to those few legislators behind those closed doors?

Wendell Potter, the former CIGNA insurance spokesperson turned whistle-blower, says he knows "where the bodies are buried." Let's be consistent. If we care about saving American lives, let's take action now.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Maggie Mahar Untangles Health Care Legislation For OpEdNews

2010-01-06T18:28:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Maggie-Mahar-Untangles-Hea-by-Joan-Brunwasser-100106-104.html

January 6, 2010
Maggie Mahar Untangles Health Care Legislation For OpEdNews
By Joan Brunwasser

Maggie Mahar is a Century Foundation fellow and expert on American health care. She is the author of the ground-breaking book, Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. Welcome to OpEdNews, Maggie. Well, the Senate finally managed to pass a health care bill on Christmas Eve. How should we regard it? Is it a holiday gift or another boondoggle masquerading as meaningful, far-reaching reform?

This bill is a start. Over the next three years, there will be amendements and more legislation. This is not the final word on reform. For low-income people and people suffering from pre-existing conditions, this legislation offers much-needed help. This is important. But healthcare will remain too expensive for most of us unless the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (formerly called the Independent Medicare Advisory Council -- or IMAC) is given the power to change what Medicare (and other payers) pay for, and how they pay for it.

Some hospitals are overpaid -- they are being rewarded for being inefficient. In hospitals where more patients contract infections or fall victim to medical errors, they stay longer and undergo more procedures. As a result, Medicare winds up paying those hospitals more. Medicare needs to begin using financial sticks to encourage hospitals to pay more attention to patient safety. Medicare can also use financial carrots to reward hospitals with good safety records.

We're also over-paying some specialists for some services that offer little benefit to patients. Medicare should cut those fees-- and raise fees for primary care and chronic disease management. But none of this will happen unless the Independent Medicare Advisory Board has teeth, is protected from Congress, and begins its work as soon as possible.

Right now the law says that the Board cannot change reimbursements to hospitals for 10 years. By then, it will be too late. An amendment sponsored by Jay Rockefeller, Joe Lieberman and Sheldon Whitehouse would give the Board the clout it needs. Watch what happens with that amendment.

How does this legislation look for small business owners and the vast but shrinking middle class?

I haven't looked into the details of what this means for small business; I've been focusing on what it will mean for patients. But I would say that for small business owners, the bill is a mixed bag. Some will benefit, others won't. Much depends on how many employees they have and their profit margins. "Small businesses" is such a varied group that you almost need to assess the effect of the bill industry by industry.

For the middle-class, those in the lower half of the statistical middle class (households with joint income of, say $30,000 to $50,000) will generally get subsidies. For those at the owner-end, the subsidies should be generous enough to make insurance affordable. Caps on out-of-pocket payments (co-pays and deductibles) and there again, lower-middle-class families should be okay. Those who don't have employer-based insurance will finally have access to comprehensive care.

But for those on the upper edges of the statistical middle class (people with joint household income of $50,000 to $65,000) as well as the upper middle-class, (people with joint income of say, $65,000 to $90,000) insurance is going to be expensive and most will not be getting subsidies. (Everything depends on the size of the household. A family of four earning $65,000 would get a subsidy.)

Federal Employee Health Benefits plans are expensive; the Office of Personnel Management has not done a particularly good job of negotiating rates. But the government pays a very large share of the premium, so federal employees are generally okay (though many have very high deductibles, which means they can't always afford to use the insurance).

Upper-middle-class households in the Exchange who don't qualify for subsidies, (because they earn more than 400% of the federal poverty level for a family of their size) are going to be paying the entire premium themselves. In many cases, they will also have pretty high co-pays and deductibles. We are going to have to bring down the cost of care itself, or they are not going to be able to afford health care.

When I say bring down the cost of care, I mean that we have to stop over-paying inefficient hospitals. We have to cut what we pay some specialists for very lucrative tests and treaments that provide little benefit to the patient. We have to lower the cost of drugs -- either by importing drugs from other countries, or by letting the government negotiate with drug-makers for better prices. (This is what other countries do.) Finally, we have to begin paying for value, not volume. Today, by paying fee-for-service, we encourage providers to do more. We need to reward them when they provide for higher quality and better outcomes at a lower price.

Finally, I'm very concerned about older, middle-class Americans. Under the Senate bill, insurers can charge them three times as much as they charge younger Americans. This will make comprehensive insurance with reasonable co-pays and deductibles unaffordable for many middle-aged, middle-class and upper-middle class Americans. And people in their late 50s and early 60s are at a stage in life when they need care.

But we have three to four years to take a closer look at costs and amend the law. I hope Medicare uses those years to begin to rein in spending.

As a middle-aged, middle-class American myself, I'm also quite concerned about this legislation. Do you want to comment on the fact that, according to John Nichols in the Nation, the Democratic leadership seems to be planning to avoid the traditional conference process of reconciling the two bills? This may shut out the Republicans but it will also shut out Progressives.

At this point, it appears that Democrats will skip the conference process and let the Senate bill become the template for final legislation. I understand why they are doing this; the 60 vote coalition of moderate and liberal Senate Democrats is so fragile. In conference, it could easily break.

But I am very disappointed that so many strong elements of the House bill will probably never see the light of day. For example, the House proposed rolling out reform in 2013. By pushing the date back to 2014, the Senate leaves open the very real possibility that if conservatives win the White House in 2012, and Republicans have a majority in Congress, they could repeal reform before it ever becomes a reality. (If reform was scheduled to begin on Janaury 1, 2013, a new conservative administration would only have two months to try to undo the legislation before taking office.)

In addition, the lack of a public option makes it less likely that insurance will be affordable. And the fact that, under Senate legislation, the states will be regulating insurers means that regulation will be spotty, at best. The House bill raised fees for primary care physicians who treat Medicaid patients to Medicare levels. TheSenate bill does not. Today, those doctors are paid 30% less than they would be paid if providing the same services to Medicare patients. This is why Medicaid patients often have a hard time finding doctors . . .

At this point, we can only hope that over the next three years, new legislation will be introduced, and that the current bill will be strengthened and amended. Much will depend on what happens outside of Washington. We need a reform movement on the ground -- something comparable to the civil rights movement.

I would call on physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals, including hospital administrators, to set their self-interest aside, step back, take a look at what we need to do to create an affordable, sustainable, high-quality, patient-centered health care system. There is a consensus among those who have studied the problem: we over-treat and we over-pay for too many products and services that provide relatively little benefit to the patient. At the same time, we under-pay for the most important services: preventive care and management of chronic diseases.

Most patients don't fully understand what is wrong with our system. They assume that more care -- and more advanced, high-tech care and more diagnostic testing -- is always better care. But patients trust doctors. Physicians need to speak out and begin a long process of education, explaining that in health care, higher quality and lower costs go hand in hand. Any reform movement is, at bottom, a "teach-in". To paraphrase Marshall Ganz, reform is a matter of moving minds from where they are now to where they could be.

People will better understand the problems inherent in our current health care system after reading your 2006 book, Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. Or, they can watch the documentary (by the same name) based on your book that was shown on Bill Moyers' Journal in September. Moyers says, "Money-Driven Medicine is one of the strongest documentaries I have seen in years and could not be more timely." Anything you'd like to add, Maggie?

(If your readers want to know more, they should check out my three posts about the legislation titled "The Glass Half-Empty, Half-Full"-- parts 1, 2, and 3 on www.healthbeatblog.org.

We'll look to your website for updates on the evolving legislation. And, thank you so much for talking with me, Maggie. It was a pleasure.

What's Really Behind Mandatory Private Health Insurance: Government Investment Groups

2010-01-06T13:13:00.001-08:00

Walter Burien is a good friend of mine and I think he's a *Hero*! Listen to him below and see why. You can learn more about this and the secret investments of government at www.Cafr1.com

Another bait and switch scam

From: http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/778.html

As an American, I refuse to buy mandatory health insurance that supports corrupt conventional medicine

2010-01-05T11:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.NaturalNews.com/z027870_health_reform_insurance.html

As an American, I refuse to buy mandatory health insurance that supports corrupt conventional medicine
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) Even if Obama's health care reform bill becomes law, mandating that all Americans buy health insurance policies for a failed system of "sick care", I will refuse to comply. I've read the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, and nowhere in that document do I find that the federal government has the power to force consumers to purchase for-profit insurance products from private companies.

