Link blogging health care reform- why no single payer option?
Posted June 9th, 2009 by Morra Aarons-MeleWhile doing research for a CNN.com Live appearance on health care reform and the Senate, I collated a series of helpful links. I am a proponent of single payer reform, but as has been reported, it’s just off the table on Capitol Hill. Obama himself said, “if he could start from scratch, single-payer might make sense—the same thing he said during the campaign.” But apparently, single payer is off the table. Without a public option, I don’t see how health reform can last and really make change. Mandating everyone to get insurance doesn’t solve the problem that just having insurance doesn’t really make things better! After all, writes Robert Kuttner,
“The U.S. health care system is the most expensive and least cost-effective in the advanced world mainly because private insurance companies waste about 25 cents on the premium dollar on claims, profits, administration, and marketing. They have no serious financial incentives to emphasize prevention, and every possible incentive to avoid sick people. Doctors and hospitals, meanwhile, make their money from increasing costs.”
Some sort of “public option”–a public health insurance plan (a la Medicare) that competes with private plans– is on the table, but whose version? See here for details. And visit Montanansforsinglepayer.org to see how Montanans are influencing their very influential Senator, Max Baucus.
Bill Moyers Journal has an excellent episode featuring Physicians for a National Health Program’s Himmelstein and Dr. Sidney Wolfe
Atul Gawande in the New Yorker on McAllen, TX, the country’s most expensive place for health care. Why?
CJR: Single Payer Advocates Finally Get Their Say
Robert Reich: How Pharma and Insurance Intend to Kill the Public Option, And What Obama and the Rest of Us Must Do
Lessons from Massachusetts: CJR
However, the “Dutch Model” of reform, which combined private and public options, is appealing to those who oppose single payer but demand reform. Maggie Mahar covers it here. I like this part, “Insurers Must Take All Applicants: Individuals Must Buy Insurance: But it would be wrong to say that the Dutch health care system is some sort of conservative utopia where the invisible hand of the market reigns. Just as in Dr. Emanuel’s plan, insurers operate under many regulations and restrictions. Most importantly, “they are legally obliged to accept each applicant for basic insurance” and they cannot charge someone more because of pre-existing conditions.”
Health reform is overwhelming in its details. I’m no wonk, but I’m trying to learn as much as I can about this hugely important change. Where do you go for information about health reform and how it affects your family?
You can join Obama’s Health Care Reform organizing team here
3 Comments
It is true that President Obama has said the proposed reform would not give the US a single payer system. But the proposed reform also has already been seen as something that would not guarantee all Americans would be able to afford the healthcare options that would become available, so it allows for the Medicaid and Medicare systems to be opened up for about 20 million more Americans than are currently part of the system. And that system does work like a single payer system would. I was a Medicaid patient for over ten years due to a medical disability, and that kind of healthcare made me more ill while leading me to believe I would be taken care of.
It is true that the government does not actually provide the healthcare in that kind of system, but provides payment for services. However, this also means the Medicaid system will refuse certain tests and treatments, including certain medicines, if their system says it’s too costly. That’s what happened to me. Because of Medicaid refusing to allow doctors to do tests based on the cost, it took years for some minor (yet potentially serious) health problems to be diagnosed. By the time they were diagnosed, they were already very serious and had spawned other health problems as complications. Because the system does not work like an emergency room triage… you do not get treatment sooner if your case is worse, you wait your turn in line… getting treatment took even longer and allowed these problems to grow. And that’s after my doctor spent months jumping through Medicaid’s hoops to prove that the treatments were necessary.
A condition that could have been diagnosed and treated in the early stages, and at least managed if not completely corrected, instead had the chance to become a much more severe illness, create two other chronic conditions as complications, leave me infertile and with a higher chance of having endometrial cancer in the future, and resulted in an uncommon nuerological disease that mimics a brain tumor and could have caused me to lose my sight. I did lose quite a bit of my peripheral vision and color vision, but the damage was (thankfully!) not permanent. I should have been treated within a month of diagnosis because the disease is that dangerous and debilitating. Because I was a Medicaid patient, treatment waited eight months. And remember, that’s on top of the fact that I didn’t have to develop this disease if Medicaid had not prevented diagnosis and treatment in the past to save money.
The healthcare insurance system is definitely flawed, and people are paying the price with their lives. But the government has done nothing with Medicaid and Medicare, or with the VA care for our veterans, that makes me believe they can fix it. What happened to me is so horrible the fear of going through it again almost makes me think it would be better just to die if the disease becomes active again (which it could). And I am not an isolated case when it comes to the health failures of a government-funded system. It terrifies me to think of that being able to happen to millions more people than it is already happening to, and especially knowing that people would actually ask for this because they don’t know the truth about how it works and think it would make them safer.
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June 12, 2009 at 2:54 pm by Helynna BrookeI am totally supportive of a single payor health care insurance system for all of America. We just have to keep organizing, keep researching and showing how expensive and ineffective our current system is. We also have to realize that a large number of insurance providers will fight it tooth and nail because they are currently experiencing a significant income from the way it is now.
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