PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Healing the Health Care System
by Bret Grote Saturday, May. 28, 2005 at 8:24 PM
groteb@wlu.edu (email address validated) 412-401-2069 1190 Windmill Lane

A brief 2000 word piece on the town hall meeting in Aliquippa last Saturday, dealing with health care, the crisis and proposed solution.

Healing the Health Care System

A Conscientious Congregation

These stories need to be heard because people
will recognize themselves in them.

—American Statesman, Dennis Kucinich

On a cloudless Saturday morning, May 21 of 2005, the Croatian Club in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania hosted a packed room of union workers and labor leaders, hospital care givers and physicians, elected officials and other assorted conscientious human beings who were gathering to participate in a town hall meeting of the sort being organized in Rochester, Birmingham, Chicago, Boston, Fresno and other cities throughout the country in the coming weeks and months. The event, chaired by the honest congressman Kucinich (OH), was organized by a coalition of unions, community groups and the Campaign for a National Health Program Now. For over two hours personal testimonials were heard regarding the egregious effects the mounting health care crisis is inflicting on the elderly, organized and non-union workers, the unemployed, young people, business interests, those in the health care profession. Pharmaceutical companies, the insurance industry, HMO’s, credit and banking interests and their champions in the media, legislature and executive branches were conspicuously absent.


Tense with emotions emanating from protracted over-exposure to needless suffering, the voices of those neglected, forsaken and forgotten by the dominant institutions of society struck a deep and resonant chord within the congregation, repeatedly bearing witness to the systemic and deliberate iniquities inherent in the structure of the health industry through barely suppressed tears of rage and fury. A mother of a heroin addict, the least served by the system and arguably the most in need, told how her daughter went through six years of inefficient treatment at exorbitant costs before finally receiving a psychological root-cause diagnosis. A nurse of 40 years spoke of the problems of overpriced drugs, “And the other thing is, prescription drugs are a major, major problem for senior citizens. The doctors come in, and they prescribe drugs for these patients. I give discharge instructions to these patients; and I hear them say, time after time after time, ‘Which one's the most important?’ ‘What do you mean, 'Which one's the most important?' The doctor ordered all of them.’ They have to choose between which drugs they can afford to take and which drugs they can't afford to take. And it happens on a daily basis.” Maria Somma, a Steelworkers organizer testified, “The irony of the situation is . . . these are health care workers who work in hospitals; and they cannot get health care from their employer. Hospital workers, health care providers cannot receive health care in this country. That is a shame, and that is a crisis.” After her husband’s company eliminated their health care plan, Carol McMann told of their travails trying to access a basic human right as they switched insurers at least four times in the very recent past due to private providers abandoning the insurance industry, or drastically cutting if not eliminating prescription drug coverage altogether. “My husband worked his life away for absolutely nothing in the U.S. of A. We no longer have any money for gifts for family, no longer take vacation, no longer take day trips or get out of the house,” she said.


Nonetheless, this convocation was hardly convened for hand-wringing and sympathy-sharing. Rather, it represented a conscious and deliberate opening salvo in the burgeoning process of organization, education and consciousness-raising necessary for identifying the problem and articulating a solution. The proposed vehicle for instituting an equitable and humane health system is H.R. 676, or the United States National Health Insurance Act (USNHI), a piece of legislation introduced by Rep. Conyers (MI) in 2003, co-sponsored at the time by Kucinich, Jim McDermott (WA) and Donna Christensen (VI). Although thirty-three congressional representatives now co-sponsor the bill it seems safe to assume that only through an extensive and prolonged grassroots campaign at local, state and national levels will the will of the electorate be able to impose itself in the Beltway. Before discussing the USNHI it will help to sketch some of the symptoms of a system in terminal decline for more and more people every minute of every day.

