Guaranteed Healthcare

Some patient stories just fill me with anger and shame.  This one -- from Iowa -- is one of those stories.  By now, we all know the plot.  Patient has insurance.  Patient gets sick.  Patient cannot afford to keep insurance or find insurance that will cover illness.  Patient goes without coverage.  Providers demand up-front payment for cancer care.  Patient calls on friends, family and community to help.  Patient grovels.  Cancer spreads.  Patient grovels.

Ah, the mid-western values.  This is Iowa.  My mom was born in Boone during the Great Depression.  Iowa is the place many think of when we think of those salt-of-the-earth, kind and hard-working Americans with traditional, perhaps even faith-based values.  A kind and gentle place with a no-nonsense work-ethic.  Iowa.  Fields of farmers' dreams and the stuff of mid-America at its finest.

So, why in Iowa should we allow Deb, (continued below)

By Donna Smith

So, all the great fanfare and all the king’s horses.  The great and almighty U.S. Senate has spoken.  I will have to buy private health insurance – forever, amen.  The defective product that has left me wanting for real healthcare for all of my adult life is now a step closer to being the law of the land.

A lump of Christmas coal all polished up with sparkling rhetoric. 

Here’s what the Chicago Tribune said this week, and I agree: 

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 

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. 

Marilyn Clement,  June 30, 1935 – August 3, 2009

By Donna Smith

August 3, 2009 – Marilyn Clement, national coordinator for Healthcare-NOW, died this morning.  We mourn her loss.  She was an organizer for the ages, a friend, a mentor, and as of today, an angel.

Behind she leaves legions of single-payer healthcare activists who may not even know her name or her background or her struggle but who carry with them her passion for a just world where every human life is valued and protected and honored no matter his or her station in life, gender, color of skin, or name recognition potential.  In a world gone mad for celebrity and status, Marilyn was a woman of peace and compassion for all.

I first met Marilyn when SiCKO premiered in New York City.  Then just weeks later when I introduced the film to audiences at the Atlanta Social Forum, it was Marilyn who took me across town to a hotel room where Laura Flanders had set up a radio studio to broadcast all the action at the event.  Marilyn brought me to be on the radio show with her – and with Atlanta’s Dr. Henry Kahn.   Diane Shamis of Progressive Democrats of America will recall that interview too.

By Donna Smith

There were no reports in the media Tuesday about the four United States Senators who voted for a bit of sanity today in the midst of the complexity of the race to reform healthcare in the United States.  Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio all voted to allow individual states the right to pass and implement publicly funded, privately delivered single payer healthcare programs, if they should choose to do so.

But the other Senators on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee didn’t want to support the amendment to the health reform legislation.  Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico was perhaps the most vocal in his opposition to the state single payer enabling amendment as he argued that he felt those Americans happy with their coverage through private or some of the public plans would not want to face a change to a single payer system.

By Donna Smith 

Ah, Independence Day.  We Americans love our freedom and our freedom to choose.  But when it comes to our healthcare system, it seems we’ve forgotten that our choices are most limited and our freedom most restricted under the broken, for-profit, private health insurance model that has been outdoing itself on greed and sleaze for decades.

Kids, women, all non-white ethnic groups, seniors, sick folks – all of these groups have been among those discriminated against by the high-cost, high-profit U.S. healthcare system.  Periodically when the abuses became just too egregious politically and socially, our government would struggle to put programs in place to address the disparities and quiet the storm.  But profits must be paid under this system, and Americans are not free to choose either their doctors or their treatments when the bottom line is the top priority.

When I wrote a piece earlier this week about a $7 laboratory charge holding up blood work for my husband, I did not expect the outpouring of stories from other Americans who have experienced similar problems over small medical bills.  From coast to coast and in every state of insurance, un-insurance, under-insurance and in poverty, in middle income or in wealth, it seems many of us have had our medical care interrupted and sometimes prevented by providers holding many of the keys to the kingdom of our healthcare system.  Heart attack, cancer, bleeding disorders, stroke – none of these potentially life-threatening conditions have prevented patients from being asked for money before being treated.

Pictured above:  The Wilkes family of Colorado (read on to learn more)

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. 

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.