Guaranteed Healthcare

Up to the middle of the last century, most Americans could count on good access to generalist primary care physicians with the training and commitment to evaluate and treat their medical problems, whatever they might be. Those days are long gone. The ratio of generalist physicians to specialists in this country reversed from about 80:20 percent in 1930 to 20:80 percent in 1970. Since then we have seen the generalist tradition being carried on by family physicians, general internists, general pediatricians, and osteopathic physicians, but their aggregate numbers today are no more than 30 percent. And that number is falling fast as more medical graduates seek out the higher pay and more attractive life styles of the non-primary care specialties.

By Donna Smith

After this past weekend of horrific storms and tornadoes, it was clearly appropriate for our elected officials to declare a federal disaster in some areas.  With the designation comes some federal money and help for the storm-ravaged areas and residents.  Few would quarrel with our government stepping up and stepping in when so many lives and so many livelihoods have been damaged and lost.  It is the right thing to do, and some suffering will be mitigated.

By Donna Smith

When I saw the cut to the low income energy assistance programs proposed by President Obama in his budget, I knew that meant more energy/utility shut-off notices for people already struggling all over the United States.  The cold day in hell has arrived for many patients and many caregivers who already find their budgets bursting from the costs of healthcare insurance, co-pays, deductibles, and out-of-pocket medical expenses, and their bank accounts strained from the loss of income and unemployment that has marked recent months for millions and millions of people.

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.