The very basis of the health care reform bill is, at its core, unconstitutional. If this mandate is allowed to stand, it sets a dangerous precedent for the U.S. government to require us to purchase other products and services from whatever industries it chooses to support. What's next? Will the government pass a law forcing us to buy pharmaceuticals at thousands of dollars a year? Will it force us to purchase U.S.-made automobiles in order to boost the automobile industry? Is our economic free choice now centrally planned by our own government operating like Communist China?

This is a serious question that Constitutional scholars will no doubt be debating in the months ahead. But who am I kidding anyway? The U.S. government has long since abandoned the U.S. Constitution and no has any intention of abiding by it. Want proof? Read just one amendment: the 10th amendment.

Check out the website www.TenthAmendmentCenter.com which carries a highly relevant article on this matter: Health Care Nullification and Interposition (http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com...). It paraphrases James Madison, saying, "...state governments not only have the right to resist unconstitutional federal acts, but that, in order to protect liberty, they are 'duty bound to interpose' or stand between the federal government and the people of the state."

Our right to choose has been stolen away
In addition to the very serious legal problems with government-mandated private health insurance, this health care reform law strips away my right to choose what type of medicine I wish to be treated with. I don't find any credibility in the drugs-and-surgery approach to health care. The pharmaceutical industry is riddled with scientific fraud, quackery, corruption and criminal behavior -- much of it documented right here on NaturalNews.com. Its drugs are approved by a corrupt, dishonest regulatory agency (the FDA) that has abandoned science in its quest to push more drugs onto the people. Why should I, as a "free" American, be forced to pay money to a system that I know to be largely based on fraud?

If I had a choice, I would prefer to buy into a system of naturopathic care, where doctors respect the healing ability of the human body and try to work with the patient instead of assaulting him with chemicals and surgeries. But Obama's health care reform bill gives me no such choice. I cannot choose to direct my money into a system of medicine that I trust and respect. Instead, I am being forced to pay money into a system that is morally corrupt and scientifically fraudulent. It is a system that will only bring more harm and suffering to the people while enhancing the profits of the greed-driven corporations behind this medical scam.

I find it highly offensive that my own government would threaten me with a financial penalty if I refuse to pay money to such a racket. It's much like being forced to pay a "protection fee" to the mob. With this health care reform decision, our government has now become the enforcement branch of the Big Pharma crime ring, using the powers of the IRS (http://www.usatoday.com/news/washin...) to intimidate people into handing over their money to a gang of dishonest corporations that have found a whole new way to take Americans for a ride.

With this bill, all Americans are essentially being held up at gunpoint. We're being mugged on the streets by our own government, and they're demanding not only our money (to the tune of over $15,000 a year for a typical family) but also our lives -- because conventional health care may very well cost you your life!

Breaking Americans down, one family at a time
The whole thing is pure highway robbery, sanctioned by the government. The arrogant Congressmen and Senators who passed this law are, themselves, guilty of robbing the American people blind in order to redirect money into the pockets of some of the wealthiest corporations in the world: the drug companies. Has anyone bothered to answer the simple question that if tens of millions of Americans can't afford health insurance now, how are they supposed to afford to pay the fine for not buying any?

Forcing people to buy something they already cannot afford is a truly idiotic idea. It's like passing a law that tries to solve the homeless problem by making it against the law to not buy a house. The reason they're homeless is because they can't afford a house in the first place!

Similarly, the reason people don't have health insurance right now is because they cannot afford to buy any. How does forcing people to buy what they cannot afford solve anything?

This is why I'm now convinced that the whole point of the health care reform bill is to destroy American families. It was designed from the start, I believe, to drive more families into bankruptcy and government dependence. It's all part of a package of new initiatives that appear to be created specifically for the purpose of destroying America through debt and disease.

You can reach no other conclusion, really, if you think about it. When you start to realize about what our nation is doing with its fiat currency, how the U.S. government has to rent debt from the private corporation known as the Federal Reserve, and how the drug companies are bankrupting cities, states and federal programs, you really have to question the motives of a new law that would further worsen both the debt and health problems now tearing our country apart.

Why would members of Congress pass a health care "reform" bill that offered no reform and no health? Why would the Obama administration be engaged in under-the-table, behind-closed-doors deals with the drug companies just to make sure they continue to be able to charge monopoly prices for their dangerous medications? Why would the IRS now be invoked to enforce this medical racket? The answer can only be that somewhere at the top of government, someone is diligently working to destroy America. There's no faster way to accomplish that goal than to keep people diseased and indebted, and this new health care reform racket accomplishes both of those goals quite nicely.

That's why I simply refuse to pay into such a system. For me to spend money supporting such a racket goes against every moral fiber in my conscious existence. I would no sooner pay money to this racket than I would donate dollars to murderers or rapists. Every dollar that goes into this system only perpetuates the crimes against humanity currently being committed by the pharmaceutical industry -- especially against our nation's children.

I guess the IRS is just going to have to issue me a fine. If so, I'll pay it under protest, but I'd rather pay a fine to the IRS than hand over my money to the corrupt, failed system of western medicine that pretends to offer "health care" in America today.

The collapse of an empire isn't pretty
I'll have the last laugh, of course, because this whole charade will come tumbling down soon enough. We are watching the last days of the Roman Empire reflected in America now. The closer any empire gets toward collapse, the more insane its legislative initiatives become. Sheer desperation drives its legislators to enact outrageously ill-conceived laws that would normally never even be considered. Such is the nature of the last desperate gasps of a crumbling empire -- an empire that has now turned to looting its own citizens as a last-ditch effort to keep itself afloat.

Of course, every collapsing empire does much the same. The looting of the citizenry is, in fact, one of the more important signs that a collapse is imminent. It has happened repeatedly throughout history, and it usually involves a looting of the treasury and an abandonment (or hyperinflation) of the currency. Punitive taxation of the population -- or a mandate requiring people to part with their money -- is nothing new.

In the big picture, what we're seeing in the United States with this health care reform bill isn't an aberration; it's merely one milestone in the accelerating decline of an empire that has forgotten what freedom really means.

Mark my words, because I will out-live the American empire by a wide margin: After its collapse, historians will look back and they will recognize that it was disease and the broken health care system that was the final straw. No nation that keeps its population diseased and bankrupt can hope to have any real future, and America apparently has no intention whatsoever to even legalize actual healing or medicinal herbs. This nation has made a decision to outlaw healing, to outlaw natural medicine and to pursue a corrupt, broken system of sick care that offers no hope for the future.

It is a fateful decision for a nation that will one day serve as an important history lesson. The title of that lesson, by the way, will be "How America destroyed itself with debt and disease while keeping its powerful corporations filthy rich." In the end, of course, everybody loses. There can be no abundance, no wealth and no hope for any nation in the long term unless it finds a way to keep its people healthy. America is now set on a course to learn this very difficult lesson the hard way.

Extortion is a word rarely (if ever) used to describe the US Congress...

2010-01-04T15:33:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Extortion-is-a-word-rarely-by-Fred-Cederholm-091231-280.html

January 2, 2010
Extortion is a word rarely (if ever) used to describe the US Congress...
By Fred Cederholm

I've been thinking about crime ... extortion, our legislative branch in Washington D.C. the national debt ceiling, the number 60, and healthcare reform.

Crime is a breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority may ultimately levy a conviction. It is interesting to me that for while every crime violates the law, not every violation of the law counts as a crime. When you consider violations or offenses that should be a crime but no law exists on the books, the anomalies of what is truly criminal " well it borders on the absurd.

You see news junkie that I am " I've been closely following the three ring circus that is our US Congress as they hustled and bustled their way to a much needed holiday break from their duties of representing their contributors and those interests which hold the real power in this "land of the Free."

Each (the House of Representatives and the Senate) just passed their own versions of reforming healthcare in this nation. The House version was approximately 1,900 pages while the Senate solution falls somewhere between 2,000 and 2,100 pages.

When you consider the "incorporations by reference" to earlier legislation, the number of pages snowballs for each version. I have little doubt that the actual "bills" were written by the lobbyists and the attorneys for the healthcare industry. Then too, there are the pork projects, freebees, and initiatives that were extorted by the Reps and Senators to the buy their vote. These added much poundage to the weighty bills which will now be reconciled in committee.