Some Contours of the Crisis

A recent article in the March issue of Z Magazine (http://zmagsite.zmag.org) by Jack Rasmus, “A Medical Mount St. Helens,” provides sobering trends regarding the erosion of access to comprehensive, affordable health care. The official number of Americans lacking any health coverage whatsoever has now climbed past the 46 million mark, soaring at a rate of 1.5 million each year between 2000 and 2002 with 2.7 million more left to fend for themselves in the past 18 months. Additionally some 37 million more went without health care for at least part of the year. Over 65 million go without prescription drug coverage of any kind. The reasons are far from mysterious. After one of the most expensive lobbying offenses in Congressional history was launched by the dominant insurance and multinational pharmaceutical companies in conjunction with private hospital chains and medical equipment providers the Clinton administration’s National Health Insurance plan was gutted and left for dead on the White House lawn, offering as a substitute, the watered-down and essentially empty Managed Health Care plan. Rasmus writes, “Despite Managed Care, health care costs since 1999 have consistently risen on average more than 10 percent each year. Premiums paid to health insurers have been rising even faster since Bush took office, in the double digit range every year, and in the last 3 years between 13-14 percent each year on average.”


Blue Cross-Blue Shield, covering one of three people in the U.S. with health insurance, reported a doubling of profit margins in 2003, raking in an $8 billion surplus to add to its $32 billion pre-existing bounty, hiking premiums by 10-16% in the same year. Furthermore, for over a decade the legal pharmaceutical cartel has been the single most profitable industry in the country, surpassing even the banking and credit industries that garner a substantial portion of their own profits price-gouging from the health industry.
Anybody who applies five minutes of thought to the issue will understand well that as CEO’s and stockholders, an overwhelming minority of the populace, reap 10-11 figure profits by constantly raising costs (for unspoken reasons of ideology) access to care will erode with a correlate rise in negative health standards such as premature deaths, estimated to exceed 57,000 per annum in a 2003 study conducted by the National Committee for Quality Assurance. Health Care accounts for more than 15% of the United States’ Gross Domestic Product ($1.79 trillion), well surpassing by 4-8% the rest of the industrialized world, which nonetheless consistently rates higher virtually across the board in health standards than the U.S. The United States stands alone as the only industrialized country without some form of socialized medicine. The situation has deteriorated so quickly and relentlessly that an October 2004 study ranked the U.S. tied for 36 out of 52 countries in the category of infant mortality, with Cuba and Slovakia, just below Malaysia. That so-called ‘Third World’ conditions continue to make inroads into far and away the richest society of its size the world has ever seen is one of the largest and least reported scandals of the modern era.
Why do corporate interests insist on increasing costs at a rate far exceeding inflation or wage increases? A Kaiser Health Insurance Survey from Sep/Oct ’04 sheds some light on this inexplicable phenomenon. 76% of those polled would pay more to maintain the same level of coverage, while only 19% would accept restricted coverage in order to maintain their current premium. In other words, more and more health insurance consumers have a gun to their heads, forced to sacrifice their money or their life, agonizing over whether to spend on housing, food or drugs.
Recent legislation facilitated by the Bush Regime (with sufficient support for passage from the Democratic side of the Property Party) unequivocally promises to exacerbate the crisis. The Medicare bill of 2003, far from providing drug benefits for a modest co-payment, will require seniors who pay $5,100 in drug costs annually to pay out of pocket $3,600 of that on top of the average premium of $420 per year. According to Consumer Reports magazine the majority of seniors will be spending more on drugs in 2007 when the alleged benefit fully goes into effect. Unsurprisingly, 10,000-15,000 AARP members resigned from the organization in disgust and outrage in the couple of weeks after passage of the ‘reform’ package that found overwhelming favor from the same elements that terminated Clinton’s ‘centrist’ solution with extreme prejudice.
The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Prevention Act of 2005, signed into law on April 20, was the culmination of yet another lucrative and lubricated lobbying campaign. Dozens of consumer, law, religious, labor and community groups were unable to ward off passage of a bill that they had fought tooth and nail against for over a decade. According to the New York Times, “The main lobbying forces for the bill—a coalition that included Visa, MasterCard, the American Bankers Association, MBNA America, Capital One, Citicorp, the Ford Motor Credit Company, and the General Motors Acceptance Corporation—spent more than $40 million in political fund-raising efforts and many millions more on lobbying efforts since 1989”(March 9, 2005). The rhetorical window-dressing for this legalization of debt-slavery is that the bill will prevent fraudulent defaults on debts that can in fact be financed or were accumulated without any intention of repayment. Yet even highly suspect analysis provided by the finance industry finds only 10% of all bankruptcies filings result from abuse of the system. Independent analyses put the figure at 3%.
What accounts for the remainder of bankruptcy filings? An article penned by Dan Frosch in The Nation (2/21/05), “When Getting Sick Means Going Broke: Your Money or Your Life,” cites a bankruptcy study published on February 2 in the medical policy journal Health Affairs showing a skyrocketing 2,200% increase in medical-related bankruptcies occurring between 1981-2001 that far outpaced the 360% growth in personal bankruptcies from the same period. And the middle class suffers 90% of all medical bankruptcies. Job loss and catastrophic medical costs are the two leading causes of bankruptcies, which will now be far more difficult to file as a result of this bill unless ‘you’ happen to be a corporation, on whose behalf the bill still permit default on pensions along with other discrepancies capable of being exploited by the millionaires and billionaires who own and operate the country as if it were their personal playground.

