Guaranteed Healthcare

The political terrain is shifting underneath the “Big 3” Democratic presidential candidates as they take baby steps on the nation’s most urgent domestic issue: healthcare. While their campaigns try to negotiate with the toxic health insurance sector, in the hopes of making them slightly less dangerous to patients, public dislike of these bad actors is about to be crystallized by Michael Moore’s powerful new film SiCKO.   

Hillary Clinton, of course, should know better.  HillaryCare I was a Rude Goldberg-like travesty premised on the idea of creating an incredibly complicated scheme in order to carve out a safe zone for insurance industry profits. 

Clinton announced last week that she plans on making many of the same mistakes.

Well not explicity, but her healthcare program is so complicated that she can’t even announce it in one speech.  It’s hacked into three parts, and appears to be a laundry list of new regulations—rather than an easy-to-understand and elegant approach (say—“modernize Medicare and extend it to all Americans,” or, “work with doctors and hospitals to replace all the insurance companies with a single, non-profit fund that covers all Americans.  You pick your own doctor—and they are paid to provide care, not deny it.”)

She says:

"There are three parts to my approach. First, lowering costs for everyone. Second, improving quality for everyone. Third, insuring everyone."

That last one of course being the scary one—she didn’t say guaranteeing care for everyone, she said insuring everyone.  So our healthcare system will still be based on a perverse dis-incentive…insurers make more money by figuring out how to deny you care.

Many of her reforms seem nice enough, and common to Obama’s and Edwards’ plans: guaranteeing insurance corporations have to issue you coverage, fixing how they price it, cracking down on their overhead.

But her plan still saddles healthcare with a middleman that takes hundreds of billions of dollars into profits and overhead and CEO salaries.  Trimming that a little doesn’t change the main dynamic—and it sets the government up for continuous running battles with the insurance companies over arcane regulatory issues, while the insurers fix the system by pumping obscene amounts of money into political bank accounts.

All of which is just more care dollars being wasted on trifles that propel medical inflation.

Now despite her safe, tinkering plan, Clinton, like Obama and Edwards, seems to understand that the insurers are the bad guys here—she rails against them, but doesn’t really take them on.  Matthew Holt, a respected healthcare blogger, notes this bizarre disparity:

"Funnily enough, neither Clinton nor Obama have gone the logical route that one might expect them to go, given their similar assessments of insurance companies and their historical liberal leanings. A Brit or a Canadian hearing stories like this might suspect that the Democrats are en route to instituting a government-based health insurance scheme that would look something like Canada's.

But the only candidate with a realistic shot at the White House who has proposed such a scheme is John Edwards - and Edwards hasn't even come straight out and said so….

Meanwhile, the pressure continues to rise while, like a frog boiling in a pot, too many Americans are fearful of jumping out."

Now what might encourage all these folks to change their minds is SiCKO.  Americans are about to experience the toxic insurance in full, big-screen color.  Healthcare politics are about to change—are they ready?

America’s nurses are.  More details to come, but the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee are co-hosts for the movie’s 3000 opening nights across the country.  We aim to turn hundreds of thousands of movies-goers into hundreds of thousands of patients advocates with a unique organizing campaign.  Won’t you join us?