Extortion is a word rarely (if ever) used to describe the US Congress. We generally think of it as protection monies paid to "da boiz so that dey won't break your knees." Congress has refined extortion to an art form. (They are much more civilized and oh so genteel about what the do!) They don't see their shenanigans as anything but being good representatives to their constituents (make that their largest contributors)! Getting "boot" for your homeland is just a matter of "bringin' home da bacon."

This maybe wouldn't be such a hot button item for me if there were mega billions of cash piled around needing a place to be spent. Let's face it, the United States is already broke and every marginal dollar of expenditure goes directly to increase the debt. With all the fanfare on health care (which really has nothing to do with the healthy) you might have missed that Congress raised the debt ceiling to $12.4 trillion. The hope is that nobody will notice and this second raise will get the incumbents thru the 2010 election. If that doesn't meet the deadline the government just won't pay their bills for a while.

It is not just the Federal Government which is in the hole and sinking deeper. All but about four or five states are sinking deeper underwater as well. 40 states have exhausted their unemployment benefit pool. This is after borrowing some $24 billion from Uncle $ugar -- who basically printed the money to help out. During 2010 another $90 billion will be "borrowed" from the Feds by the States to meet their mandated unemployment payments. So much for the "jobless recovery," now think tanks are suggesting that unemployment won't return to the "normal" unemployment of 5% or less until 2015 to 2017. That is six to eight years down the road.

Uncle $ugar just loves to help out whoever is squealing the loudest. Some largess comes to those in "need" via a blanket bailout. These are truly rare though. The number 60 (or 60%) is important in Congress. This is the "super majority" threshold number of members required to vote on a growing number of actions. It is also the number needed to override the filibusters, and bring an action to a floor vote. If all Democrats (and every independent vote together), Republicans basically do not have a voice.

The House and the Senate "Health Care Bills" needed 60 votes (or 60%) to get over the first hurdles. Most party loyalists fell in line and voted the way Pelosi and Reid wanted. There were however a few holdouts which sold out (or rather extorted their votes) for the fat cats back home. This porcine greed ranged from limiting the cutbacks in medicine payments to a decline of a mere $100 billion (when four times that was possible).

30 to 50 million people will be required to buy insurance from the existing insurers, or pay up to 8% of their wages as a penalty.

One major insurer got a permanent exemption from penalties; it faced from the beneficiaries of their "golden policies" and Illinois got, well, a Federal Prison!

Ah, politics!

Krugman's Health Care Sell-Out: Health 'Reform' Bill is Worse than Nothing

2010-01-02T17:07:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Krugman-s-Health-Care-Sell-by-Dave-Lindorff-091231-516.html

December 31, 2009
Krugman's Health Care Sell-Out: Health 'Reform' Bill is Worse than Nothing
By Dave Lindorff

Paul Krugman, one of the few liberal columnists writing for the New York Times, claims that at some point in the hoary past when he "began writing a lot about health care," he was in favor of a Canadian-style single-payer health care system. He adds that even today if he thought there was "any chance of creating Medicare for All any time in the next decade," he would be "pushing for single-payer now."

But on Christmas, Krugman threw in the towel, calling on progressives to support the Senate's version of health care legislation. Suggesting that the so-called Senate Health Reform Bill, if it had been the law back in Dickens' time in England, would have saved Tiny Tim without any need for the belated charitable intervention of Ebenezer Scrooge, Krugman says progressives should recognize that the Senate bill is the best they can hope for, and that they need to accept that politics is "the art of the possible."

Krugman goes on to say that despite some "flaws and limitations," which he leaves unexplained, the Senate bill is "a big win" for progressives--and for America."

But is it?

Certainly the Senate bill, and the only slightly less cruddy House version, with which it must be reconciled (let's be clear here that the ultimate act, when passed, will much more closely hew to the Senate version than the House version, given the number of conservative Democrats in the Senate), does a few good things, such as increasing funding for community health clinics, expanding Medicaid, the health insurance system for the poor, and banning the current insurance industry practice of denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions. But these small positive steps pale in comparison to the truly noxious things this bill does, and the things it fails to do.

The most outrageous thing the health "reform" bill does is further consolidate the death grip that the insurance industry has over health care access and delivery in America. It does this by mandating that everyone buy health insurance, on pain of being slapped with a heavy fine by the IRS. Since most of the 47 million Americans without health insurance are younger and healthier than average, what this measure does is hand the private insurance industry a huge captive customer population who will be stuck with high-cost, low-benefit insurance that will generate huge profits for the industry. The industry will be further enriched by nearly half a trillion dollars in subsidies needed to help low-income people or small businesses buy their mandated health insurance--subsidies which will end up going directly to insurance companies, which will be offering in return wretched bare-bones plans that will only cover some 60% of actual medical costs.

Supporters say that mandating that everyone have health insurance is akin to mandating that every driver of a car buy liability insurance, but there actually is a huge difference. Driving is a matter of choice. If a person doesn't want to buy car insurance, she or he can decide not to own a car. That reality at least forces auto insurers to compete in offering low-cost minimal insurance plans. Nobody can decide not to buy health insurance under this plan though. It is a historic first: a law requiring American citizens to buy a service from a private company.

Adding insult to injury, the bill does almost nothing to limit costs. This is why doctors, hospital and drug companies and the insurance industry, all of which spend millions of dollars lobbying for this law, love it (health insurance company shares jumped on word of Senate passage). Indeed, the government's own Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), predicts that the law, if enacted, will cause US health care costs--already the highest in the world on a per capita basis and as a share of GDP by a factor of almost two--to rise faster than ever. Furthermore, to keep the projected costs of this bill at an alleged $871 billion over ten years, a huge amount of money is stolen from important existing programs, including $43 billion from payments to safety-net hospitals (mostly public institutions in urban centers which serve poor populations), and from cuts in Medicare funding that could for the first time lead significant numbers of physicians to stop seeing elderly patients on Medicare.

The reform plan is terrible for other important reasons too. In order to sell it to one lone hold-out Democrat, Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Senate leaders allowed strict limits to be put into the bill making it almost impossible for low-income women or families to buy insurance that includes payments for abortions. The bill also undermines trade unions by taxing, at a rate of as much as 40%, those health plans which, through years of negotiations, offered quality care to workers. As the group Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) points out, group health insurance costs are also largely driven by geographical and demographic considerations, and thus this penalty tax actually targets workplaces that employ more women, or that have older workers, or which are located in higher-cost regions such as New York or California.

But surely the worst thing about this bill is that far from putting the US on a course towards some eventual humane national health system like those that exist in the rest of the developed world, and even in many countries in the less developed world, it actually locks in the power of the insurance industry even more solidly, making achieving true health reform an even more difficult challenge than it has been.

Krugman is wrong. If the health plan envisioned by Congress had been the law of the land in Dickens' time, Tiny Tim's survival would still have been dependent upon Scrooge's largesse. If his parents did manage to buy some subsidized insurance policy (and under the Senate version, over 20 million Americans would still be left uninsured!), the deductibles and co-pays would be so high that they still would not be able to get him treated for his deadly disease, and the dark future predicted by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come would still have befallen him and his family.

Krugman is also profoundly wrong in his gloomy prediction that there is no chance for true health care reform (as defined by expanding Medicare to cover everyone in America), any time in the next ten years.

As the insurance industry continues to rake in obscene profits, as America's health statistics continue to plummet, and most importantly, as the huge population of baby boomers hits retirement age and sees their health coverage under Medicare gutted and their children and grandchildren struggling to pay for care, the stage will be set for a radical political realignment, with socialized medicine as one of its key demands.

The liberal attitude expressed by Krugman, of urging progressives to accept a tenth of a loaf, only works to push off the day of that political revolution.

13 AGs threaten suit over health care

2009-12-31T11:30:00.000-08:00

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/12/30/general-us-health-care-deal-states_7243569.html

13 AGs threaten suit over health care
By MEG KINNARD , 12.30.09, 05:43 PM EST

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Attorneys general in 13 states say congressional leaders must remove Nebraska's political deal from the federal health care reform bill or face legal action.

Republican South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster and a dozen of his counterparts are sending a letter Wednesday night to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid objecting to Nebraska getting a break on Medicaid payments.

McMaster said last week he was leading a charge to probe the constitutionality of the deal he dubbed the "Cornhusker Kickback."

Republican U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint asked McMaster to look at the bill amended to win Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson's support.

McMaster and several of the leaders supporting his effort are running for governor in their states.

