Guaranteed Healthcare

Whatever happened to “Moving On?”

Perhaps it is just my submersion in the ongoing war to guarantee healthcare for every man, woman, and child in this country, but it seems to me like things have really warmed up over the past year, and that everyone is feeling the heat. Since the release of SiCKO approximately a year ago, everyone has been asking themselves the same questions: Am I covered? What does my policy include? Am I one illness, one surgery, one prescription, or one ER visit away from being branded “uninsurable?”

The news media has been focusing on the dark underbelly of the insurance industry (as if there’s a lighter side to the industry). Everyday there are reports of skyrocketing CEO salaries and parallel policy costs, the increasing numbers of uninsured and underinsured, and patients who have been denied care. The downturn in the economy has meant that an entire nation of working- and middle-class people are walking on eggshells, worried that they are a pink slip away from losing health benefits for them and their families. And of course, we welcome home every day women and men who have been irrevocably damaged by war in the Middle East. Some scars are visible, most are not, and few (if any) of them are receiving the full network of health support they require and deserve.

Clearly, this coverage and outrage are coming to a head. They say things need to get worse before they get better, and it doesn’t get much worse than this. With a major political shift in this country a mere six months away, the caregivers and patients of this country are poised to effect profound healthcare reform.

Which is why it’s so disappointing that a group of enormously influential organizations, including MoveOn.Org, Planned Parenthood, and the National Women’s Law Center, are steering a new organization that follows up a mighty swagger with a whimpering compromise: not to chuck out the insurance industry altogether, but to strictly monitor it. Right.

The insurance industry is comprised of people who will not hesitate to put a monetary figure on a human life. Hitmen, if you will. If you think I’m being harsh, ask Hilda Sarkisyan if you think her daughter wasn’t murdered. Ask Julie Pierce if her husband wasn’t killed by greed.

Our society does not aim to ‘regulate’ or ‘monitor’ serial killers. It takes all measures necessary to protect everyone while removing known offenders from society. To negotiate with insurance corporations is a fool’s errand, and a show of weakness. I hate to flog a tired metaphor, but it’s apt all the same: when I’m at work in the hospital, I do not work to cure and rehabilitate my patients by treating their symptoms. I address the cause of their ailment, and the cause of our country’s healthcare ailment is the insurance industry.

Let’s look at some of Health Care for America Now’s goals, and how they fall so short in comparison to a single-payer system:

·         Health care coverage with out-of-pocket costs including premiums, co-pays and deductibles that are based on a family’s ability to pay for health care and without limits on payments for covered services.

Under single-payer, there would be no out-of-pocket costs. Healthcare would be provided regardless of ability to pay out-of-pocket by virtue of the fact that it is simply a human right. Single-payer healthcare is far more economical than insurer-based plans many times over—most nationalized health systems in the industrialized first world operate with overhead costs of three percent or less, compared to the whopping thirty percent incurred by America’s health insurers. There are fears that providing healthcare to everyone in the country would be expensive, and yes, the program would be funded by tax money, but few people seem to realize that it’s our current system that is far too expensive. America spends twice as much money as any other industrialized nation in the world on healthcare, and yet still manages to exclude millions of citizens and rack up some of the worst patient outcomes in the first world. 

 ·         A standard for health benefits that covers what people need to keep healthy and to be treated when they are ill.  Health care benefits should cover all necessary care including preventative services and treatment needed by those with serious and chronic diseases and conditions.

Something is fundamentally wrong with the healthcare industry if you have to force it to provide care to sick people. Single-payer would provide medically necessary care to every American—no riders, no loopholes, no deductibles, no pre-existing conditions that aren’t covered. It wouldn’t be a difficult principle to enforce, because with single-payer, providing care would not be considered a ‘profit loss.’ Regulating the insurance industry will be an indefinite, and Sisyphean task. HCAN is asking the insurance industry to quietly reform all the mechanisms that earn its profits, and that’s just not going to happen. 

 ·         A watchdog role on all plans, to assure that risk is fairly spread among all health care payers and that insurers do not turn people away, raise rates or drop coverage based on a person’s health history or wrongly delay or deny care.

Again, with single-payer, no regulatory agency would be needed. There would be no tempting motivation to drop people, deny care, or not spread risk evenly among the pool. It doesn’t get any simpler than single-payer: everybody in, nobody out. And it baffles me that anyone would want to try it any other way.

In the fight for guaranteed healthcare, there will be a lot of intimidation. The insurance companies have a lot of money—dirty money—to throw into campaigns and lobbying. But if there was ever a time to hold one’s ground, this is it. The insurers certainly won’t return the favor we give them if we compromise. They are the cause of America’s healthcare crisis. It’s time to stop treating the symptoms and attack the disease, with all we’ve got.