Guaranteed Healthcare

Barack Obama has released his healthcare plan—and it is a bitter disappointment to patient advocates around the country who hoped that he would ‘turn the page’ on the broken healthcare system that is causing our nation so much anguish.

There are two basic options for healthcare reform: increase the role of health insurance companies or replace them.  Obama has chosen to give more customers and more public funds to the for-profit insurance corporations. It’s an expensive gift and one that allows them to continue meddling in medical decision-making while raking in obscene blood-money profits.

Clearly Sen. Obama needs to see Michael Moore’s new movie SiCKO, which lays out what the American people already know about health insurance corporations: they are a malevolent lot who make a buck by denying care to patients.  The National Nurses Organizing Committee will be co-hosting premiers of SiCKO around the country—and we hope that Sen. Obama will join some RNs to learn what’s really happening on the front lines of America’s healthcare tragedy.

 Andrew O’Herir in his glowing Salon review of SiCKO lays out the context in which Barack Obama unveils his health plan:

"Sicko" …{focuses} on the horror stories of middle-class working folks who believed they were adequately covered. There are so many of these they begin to blur into each other: the woman in Los Angeles whose baby was denied treatment at an emergency room outside her HMO network, and died as it was being transferred hours later; the woman in Kansas City whose husband was repeatedly denied various drugs his physician prescribed for kidney cancer, and who in the last stage of life was denied a bone-marrow transplant that could have saved his life; the woman who was told her brain tumor was not a life-threatening illness, and died; the woman who was told her cancer must have been a preexisting condition, and died.

One might respond that anecdotes like these have tremendous emotional power but little analytical rigor, but in this case I think we all know (and fear) that these worst-case outcomes exemplify the system perfectly. Moore interviews two healthcare whistle-blowers, both now plagued with guilt, who explain what should be obvious: The point of the system is to treat as few people as possible as cheaply as possible, and those who get ahead in the healthcare industry are those who find ever more devious ways to deny coverage. (For example, you can now be denied for certain preexisting conditions you didn't know about, on the premise that you should have known about them.) "

And he asks:

"But who do you know who will defend the current method of healthcare delivery, administered by insurance companies whose central task is to minimize cost and maximize shareholder return?"

The answer to this question is: most politicians, including, apparently, Barack Obama.

Obama’s plan does not contain an insurance “mandate,” but:

"Obama's plan retains the private insurance system but injects additional money to pay for expanding coverage. It would also create a National Health Insurance Exchange to monitor insurance companies in offering the coverage.

Obama also called for a series of steps to overhaul the current health care system. He would spend more money boosting technology in the health industry such as electronic record-keeping,… "

This is the worst of all worlds.  On the one hand, we will continue to see patients abused by insurance industry execs--the very same abuse SiCKO documents.  On the other hand,Insurance companies continue to run their plans—meaning we will continue to see astronomical medical inflation, bankruptcy, heartache, and repeated denials of care—BUT the federal government will find themselves on the hook for the sickest and most expensive patients.

This concept is contrary to basic economics.  Health insurance should function on a broad-based risk pool that throws the sickest patients in with the healthy ones and averages out the expenses for everyone.  INSTEAD, under Obamacare, private, for-profit insurers will cover healthy patients but the public will cover sick ones.  How does that work again?

Moreover, speaking of basic economics, let’s look one more time to every other industrialized nation in the world.  Almost all guarantee healthcare on the single-payer model, which puts sick and healthy patients together in a national, non-profit risk pool which funds (usually) private doctors or patients.  All those countries provide better care than we do, at about half the cost.  Shouldn’t we look there for inspiration?

Instead, Obama, like Romney, Schwarzenegger, and Hillary before him, builds on the current, private system that has proven itself to be a miserable failure.  He justifies his decision by saying that the average family saves up to $2500 a year in premiums.

Wait—how?  Does he expect insurance corporations to lower their premiums in the face of complicated new regulations?  Does the plan suppose that investments in technology are cheap, and will immediately save money?  Will the “average” American family be receiving public subsidies to pay for the care?  Where does this figure come from?  Nothing in the plan backs up this statement, or even the idea that medical inflation will be tamed with these tweaks.

What is most tragic about this plan is that Obama seems to understand the problems we’re facing.

While laying out his plan, he said:

"Since President Bush took office, the single fastest growing component of health care spending has been administrative costs and profits for insurance companies. Coming in a close second is the amount we spend on prescription drugs. In 2006, five of the biggest drug and insurance companies were among the fifty most profitable businesses in the nation. One insurance company CEO received a $125 million salary that same year, and has been given stock options worth over $1 billion. As an added perk, he and his wife get free private health care for as long as they live.

Now, making this kind of money costs money, which is why the drug and insurance industries have also spent more than $1 billion on lobbying and campaign contributions over the last ten years to block the kind of reform we need."

Exactly!

Unfortunately, his plan doesn't deal with the problem he lays out.  It is, instead, a safe, unworkable choice that will extend the heartache of America’s healthcare crisis--and could have been ripped out of Mitt Romney's briefing book.

Senator: please go see SiCKO, I promise you’ll be a lot less interested in protecting the for-profit insurance sector.