With Real Health Care Reform, US Would Not Need Affordability Tax Credits

2009-12-30T07:24:00.000-08:00

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/12/29/if-this-were-germany-denmark-belgium-or-france-we-would-not-need-affordability-tax-credits/

December 29, 2009 by Firedoglake
With Real Health Care Reform, US Would Not Need Affordability Tax Credits
If This Were Germany, Denmark, Belgium, or France, We Would Not Need Affordability Tax Credits
by Jon Walker

Our health care system is unbelievably more expensive than any other first world nation. On a per capita basis, we spend over 50% more on health care than the second most expensive nation, Norway. As a nation, we spend more than twice as much per capita on health care than first world countries like Germany, Denmark, Belgium, France, Sweden, the UK, or Australia. If we actually got real health care reform that brought our health care costs down closer to the rest of the industrialized world, their would be no need to grant affordability tax credits on the new exchange.

In 2016, the Senate bill will spend $76 billion on affordability tax credits in the new exchange. The CBO says in 2016,

The majority of nongroup enrollees (about 57 percent) would receive subsidies via the new insurance exchanges, and those subsidies, on average, would cover nearly two-thirds of the total premium

Using this data, I can estimate that roughly $210 billion will be spent on premiums in the non-group market in 2016. Of that $210 billion, about 36% ($76 billion) will by paid for by the government in the form of tax credits, and about 64% ($134 billion) will be paid directly by individuals.

If we had a health care system as cost effective as Germany, Denmark, or France, that $134 billion paid by individuals would be more than enough to cover everyone in the non-group market with several billion left over. If we could truly reform our broken health care system and bring its costs in line with the rest of the industrialized world, there would be no need for large government tax credits on the exchange. Think about that for a moment. Even with the government picking up about 36% of the cost, individuals in the new exchanges would still be dramatically overpaying for health insurance compared to the rest of the world.

What this bill does is expand something called "coverage" and adds some new regulations to insures. It is not real health care reform. Because Obama cut sweetheart deals with the hospitals, doctors, and drug companies, true cost-controlling reform became impossible.

Some supporters of the Senate bill have pointed to all the money going to middle class families to help them afford insurance as a great thing. The help is nice, but it only points to how terrible the underlying problem really is. It is simply a strategy of throwing good money after bad. Middle class families should not need government subsidies to afford health insurance. What middle class American families really need is for our government to rein in the different industries ruining our health care system, not pass a bill that will only enrich and empower them further.

Health Insurance Monopolies Are Illegal. There Is No Insurance Antitrust Exemption

2009-12-29T12:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Health-Insurance-Monopolie-by-Jerry-Policoff-091228-669.html

December 28, 2009
Health Insurance Monopolies Are Illegal. There Is No Insurance Antitrust Exemption
By Jerry Policoff

One of the more under-reported aspects of the healthcare reform efforts currently making their way through the Senate and House of Representatives in Washington is the antitrust exemption conferred upon the insurance industry sixty-four years ago with the enactment of the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. The Act fostered the growth of giant health insurance monopolies whose Wall Street driven for-profit corporate culture has produced a dysfunctional American healthcare system where profit takes precedence over health care.

The irony is that the McCarran-Ferguson Act was never intended to exempt the insurance industry from antitrust law or to protect it from strong regulation and enforcement. In fact it was designed to do exactly the opposite. The Act came about as a result of a Supreme Court decision, United States v South-Eastern Underwriters Assn., which found that insurance companies that sell policies across state lines are engaged in interstate commerce, and are thus subject to federal antitrust law. Up until that decision regulation of the insurance industry was the responsibility of the respective states. Many states were concerned that they no longer had that authority, and McCarran-Ferguson was designed to restore the power to regulate insurance to the states while also empowering the federal government. The Act permitted the federal government to regulate insurance, but it also stipulated that only the states have broad authority to regulate the insurance industry unless the federal government enacts specific legislation intended to regulate insurance and displace state law. In plain English that means that the states have the power to regulate the insurance industry but so does the federal government if it enacts specific laws directed at the industry. McCarran-Ferguson also unambiguously stipulated that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 (which prohibits abusive monopolies) and the Clayton Act of 1914 (passed by the U.S. Congress as an amendment to clarify and supplement the Sherman Anti-Trust Act by prohibiting exclusive sales contracts, local price cutting to freeze out competitors, and in general prohibiting abusive monopolies), apply to the business of insurance to the extent that such business is not regulated by state law. In short, McCarran-Ferguson was designed to empower both the federal government and the individual states so that they could act to prevent insurance companies from becoming abusive monopolies. How ironic that it has instead enabled the health insurance industry to achieve exactly the opposite result because the federal government has chosen not to pass legislation targeting insurance monopolies and the states have, for the most part, shirked their regulatory responsibilities. It is time to restore the original intent of McCarran-Ferguson by subjecting the insurance industry to state and/or federal regulation and through vigorous enforcement of federal antitrust law.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi apparently saw it that way. The House bill specifically subjects the health insurance industry to antitrust law, stripping it of any perceived exemption. Not so with the Senate Finance Committee chaired by Senator Max Baucus and his special interest-friendly gang of three, which produced a bill reportedly written by one Elizabeth Fowler. Fowler, no stranger to Baucus, had worked for him from 2001 to 2005 as Chief Health and Entitlements Counsel for the Democratic Staff of the Senate Finance Committee. She returned to the Senate in February of 2008 as Senior Counsel to Senator Baucus. In between she served as Vice President of Public Policy and External Affairs for insurance giant WellPoint, Inc., a small detail left out of the February 26, 2008 Max Baucus press release announcing her return to his staff where her portfolio would "include the panel's yearlong preparation for broad-based health care reform."

Apparently Baucus, Fowler, and WellPoint saw no need to strip the insurance industry of its antitrust exemption, so they didn't even though it was never intended to actually be an anti-trust exemption.

Senator Patrick Leahy had other ideas. He proposed an amendment to the Baucus Finance Committee Senate bill that would subject health and medical malpractice insurers to federal laws forbidding price-fixing, bid-rigging, or the dividing up of markets, an amendment favored by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who maintained that a repeal of the anti-trust exemption would produce more competition and better prices for consumers. President Obama also implied support for the Leahy amendment when he voiced criticism of the antitrust exemption in his weekly radio address, complaining that the health insurance industry is "earning these profits and bonuses while enjoying a privileged exemption from our antitrust laws."

The final word on the Senate bill belonged not to Max Baucus, but to Harry Reid, so one might have expected the removal of the antitrust exemption to make its way into the Senate bill that was finally passed last week. The media has largely ignored the fact that the final Reid bill never did address the anti-trust issue, thus leaving the perceived exemption intact, and at odds with the House bill. The obvious question is why, and the answer would be Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson. Nelson, a former insurance industry executive (He served as CEO of the Central National Insurance Group, as chief of staff and executive vice president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, and as director of the Nebraska Department of Insurance), took issue with the Senate bill depriving his insurance industry friends of the right to legally defy federal anti-trust law. The insurance industry had also lobbied to keep the Leahy anti-trust provision out. Harry Reid, desperate for Ben Nelson's vote which would give him a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority, went along, and out it went.

Does the continuation of the insurance anti-trust exemption really make a difference? In a word, absolutely!

Both the Senate and House bills leave regulation of the insurance industry to the states which have never been known for holding the industry's feet to the fire. A recent study by The Center for American Progress found that State regulatory authorities rarely bring consumer protection suits against insurance companies and that is especially true in the states most dominated by one or two insurance companies that enjoy virtual monopoly status. In fact in the five states with the least competition four of the five had brought no such suits in the past five years. The report suggested that most states are stretched too thin, and lack the resources to enforce antitrust laws, citing Congressional testimony by Georgetown health policy professor Karen Pollitz's pointing out that "In four states, the Insurance Commissioner is also the fire marshal." Senator Leahy cited the study in support of his effort to repeal the antitrust exemption for health and medical malpractice insurers. "If we remove it, they will have to compete," Leahy saidin a conference call with reporters.

Of course we have come to learn that the minority, not the majority, rules, if the minority bears the name of Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman (sometimes referred to as the Senator from Aetna).

