Guaranteed Healthcare

By Donna Smith

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania – This day began in the drizzle and cold wind of Pittsburgh where members of the CNA/NNOC road show team appeared at Carnegie Mellon University to join in a panel to educate citizens and students about single payer healthcare reform.  Geri Jenkins, RN, and CNA President, joined Congressman Mike Doyle, D-PA14, and Congressional candidate Steve O’Donnell, D-PA18, and many others to not only explain the ins and outs of single payer, publicly funded, privately delivered healthcare but also to acknowledge that the work of passing single payer legislation will need even more energy and passion following the November elections.

Geri was a powerful advocate – as usual – for the kind of change that RNs know must come.  Congressman Doyle is one of the congressional co-sponsors of HR676, the National Health Insurance Act, and he pledged to continue his support of single payer legislation with the seating of the new Congress in January.  Doyle told the audience that passing any healthcare reform legislation will not be so easy as some seem to think in the near future.

Audience questions were terrific, and Geri and the Congressman answered every one with all the detail necessary for those present.  It was a great panel, and it is always good for single payer to step onto campuses where conservative thought and practice sometimes keep alternative views at bay. 

But I couldn’t help thinking about all the plotting and planning and emailing and faxing and texting and power-mongering already underway on the issue of healthcare reform.  No matter where we are in citizen discussion and activism, the big money interests are moving right along.

But Washington and the powers that be wait for no one.  The election campaigns have not stopped anyone in the private health insurance and pharmaceutical industries from thundering forward, and the corporations wait with great anticipation for the expansion of their markets if healthcare reform legislation accomplishes signing up millions more new policyholders from whom to collect premiums and from whom to withhold payouts of claims whenever possible.  No other American industry, save the banks and financial services folks basking in the blush of bailout riches, can expect such handsome protections from downward market forces as the for-profit health insurance folks who are looking forward to an embarrassment of riches in the coming months and years unless someone grows some guts somehow and refuses to capitulate to their pressures. 

Talk about a bailout… if Congress adopts a Massachusetts-like healthcare reform plan, that will be a windfall of unprecedented proportions for the usual rogues’ gallery of healthcare corporate interests.  So as Sen. Ted Kennedy holds his meetings to craft legislation, rest assured, no patients will be asked the really critical questions – I’m betting some providers and professional caregivers – carefully selected to stay on-message – are part of these meetings, and I would guarantee that the money interests in insurance, pharmaceuticals and such are right there too. 

So while the American people may think the plans of the presidential candidates are the main options for reform and that work will begin after we know who will be president and who will be in the new Congress, the decisions are well underway. 

Read about Sen. Ted Kennedy’s work, touted as secret, but obviously not so very secret: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/24/kennedy-secretly-crafts-health-care-plan/

But I decided to day and told the audience at C-M University that I would hope there would be a “Sen. Ted Kennedy- citizen Donna Smith cancer patient litmus test” for any new legislation offered, and here’s how that litmus test should work.

I’d like any patient who hears the words “You have cancer” to be afforded the same decency and dignity as Sen. Kennedy was given as a cancer patient when he learned of his illness.  And I guarantee Sen. Kennedy’s first thoughts when he learned of his illness were not about money and insurance and who would pay for his care or if he would even be able to get care or if his family would be bankrupted by his care or if he’d be better off dead than bankrupting his family.  That was my reality when I learned I had cancer.  And according to the RNs I have spoken to, it is the reality for many, many patients in this nation.

So, that is how I told the audience I believe the new Congress should evaluate their work on a new HR676 draft or any other healthcare reform legislation:  Does every cancer patient upon diagnosis have the same right to treatment as Sen. Ted Kennedy did upon diagnosis?    If not, why not?  And if a plan with treatment disparities is to be our law, then let’s be honest about whose life is determined to be most valuable and whose is determined to be most expendable and who deserves to be made to suffer their way through cancer treatment.  A check-off system of possible life-value ratings could and should become a transparent part of a treatment plan if Sen. Kennedy’s legislation makes one cancer patient eligible for more care than another or subject to the financial whims of the insurance companies.  Full disclosure, folks, full disclosure.

This is what happens to insured Americans now: http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/healthday/2008/10/28/medical-debt-sending-many-over-financial-brink.html

So if the new Kennedy effort doesn't stop this sort of financial and emotional assault and battery by the for-profit healthcare system, then the new legislation should not become law.  I do not think he'd want to leave broken lives labeled with his law.

And I would bet you my next paycheck that the draft legislation already circling the DC Beltway wouldn’t even come close to meeting that cancer patient litmus test I suggest.  Patients have a right to know if the plans being drafted are simply meant to make a few legislators feel less guilty about the most glaring disparities we now have in access to care or if the plans truly start wiping away those biases. 

I’d guess as we are seeing insurance companies anxiously awaiting the new plans, we aren’t moving toward better things for most patients.  And if Sen. Kennedy truly wants to leave a legacy of a better health system, then he can walk a mile in the shoes of fellow cancer patients before he wraps his arms around a healthcare industry bailout cloaked in phony promises of reform.