Guaranteed Healthcare

The legislative battle over the health care overhaul ended months ago, but it is hard to tell from the intense effort now under way by insurance companies to retool a critical provision.

The New York Times
By REED ABELSON

Does passage of a bill that funnels millions of additional Americans into the private insurance system, and the decision of House leaders to shut down debate on one single payer amendment and scuttle another, mean the end of the years of efforts by single payer activists to win the most comprehensive reform of all?

By Donna Smith

Jenny Fritts was 24 years old.  Jenny lived with her husband Sean for the past five years, and together they had a little girl named Kylee, 2. Jenny was seven-and-a-half months pregnant with her second child – a beautiful, baby girl. 

Jenny is dead.  Jenny’s unborn baby is dead.  They died because they were turned away for appropriate care at a for-profit hospital because they did not have health insurance.  Sean rushed Jenny back to another hospital when her symptoms became even more severe, and he lied about having insurance to get her in the door. She was placed on a respirator in intensive care, but she didn’t make it.  She died.  And so did her baby.

They become two more of the more than 45,000 Americans who die preventable deaths due to our broken healthcare system every year.  Two more.  Mother and child. 

By Donna Smith

This story is not unlike millions that play out in a similar fashion all over this nation.  For-profit, private insurance companies practice medicine without apology – and without license to do so.  Patients seek care; doctors assess medical needs; private insurance companies make the final choice.  My insurance company – Blue Cross -- decided just yesterday that doctors at one of the finest medical facilities in this nation were wrong in what they prescribed for me. 

Yet if we listen to the plans unfolding on the national political scene, we are supposed to trust that the private, for-profit insurers – like Blue Cross – will clean up their acts over the next few years rather than “trigger” the availability of a public health plan option for all Americans.  As far as I am concerned, their decades of escalating abuses against patients and healthcare providers are trigger enough – they do not deserve five more years to decide if they’ll do what it is right.  We know they will not.

By Donna Smith

Some old adages survive because they are true.  No matter how you deliver the message – email, snail mail, voice mail, text message or old-fashioned word-of-mouth – if you forget to keep it simple and keep it local, your issue or candidate will lose.

The right-wing went into high-wind to scare seniors – a huge voting block – about healthcare reform.  And why not?  All politics is local. 

Tell a senior citizen you are going to raise property taxes for new schools and it won’t matter for even a moment that the money is for their grandkids’ education – those seniors will vote no.  Ask any number of local or state candidates for office.  Seniors, more than any other voting block, vote their pocketbooks and vote their own immediate well-being.

Don’t get me wrong, I love older folks.  In fact I am getting to be one. 

By Donna Smith 

It’s 2009.  We’ve elected President Barack Obama.  We’ve elected a Democratic majority in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.  Those bastions of social policy are now in place to protect basic human rights.  Good things should be in the offing – at least we should make progress in the direction of more equity for women and their families and perhaps most especially for women of color.  Right? 

And we’ve declared that healthcare is a basic human right.  Women surely fall into the category deserving of equal access to basic human rights.  So far, so good.  Surely we’re setting ourselves on a course to expand more healthcare equity to women.  Surely it must be so.

But, alas, it’s not to be. 

By Donna Smith

I feel something coming on in this country.  Our healthcare reform effort is catching a bit of a cold.  Actually it’s a virus.  The Blue Dog and the Blue Blood flu.  And this flu bug will kill far more people than the swine flu or the bird flu.

Here’s how we got sick…

Way back in the fall during the campaign season, we had great hope for an Obama administration that seemed to understand very clearly that healthcare is a human right.  Then came the declarations of the new administration and the promises from Congress.  We’ll get it done this year, they said.  And because we all know thousands of American lives hang in the balance every month, we believed they meant to end the suffering and many of our leaders probably did intend to act.

But the bailout for Wall Street came first.  Then more money flowed to the financial markets.  And more money still.  The work on healthcare reform was held back a bit as the economy’s failing and ailing was first in line for action.

By Donna Smith

OK, if this wasn’t personal enough just yet for me, it just got a whole lot more so.  And if you think for one instant that in this nation at this point in history and with this popularly elected President and Democratic Congress you will be treated for a heart attack simply because you might die if you are not treated, think again.  And if you think having insurance helps, think some more.

On Friday, my husband was denied a blood test because a computer record from some distant time past and some other state showed he had a $7 balance with LabCorp.  I am not making this up.

My husband had a heart attack this week.  He woke up one morning sweating profusely and with a heart rate dropping.  I watched his color turn first ruddy then ashen, and then he felt as though he was going to pass out.  He would not allow me to call 911 as he slowly began to feel sick to his stomach and he believed his symptoms were digestive rather than cardiac. 

Sing along with the healthcare pirates... brought to you by our Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care partners Consumer Watchdog.

By Donna Smith, community organizer and legislative advocate 

You'd think after eight long and ugly years listening to pompous and wealthy officials slam their versions of social hatred down our gullets, we'd have sent those folks packing for good on January 20, 2009. You'd think as we debate healthcare reform for this nation, we'd have left the arrogance and the flaunting of greed back in the pre-Wall Street bailout days of summer 2008. And you'd think in the People's House, the United States House of Representatives, we'd at least have stood up and said that every single American is deserving of and yes, entitled to, healthcare and protected from going broke in the process of getting care when ill.

You'd think.