There are some serious reformers who find much to fault in the healthcare reform bill just passed by the Senate, but who think it is time to hold our collective noses and pass this bill. I respect their opinions, but unless this bill undergoes some serious revision during the House/Senate reconciliation process I fear dreadful consequences if this bill becomes law. First and foremost, it is absolutely essential that federal antitrust law be recognized as something that applies to the health insurance industry, and the time is long past due for it to be utilized to strip the industry of the monopolistic power it both enjoys and abuses. I don't see the insurance companies mending their ways, and now, armed with mandates, they will have even more power and more money with which to thwart any attempt to enforce regulations that already exist, or that may be enacted in the future. To the extent the insurance industry has attained its exempt antitrust status; it is because the states and the federal government never exercised the regulatory authority that McCarren-Ferguson explicitly granted them. Any effort to reform health care has to start with reigning in and dismantling the health insurance monopolies. We need no laws empowering the government to do this, just an acknowledgement that present law allows it and always has.

Walk Away From the Health Reform Bill

2009-12-28T17:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Walk-Away-From-the-Health-by-Rob-Kall-091226-885.html

December 26, 2009
Walk Away From the Health Reform Bill
By Rob Kall

House progressives should simply walk away from this bill that's in conference. People who say accept what we've been offered don't have the negotiator chops to make the call.

Just walk away.

Imagine paying $100 for a store brand loaf of white bread. That's what the senate is asking us to do.

I learned about walking away from a deal in morocco, back in 1973. There, in the souks where tourists and locals buy goods, the vendors expect you to haggle. The vendors expect to rip off the most naive tourists, so they start off asking an outrageously high price. This happened to me when I was looking at a tapestry.

"How much," I asked.

"Eight hundred dirhams," he replied, about $200.00.

I knew my brother had bought one of these for $20 or $30 in the states, so I took a deep breath and offered ten dirhams, $2.50, and laughed.

He looked at me like I was crazy, so I started to walk away, as I'd done on numerous other occasions on my one month, post college graduation trip to Morocco.

"I give you special price-- 400 dirhams," he called to me.

"You insult me," I replied. "I'll give you 15 Dirhams," turned to see his response, then kept walking.

"Wait, wait. two hundred. Is very good price." He tried again.

I turned again towards him. "My brother bought one of these in the US. I know what it's worth. I'll give you 20 dirhams," I said.

"I have a wife and four children," he opined. "One hundred Dirhams. You take, yes?"

I walked again.

After a few more exchanges, I finally bought the tapestry for 40 dirhams-- ten dollars, a fortieth of the price he'd originally asked But I'd been ready to walk and did start walking several times. Just because he told me he was giving me a good deal didn't cut it. His offers had sucked. They had been insanely unreasonably initially.

I've been self employed as a freelance writer or entrepeneur since 1980, almost 30 years. I don't take the offered price as THE price. I almost always ask if they can do better. I often shop for better prices and often inform my potential suppliers that I am shopping. This is what business people do to survive. It's not what you gross. It's what you keep. You have to cut good deals every time to make a living.

This shocks some people, even embarasses many, who are accustomed to going into a store and paying retail, as told. I'm so accustomed to my way of doing business WITH negotiation, that when I experienced a hassle buying a Christmas gift at BestBuy, I asked to speak to a manager and requested some discount somewhere-- on the price of the item, the warranty. He ended up coming back with discounts that added up to $19. Not much, but worth the ten seconds it took to ask for it.

It's not that uncommon for people to haggle while buying cars, or to haggle when at a flea market or yard sale. But there are even people who don't haggle there. If a person comes into a car dealership, especially a used car dealership, and pays the asking price, you KNOW, the sales person thinks the person is a sucker and a fool.

There are some vendors who try to embarrass you or feign to taking offense if you negotiate. They're still working you, or they've decided there are enough suckers out there.

Early on, a lot of people complained that the House and Senate and HCAN and other leaders were starting out on the health insurance reform path asking for far too little. There was no room to give up anything in the negotiations. It was no surprise that the final legislation offered almost nothing-- scraps and dregs of real reform.

But it's not too late. The members of the House can walk away. They can kill the bill... as it's currently written... and demand a hell of a lot more. Anything can happen in conference. They can come out with a far more robust bill that really does make some reform happen.

The problem is, all these people are saying, "Settle for this first wonderful step."

Sorry. It's not wonderful and may not even be a step in the right direction. It proves that the health industry can effectively lobby the Congress into total submission, so much that health care company stocks have reached record highs.

I think the people who are saying settle for what you've been offered are the people who happily go in and pay retail, at the flea market, at the auto dealer. They're not entrepreneurs or purchasing people.

They don't have a clue how to negotiate and don't understand that sometimes, to get a fair deal, you have to walk away. That's the way it's been for millennia. it's the way the members of the House, particularly of the progressive caucus, should go.

Now, a lot of those same people are telling us we should take what we've been offered in the first pass. We should go to the car dealer and pay retail, Buy a house at the asking price that was set a year ago. Hello!! It is not too late to negotiate. It is the ideal time. Harry Reid thinks he has deal. Obama has already patted himself on the back. The progressive Democrats should play hardball and force a better deal. The recalcitrant senators who held off until the last minute have already accepted big offers for their states and will be in trouble if they lose those hundreds of millions of dollars in perqs.

Now it's time to pay negotiating hardball for we-the-people instead of specific states or lobbying orgs. We can do this. if the members of the House call up the courage, We can walk away, look back and I assure you, Harry Reid, Obama, Rahm Emanuel-- they'll be coming back at us with better offers-- a lot better. That's not giving up. That's refusing to settle for the best we can get. Taking the offer the Senate has made will be a real sellout, something we've come to expect from Nancy Pelosi. Fortunately, she can't bring this bill home if the congressional progressive caucus demands more.

Let's hope Dennis Kucinich, Alan Grayson, Raul Grijalva, Lynn Woolsey, Anthony Weiner, John Conyers, Jan Schakowsky, Patrick Murphy (my rep,) Keith Ellison, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Donna Edwards, Tammy Baldwin, Earl Bleunauer, Robert Brady, Corrine Brown, Michael Capuano, Judy CHu, Yvette Clarke, Elijah Cummings, Danny Davis, Peter DeFazio, Rosa DeLauro, Sam Farr, Bob Filner, Barney Frank, Marcia L. Fudge, Luis Guttierrez, Phil Hare, Alcee Hastings, Maurice Hinchey, Hichael Honda, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Eddie Bernice Johnson, Hank Johnson, Marcy Kaptur, Carolyn Kilpatrick, Barbara Lee, John Lewis, David Loebsack, Ben R. Lujan, Carolyn Maloney, Ed Markey, Eric Massa, Jim McDermott, James McGovern, George Miller, Gwen Moore, Jim Moran, Jerrold Nadler, ELeanor Holmes-NOrton, John Oliver, Frank Pallone, Ed Pastor, Donald Payne, Chellie Pingree, Jared Polis, Charlie Rangel, Laura Richardson, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Bobby Rush, LInda Sanchez, Jose Serrano, Louise Slaughter, Pete Stark, Bennie Thompson, John Tierney, Nydia Velazquez, Maxine Waters, Henry Waxman, Peter Welch, Robert Wexler and others will hold firm and talk now, over the holiday break, about rejecting the bill.

There's no vote happening now. It's a safe time to get tough, take a stand now and get the Senate thinking about giving up some more. Failure to do so is just bad business, no, make that TERRIBLE business, incompetent negotiation-- failure to negotiated effectively at a malpractice level.

"Con" is the Operative Part of "Reconciliation" on the Health Bill

2009-12-28T16:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Health-IN-URANCE-by-John-Jonik-091227-278.html

December 27, 2009
Health IN$URANCE
By John Jonik
"Con" is the Operative Part of "Reconciliation" on the Health Bill

We are now to endure something called "reconciliation" of the House and Senate "health care" (insurance industry care) bills as if industry-funded House members and Senators are opponents yearning to come together on differences to better serve constituents. Consideration of the wants and needs of the public is Off the Table, thus demonstrating the obvious---that officials in this government are rarely agents of the people.

Still, the public has power and time to make demands, especially of Congress members facing elections. This is to suggest some simple, sensible demands for inclusion in this bill to make sure it maximally serves the public and does not remain, as it is, the Insurance Industry Protection and Enrichment Act.

1) No for-profit insurers participating in, or benefiting from, the Act may invest in any industry that produces or manufactures health-damaging and health-threatening substances (pollutants, etc.) or products including, but not limited to, processed multi-adulterant cigarettes, tobacco pesticides or other pesticides, fossil fuels, petrochemicals, dioxin-producing chlorine products, military weaponry, pharmaceuticals that make tobacco pesticides and/or cigarette additives, genetically- engineered crops, non-organic foods, high fructose corn sweeteners, petroleum-based plastics, radioactive waste, and so forth.

a) No CEO or other top executive of a participating insurer, or immediate family, may have economic relationships with such businesses for five years before, or five years after, their position with such an insurer.

