Guaranteed Healthcare

I was speaking to a reporter recently about single-payer healthcare, when she said something striking: “I hear from people all the time complaining about the pharmaceutical companies.  But where’s the movement against the insurance companies?  I hear almost nothing.”

Well, I think it’s out there and it's growing—-in individual states and around the country.  There are a couple of great examples just from today. 

USA Today reports on a national trend to crack down on insurance denial of care.  They report:

Lawmakers in several states are limiting insurers' ability to cancel health policies for consumers who buy their own coverage.  The state actions come as more people buy individual insurance policies because they are self-employed, unemployed or don't get coverage at work. More than 18 million people have individual coverage…. Prompted by numerous consumer complaints and lawsuits against insurers, state lawmakers are taking action.

Great news: consumers are driving change, and politicians are sensing a shift in the winds.  Maybe $100 million doesn’t buy the insurance industry the influence it used to?

Of course, ending this trend of recission of care is not the same thing as replacing for-profit insurance corporations with a guaranteed, non-profit universal coverage pool, but it’s a start.  And it indicates the public impatience with on-going insurance industry abuses, such as this of a twenty-six year-old tri-athlete:

For the last two years I have been only sporadically insured, depending on whether I have an employer that will provide it. It's not that I can't hold a job, but my choices of income are considered self-employment….am a healthy athlete who participates in triathlons, multi-sport endurance races, and soccer matches, to name a few…however, the insurance industry suggests that I am too much of a risk to offer coverage. Things such as migraines and an irregular heartbeat (a very minor one, that I had checked out as a precaution and was never treated for), have been absent for years, but listed as reasons for being denied, as they occurred in the past ten years. I have no major health problems that require monitoring more than during a yearly checkup, and the most complicated procedure I've ever had was the removal of my wisdom teeth.

His story is one of over a thousand that has flooded into the Guaranteed Healthcare Web site in the last weeks, as Americans are pushing back against the pain and suffering caused by an out-of-control insurance industry.  Go read some of the stories, or add your own, they offer an incredible archive of American heartbreak--and make clear why only 7 percent of Americans think of health insurance corporations as honest and trustworthy.  Our job is to motivate the other 93 percent into action.

One person who is part of the 7 percent?  The President of the American Medical Association.  Dr. Ron Davis today managed, in one interview, to call for tax changes that would weaken employers’ incentives to provide healthcare, for individual mandates for health insurance that shift all risk onto patients, and for the sheltering of insurance corporations from guaranteed issue of policies to all patients. 

In other words, his Q & A on healthcare could have been the talking points from internal insurance industry marketing documents.  And not surprisingly…the President-elect of the AMA is also an insurance industry executive.  AND the past president of the AMA denies there’s a healthcare crisis!  No wonder doctors are flocking to join Physicians for a National Health Program!