Catalyzing an Overdue Offensive

Beware the small man with the big idea.

—Canadian Proverb

The United States National Health Insurance Act would establish a publicly financed, privately operated single payer health care system, expanding and upgrading the current Medicare program so as to provide each and every citizen access to the highest quality care and service regardless of employment, income, or health status. Physicians for a National Health Program (http://www.pnhp.org) estimate that over $286 billion would be saved annually due to the elimination of the wasteful bureaucracy and marketing costs which currently account for over 25% of every dollar that goes into health care without providing any medical benefits whatsoever. The program would cover all necessary medical services, including primary care, inpatient care, outpatient care, emergency care, prescription drugs, durable medical equipment, long term care, mental health services, dentistry, eye care, chiropractic, and substance abuse treatment. Patients would have their choice of physicians, providers, hospitals, clinics and practices without the government dictating the practice of medicine in any way. Government would merely facilitate the financial logistics, running an overhead of approximately 3% (like the current Medicare program) as opposed to the average 18% administration overhead of the profit driven insurance industry.


Conversion to a non-profit system would be phased in over a 15 year period through the sale of U.S. treasury bonds that will account for real estate, buildings and equipment but not loss of private profits. Clerical workers currently working in administrative roles would have first priority in retraining and job placement, putting paid to the false warnings that such a systemic transformation would lead to massive layoffs. The program would be funded by modest adjustments to the tax code that would be offset for the overwhelming majority of people and employers who will no longer be held hostage by the private insurance companies. At the meeting in Aliquippa estimates were given of a reduction in costs for 95% of Americans. More details on how the program would be run, information on how to defend the proposal from the deceitful attacks posited by corporate interests, and resources for organization and education can be found on the Campaign for a National Health Program Now website: http://www.cnhpnow.org.


The potential catalyzing effects of the grassroots campaign needed to bring this intelligent, sane and compassionate idea to fruition are manifold and of vital importance to constructing the foundations for a democratic society based on popular participation. For starters it will expose the shameless hypocrisies of the ‘family values’ politicians, assuming of course that antisocial greed not be counted as a virtuous tenet of kinship affiliations. Unions will gain breathing room to assert their rights as rising health care costs have been undermining collective bargaining efforts and instigating strikes at an alarming rate. Furthermore, USNHI will provide a solid platform electing new, community-centered officials to office while simultaneously offering something to the 40% or so of the electorate who see no point in voting because they correctly understand that the vast majority of candidates fail to take their concerns and circumstances into account. This constituency (mistakenly labeled apathetic; the correct word is disempowered) represents the greatest force for enabling positive transformation in the country. Elite interests count on them not to participate and seek to discourage active engagement by consistently pursuing an agenda that negates their needs in favor of radical corporate activism. Empowering people with an opportunity to work collectively for tangible improvements in their communities and workplace may even give rise to the dangerous and seditious notion that government should be run by and for the people who comprise the body politic.

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