2) Participating insurers must disclose, up-front, without customer request, any and all investment properties they own, and the amount invested. This is a Right To Know issue. Government has no right to compel speech, with scarce few exceptions such as taxes, the draft, grand juries, doctors required to report shootings and child abuse, etc. People have the right to not speak to or otherwise interact with insurers that invest in businesses that one may oppose for moral, religious, political, or personal business reasons. With no acceptable option, that basic right is denied.

3) To prevent conflicts-of- interest that work to the detriment of the public's well-being, no participating for-profit insurer may insure and be beholden to those businesses.

4) No participating insurer, non-profit or for-profit, may use public tax revenues, or revenues paid to private insurers by citizens under compulsion of the mandates, for advertising or PR (including supporter announcements on "Public" Broadcasting) , as those things provide no Public Interest health benefit.

5) Participating insurers, unlike businesses in the non-mandated area, will have no Proprietary or Trade Secrets. As either de-facto or actual agents of the people's government, as recipients of public funding (directly via mandates, or second-handedly via tax revenues), "Sunshine Law" principles will apply so that the public can monitor, publicize, comment on, and control all business dealings.

6) Salaries and other compensation to CEOs of participating insurers will be no more than what is paid to other government agency directors. To allow otherwise would harm the public, economically and physically, by depleting money from public health care. No "deferred payments" will be permitted to such CEOs, or their heirs or assigns, in perpetuity.

7) Participating insurers and executive officers must have no investments in, or business insurance relationships with, pharmaceutical firms because that would create motives for insurers to use their power to favor drugs from their investment properties over other drugs (be they natural public-domain, or patented industrial drugs) that may be safer, less expensive, and more effective.
Such a conflict may deter insurers from acting on, investigating, disclosing, or warning about harmful effects of drugs produced by their investment properties. Even if insurers claim or show that they do not favor their own drugs, the need for the Appearance (as well as the reality) of conflict-free health care, being necessary for trustworthiness, prevails.

8) Participating insurers must show that they have paid proper compensation to victims of their investment properties, and are facing no outstanding claims against their investment properties for penalties or other obligations relating to individual or public health.

10) Participating insurers must show that they have no outstanding charges or suits against them for misdeeds (unjustifiable denial of claims, arbitrary refusals of payments for pre-existing conditions, invalid contracts with consumers, etc.).

11) Participating insurers must, by law, end the practice of lobbying for legislation that their customers may not approve of because the funding for such lobbying is coerced and compelled by law, and because such lobbying may be for legislation detrimental to the person's, and everyone's, environment and health.
Such lobbying, heretofore, and questionably, has not been a disclosed or agreed-upon element of contracts between insurers and customers. Full disclosure of the elements of a contract is necessary.

12) Participating insurers may not, by law, contribute to campaigns of any candidate for public office, or to any political party, because the revenue for this is not freely given for that purpose, because any number of customers may oppose the candidate or party, because this violates basic principles of voting, elections, and democracy, and because the revenue for such political purposes generates no benefit to public health.

13) Participating insurers may not use revenues collected from compulsory customers, or from public tax revenues, for private jet transportation, private business trade conventions, or for luxuries relating to corporate headquarters. None of those things are justifiable for public health purposes.

14) To make clear distinctions, private insurance shall henceforth be inscribed in public documents with an '$' (e.g. "in$urance") to indicate the difference between private and public health care administration.

House Backers of Public Insurance Option May Yield

2009-12-28T16:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.commondreams.org/print/51034

December 28, 2009 by Associated Press
House Backers of Public Insurance Option May Yield
by Calvin Woodward

WASHINGTON - Some House Democrats who favor a government insurance plan, a central element of health care legislation passed in their chamber, acknowledged Sunday that it might have to be sacrificed as negotiators work out a final agreement with the Senate.

Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the number three Democrat in the House and one who had appealed to President Obama not to yield on the public plan, set out conditions for yielding himself.

Asked during rounds on the Sunday news shows whether he could vote for a final bill that does not embrace a public plan, Clyburn said: "Yes, sir, I can.''

Clyburn added: "We want a public option to do basically three things: Create more choice for insurers, create more competition for insurance companies, and to contain costs. So if we can come up with a process by which these three things can be done, then I'm all for it. Whether or not we label it a public option or not is of no consequence.''

Clyburn was interviewed on CBS's "Face the Nation'' and CNN's "State of the Union.''

Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said the public option is not dead but added that he recognizes the realities in the Senate, where Democrats had to scrape up every vote from their side even to pass a bill without a government plan to compete in the private insurance marketplace.

"Before the House was to give up the public option, we would want to be persuaded that there are other mechanisms in whatever bill comes out that will keep down premiums,'' Van Hollen said on "Fox News Sunday.'' He appeared to sketch out a bottom line without a government plan necessarily included, saying, "We've got to make sure that the final product is affordable.''

Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, underscored the divisions Democrats will have to bridge when negotiators from the House and Senate meet next month to reconcile the two bills. He said there will need to be more give on the House side than the Senate, which took weeks to find the 60 votes needed for passage.

"If we are going to have a final law, it will look a lot more like the Senate version than the House version,'' Menendez asserted on the Fox program.

The Senate's Christmas Eve achievement brought the nation closer than it has been for generations to a new order in health insurance, one that would eventually require nearly all Americans to get coverage, help many pay for it, and restrict onerous insurance company practices such as denying coverage to people with preexisting sickness.

But nothing will change for anyone until the House and Senate can settle on common legislation, pass it, and send it to Obama to sign. The high stakes have both parties hoping they can find converts from the other side. Nearly every Republican in Congress opposed the measures.

"If some of the Republicans would come forward with suggestions - offer a vote or two or three or four - to take away the need to have every last one of the 60 Democrats, you'd have a much better bill in accordance with the tradition of the Congress, especially the Senate, on bipartisanship,'' said Senator Arlen Specter, Democrat of Pennsylvania, himself a party switcher.

Besides the government-run health option, another controversial part of the health overhaul bills is a proposal to reduce Medicare Advantage subsidies to seniors. The cuts would help pay for expanded coverage for those without insurance.

Though there are marked differences between House and Senate versions, both bills would cut payments to private Medicare Advantage plans, which on average cost the government 14 percent more than traditional Medicare. Insurers have been warning seniors that Medicare Advantage perks such as hearing aids, dental payments, and even gym memberships could fizzle if Democrats cut the subsidies.

But critics say tens of billions of Medicare dollars funneled through private insurers also pay for extras that never reach beneficiaries: multimillion-dollar salaries, foreign retreats for executives, and massive expenditures on marketing to lure more customers to the privately administered Advantage plans that serve as an alternative to government-provided Medicare.

The AARP, which lends its name to a Medicare Advantage plan, and other senior advocacy groups support the Advantage cuts. Despite the belief that Advantage plans offer broad savings for seniors, a Government Accountability Office report last year found wide differences depending on the plan, including home health service costs that could be up to 84 percent more than traditional Medicare.

A half-million Advantage enrollees were in plans with no copayments for hospital stays. But a roughly equal number were in plans with high hospital copayments and no limits on out-of-pocket inpatient expenses, potentially costing patients thousands more.

Musician Vic Chesnutt Dead at 45. Victim of U.S. Healthcare System?

2009-12-27T11:05:00.001-08:00

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/199700-Musician-Vic-Chesnutt-Dead-at-45-Victim-of-U-S-Healthcare-System-

The Associated Press
Sat, 26 Dec 2009 10:53 EST
Athens, Georgia - Vic Chesnutt, the folk-rocker whose sometimes dark reflections on life were influenced in part by a car wreck that left him paralyzed, has died. He was 45.

Family friend Christina Stuckey, who answered the phone at Chesnutt's home, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Chesnutt's record label, Constellation Records, said in a statement on its Web site that Chesnutt died on Christmas Day, Friday.

The brief statement says "Vic transformed our sense of what true character, grace and determination are all about."

Chesnutt worked with such notable artists as R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe and guitarist Guy Picciotto of the punk band Fugazi.

Chesnutt said in a biography posted on his MySpace page that he came to "a whole new understanding of music" after the 1983 car crash.

He recently had toured with his Vic Chesnutt band, a "supergroup" of sorts featuring members of Canadian bands Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra, as well as Picciotto.

"This is a truly incredible braintrust, with all these people - we've got some of the smartest and most sensitive punk rockers out there," he told the Athens Banner-Herald for a story in October.

The rocker released two albums in the past year, including "At the Cut."

However, Chesnutt had recently struggled with a lawsuit filed by a Georgia hospital after he racked up surgery bills totaling some $70,000, the Athens newspaper reported. He said he couldn't afford more than hospitalization insurance and couldn't keep up with the payments.

The problems baffled his Canadian bandmates, Chesnutt said.

"There's nowhere else in the world that I'd be facing the situation I'm in right now. They cannot understand what kind of society would inflict that on their population," he said. "It's terrifying."

Hold the Hyperbole on the Senate Health Bill

2009-12-27T10:19:00.000-08:00

http://www.progressive.org/wx122409.html

Hold the Hyperbole on the Senate Health Bill
By Matthew Rothschild, December 24, 2009

Hold the champagne.

And don’t get rolled over by the hyperbole.

The Senate health care bill, which just passed 60-39, is nothing to cheer about.

It will do “more harm than good,” say the leaders of Physicians for a National Health Program.

They acknowledge “the salutary provisions included in the legislation, notably an expansion of Medicaid coverage, increased funds for community clinics, and regulations to curtail some of private insurers’ most egregious practices,” write Dr. Oliver Fein, Dr. David Himmelstein, and Dr. Steffie Woolhandler.

But these are outweighed, they say, by the bill’s killer flaws.

The individual mandate “would reinforce private insurers’ stranglehold on care” by forcing millions of people to buy insurance on the private market. “Those who dislike their current employer-sponsored coverage would be forced to keep it,” they write. “Those without insurance would be forced to pay private insurers’ inflated premiums, often for coverage so skimpy that serious illness would bankrupt them.”

The individual mandate, by the way, was the top priority of the private insurance lobby.

The leaders of the single-payer organization cite four other problems with the bill.

One: “The bill’s anti-abortion provisions would restrict reproductive choice, compromising the health of women and adolescent girls.”

Two: “The new 40 percent tax on high-cost health plans—deceptively labeled a ‘Cadillac tax’—would hit many middle-income families.”

Three: “The bill would drain $43 billion from Medicare payments to safety-net hospitals, threatening the care of the 23 million who will remain uninsured even if the bill works as planned.”

And four: “The bill would leave hundreds of millions of Americans with inadequate insurance. . . . Predictably, as health care costs continue to grow, more families will face co-payments and deductibles so high that they preclude adequate access to care.”

This last point puts the lie to the claim that the bill will cover 26 million more Americans. Actually, it will force most of those 26 million either to buy private insurance or pay a fine of $750 a person or $2,250 a family by the year 2016. Millions of people will likely to choose to pay that fine rather than pay the premiums, co-pays, and deductibles that can reach four, five, or six times the fine.

National Nurses United, the newly formed union of 150,000 nurses, also opposes the bill.

It points out that the much-heralded prohibition on not covering people with preexisting conditions is far less than meets the eye.

For instance, “insurers can charge four times more based on age plus more for certain conditions, and continue to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees. So the insurance companies might not have a policy of not covering preexisting conditions, but they would have a practice of doing it.

Also, check this out: “Insurers may continue to rescind policies for ‘fraud or intentional misrepresentation’—the main pretext insurance companies now use to cancel coverage,” notes the nurses’ union.

Much of the bill is a straight up handout to the private insurance companies.

Remember the Medicare buy in proposal for people between the ages of 55 and 65? Well, that’s gone from the bill, and in its place, the government will pay employers and the insurance companies for covering the part of this cohort that is retired. The program “will reimburse employers or insurers for 80 percent of retiree claims between $15,000 and $90,000,” the bill says, according to an excellent breakdown by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Gone, too, of course, is any public option.

“Sadly, we have ended up with legislation that fails to meet the true test of health care reform, guaranteeing high quality, cost-effective care for all Americans,” said Karen Higgins, co-president of National Nurses United. Instead, she added, we are “further locking into place a system that entrenches the chokehold of the profit-making insurance giants on our health.”

No wonder the stocks of those giants are soaring.

Senate Health Bill Warning Label

2009-12-26T05:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Senate-Health-Bill-Warning-by-Daniel-Tilson-091224-262.html

December 24, 2009
Senate Health Bill Warning Label
By Daniel Tilson

The Obama Administration and most of the Democratic Party has gone into high gear selling its Senate Health Reform Bill passage as a Christmas miracle, a prescription for what ails us. While it does take some meaningful steps forward from our abysmal past, be warned:

WARNING: The United States Senate's version of health reform may have serious side effects on our health care system, including:

• Failure to provide universal coverage for all uninsured Americans

• Creation of state-controlled "health insurance exchanges" that promote no actual competition between private, for-profit health insurance companies in those exchanges

• No enforceable oversight or penalty system to prevent for-profit health insurance industry pricing/policy collusion on the new "exchanges"

• Imposition of $750/$2,250 or 2% of income - whichever is greater - tax surcharges on uninsured individuals/families who don't buy coverage from private, for-profit insurers

• Allowance for 300% higher premiums for those with pre-existing conditions, like old age

• Funding by 40% excise tax on high-end health insurance plans, and new taxes on Medicare recipients with income over $200,000, instead of across the board tax hikes on the very wealthiest Americans

• Failure to institute enforceable cost-controls for the health care industry as a whole

• No reform of Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Plan giveaway to Big Pharmaceuticals

• No allowance for cost control through low-cost prescription drug purchases from Canada

• Failure to limit premiums that for-profit health insurance companies can charge

Allowance for states to opt out of including plans in new "exchanges" that offer women abortion coverage, and requirement that any woman with abortion coverage write two separate premium checks -- one for abortion coverage and one

PRESCRIPTION: Do not stop working, harder than ever in fact, to push the Democratic Party closer toward its Populist Progressive salvation and farther away from its compromising corporate doom. Do not, not quite yet anyway, go to the ER of the Green Party. Take a dose of electoral reality, and take a minute after the holidays to get everyone you know to call their Congressional reps and demand real insurance industry competition through the U.S. House Public Option Plan, and socially just funding through higher taxes on the richest of the rich - Senate filibuster be damned

Compulsory Private Health Insurance: Just Another Bailout for the Financial Sector?

2009-12-24T13:40:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Compulsory-Private-Health-by-Ellen-Brown-091223-58.html

December 23, 2009
Compulsory Private Health Insurance: Just Another Bailout for the Financial Sector?
By Ellen Brown

Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is quoted as warning two centuries ago:
"Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship. . . . The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom."

That time seems to have come, but the dictatorship we are facing is not the sort that Dr. Rush was apparently envisioning. It is not a dictatorship by medical doctors, many of whom are as distressed by the proposed legislation as the squeezed middle class is. The new dictatorship is not by doctors but by Wall Street -- the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sector that now claims 40% of corporate profits.

Economist L. Randall Wray observes that ever since Congress threw out the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial banking from investment banking, insurance and Wall Street finance have been "two peas in a pod." He writes:

"[T] here is a huge untapped market of some 50 million people who are not paying insurance premiums--and the number grows every year because employers drop coverage and people can't afford premiums. Solution? Health insurance "reform' that requires everyone to turn over their pay to Wall Street. . . . This is just another bailout of the financial system, because the tens of trillions of dollars already committed are not nearly enough."

The health reform bills now coming through Congress are not focused on how to make health care cheaper or more effective, how to eliminate waste and fraud, or how to cut out expensive middlemen. As originally envisioned, the public option would have pursued those goals. But the public option has been dropped from the Senate bill and radically watered down in the House bill. Rather than focusing on making health care affordable, the bills focus on how to force people either to buy health insurance if they don't have it, or to pay more for it if they do. If you don't have insurance and don't purchase it, you will be subject to a hefty fine. And if you do purchase it, premiums, co-pays, co-insurance payments and deductibles are liable to keep health care cripplingly expensive. Most of the people who don't have health care can't afford to pay the deductibles, so they will never use the plans they are forced to buy.

To subsidize those who can't pay, the Senate bill would make families earning two to four times the poverty level who don't have employer-sponsored insurance surrender 8% to 12% of their income to insurance payments, or pay a fine. In another effort to make the insurance payments "affordable," the Senate bill calls for the lowest cost plan to cover only sixty percent of health care costs. "In other words," wrote Dr. Andrew Coates in a November 23 article, "a guarantee of insurance industry dominance and the continued privatization of health care in every arena."

An excellent analysis was posted on December 22 by a national organization of 17,000 physicians called Physicians for a National Health Program. The authors observed:

"Some paint the Senate bill as a flawed first step to reform that will be improved over time, citing historical examples such as Social Security. But where Social Security established the nidus of a public institution that grew over time, the Senate bill proscribes any such new public institution. Instead, it channels vast new resources including funds diverted from Medicare into the very private insurers who caused today's health care crisis. Social Security's first step was not a mandate that payroll taxes which fund pensions be turned over to Goldman Sachs! . . .

"The bill would drain $43 billion from Medicare payments to safety-net hospitals, threatening the care of the 23 million who will remain uninsured even if the bill works as planned. . . . The bill would leave hundreds of millions of Americans with inadequate insurance an "actuarial value' as low as 60 percent of actual health costs. . . . The bill would inflate the already crushing burden of insurance-related paperwork that currently siphons $400 billion from care annually. . . . [T]he bill will cause U.S. health costs to increase even more rapidly than presently, and budget neutrality is to be achieved by draining funds from Medicare and an accounting trick front-loading the new revenues while delaying most new coverage until 2014."

The Right to Sovereignty Over Our Own Bodies

Compulsory health insurance is like compulsory selective military service (the draft), except that all of our numbers have come up. The argument has been made that auto insurance is compulsory, so why not health insurance? But the obvious response is that you can choose to drive a car. The only way to escape the vehicle we call a body is to give up the ghost.

And that brings up another issue alluded to by Dr. Rush: the matter of freedom of choice in health care, which some people would equate with freedom of religion. Not everyone believes in Modern Medicine. If we the people have a right to choose what we believe about life after death, we should have the right to choose what we believe about life before death, by choosing how to maintain our own bodies.

The conventional treatment promoted by the medical/pharmaceutical complex is an aggressive approach that can wind up killing the patient as collateral damage in its war on the disease. Among other researchers questioning the wisdom of this approach is Gary Null, who reported the results of an exhaustive independent review by the Nutrition Institute of America in 2004. The reviewers concluded that the number one killer is not heart disease or cancer but conventional medicine itself. Conventional medicine was found to be responsible for an estimated 783,936 deaths annually, including 106,000 deaths from adverse drug reactions, 98,000 from medical errors, and 88,000 from infection; and those figures were conservative, since no more than 20 percent of iatrogenic (doctor- or drug-caused) mishaps are ever reported.

There are more natural, less invasive alternatives, but most are not covered by insurance; and even such simple remedies as healthy organic food may be too expensive for people forced to use a major portion of their incomes for medical insurance. A true public option of the Medicare-for-all variety could have solved the problem by keeping health care affordable. If other industrialized countries can find the money for a national health service, we could too. For a model, we could follow the lead of Canada, which originally obtained the funds for its national health service from its own publicly-owned central bank. But that will be the subject of another article. Stay tuned.

Obama & Democrats Give Americans a Healthcare Con Job for Christmas

2009-12-24T13:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama--Democrats-Give-Ame-by-Kevin-Gosztola-091223-261.html

December 23, 2009
Obama & Democrats Give Americans a Healthcare Con Job for Christmas
By Kevin Gosztola

Corporate Democrats and the Obama Administration stand ready to deliver a gift to Americans on behalf of the pharmaceutical companies and private insurance industry in America: health reform.

Cloaked in the spirit of the holiday season, Americans will let politicians shove this right under their Christmas tree somewhere between little Timmy's Zhu Zhu Pets and daddy's new GPS navigator, which many Americans probably managed to barely squeeze onto their Visa Mastercard.

In the final moments before passage, Americans will whine about how Republicans are Scrooges and do not understand the meaning of Christmas and they should pass this bill for the poor instead of always giving to the rich. And, some Americans will sympathize with Democrats who have to be in the Senate on Christmas Eve and cannot be with their families because Republicans continue to obstruct passage of health reform.

See the words recently spoken by Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL) as he read his own version of the famous Christmas poem, "Twas the Night Before Christmas."

"Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the Senate/ the right held up our health care bill no matter what was in it/The people had voted, had mandated reform/ 'We'll clog up the senate,' they cried with a grin, and in the midterm elections, we'll get voted in"

Premeditated Genocide By Lack of Health Care Insurance

The False Health Debate: Shall We Be Forced To Buy Corporate Insurance By Law . . . Or By Necessity?

Donors Reward Dems Who Pushed Public Option

Greed Trophy Goes to Health Insurance Companies

Medicaid is Failing, and Nothing Short of Health-Care Reform Can Fix It

Here Comes Single-Payer Healthcare in Another State

Pharma Giant Gets Cozy With Congress, Spends $100 Million in Advertising to Cash in on Health Reform

Top Five Health Insurers Posted 56 Percent Profit Gains in 2009

How Shopping Carts May Be Our Greatest Weapon in the Health Care Fight

Insurer Denies Life-Prolonging Treatment To Five-Year-Old Boy With Cancer

Hospitals Ravaged by Recession Pile More Work on Staff

Hospitals Ravaged by Recession Pile More Work on Staff

Income Inequality Bad for Your Health. And the Nation's

The Decline of St. Vincent’s Hospital

Health Care Babbaloney

Sticking it to the Man at the private medical insurance company

Dying for Health Care

Insurer Steps Up Fight to Control Health Care Cost

Health Insurers Spent $38 Million Lobbying Congress in 2009

The Art of the Possible in Universal Health Insurance

How Wall St Destroyed Private Medicine

MY PERSONAL MEDICARE SCAM: SIMPLE BUT EFFECTIVE

Those without healthcare should make it a point to die on the Capitol Steps

"I Don't Want to Pay for Somebody Else's Health Care"

Is President Obama Throwing Real Health Reform Under The Bus?

Calif. Democrats revive single-payer health care

Sick-care America now needs another $1.9 trillion increase in debt limit just to stay afloat

Sick-care America now needs another $1.9 trillion increase in debt limit just to stay afloat

House Progressive Won't Back Senate Healthcare Bill

Reforming Health Care is Not Optional

Florida attorney general threatens suit to halt healthcare mandate

ear President Obama: Time to Stop Letting Corporations Write the Health Care Bill

Whistleblower reveals how insurers can game healthcare bill

C-SPAN wants to televise healthcare compromise talks

A Wake Up Call

Misleading claims about Safeway wellness incentives shape health-care bill

Dems stiffen spines on health bill

Client X reveals the secret truth about health care reform

Mandatory purchase of health insurance becomes an issue

Obama Received $20 Million from Healthcare Industry in 2008 Campaign

Advocating personal responsibility in health-care reform: Bullshit!

We'll have a great economy if we would all just get sick"

C-SPAN wants open hearings

An American emigre speaks to Joe Lieberman

Calling the Bluff in the Conference Committee

Cash-strapped Florida health group stops dialysis for poor patients

Protesters Surprised As Maloney Steps Up

U.S. Supreme Court: Is healthcare reform constitutional?

Obama urges tax on costly health policies

You will be jailed if you don't buy private health insurance

Sick with Terror

Maggie Mahar Untangles Health Care Legislation For OpEdNews

What's Really Behind Mandatory Private Health Insurance: Government Investment Groups

As an American, I refuse to buy mandatory health insurance that supports corrupt conventional medicine

Extortion is a word rarely (if ever) used to describe the US Congress...

Krugman's Health Care Sell-Out: Health 'Reform' Bill is Worse than Nothing

13 AGs threaten suit over health care

With Real Health Care Reform, US Would Not Need Affordability Tax Credits

Health Insurance Monopolies Are Illegal. There Is No Insurance Antitrust Exemption

Walk Away From the Health Reform Bill

"Con" is the Operative Part of "Reconciliation" on the Health Bill

House Backers of Public Insurance Option May Yield

Musician Vic Chesnutt Dead at 45. Victim of U.S. Healthcare System?

Hold the Hyperbole on the Senate Health Bill

Senate Health Bill Warning Label

Compulsory Private Health Insurance: Just Another Bailout for the Financial Sector?

Obama & Democrats Give Americans a Healthcare Con Job for Christmas