Health Care, HR676, Single-Payer, WTF?
Ladkiddo’s post below got me doing a little research. The difference between the two health-care reform groups she talks about are:
PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Care Program): want HR 676 — universal, national, single payer, grassroots
Chant over at DragonFlyEye questions the requirement of single-payer (although he does note it’s way cheaper bang for your healthcare buck, as Canada has shown):
Single payer is not a panacea. It is a good tool for efficient payment but is only one tool. We also need to develop enough political power to regulate the pharmaceutical company prices, do preventive care, and force some planning on the market. And maybe we should address the absurd salaries of doctors (or just import cheap doctors from overseas- that ought to make the Thomas Friedman adherents apoplectic).
Of course we’d be better off if we got rid of insurance companies. We should also nationalize the energy industry and change our entire cheap food agriculture system. But these goals will require a fundamental shift in the current power dynamic and it don’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon.
Then again, he wrote this over a year ago, and I wonder if he may have changed his mind, given the change election we just witnessed, along with the economic chaos we’re descending into.
My gut feel is, I can’t trust the insurance industry to do the right thing. They are private, for-profit companies that make more money the more they deny healthcare to people. It is a fundamental conflict of interest. I’m assuming that any attempts at seriously regulating them will be undercut and circumvented by the vast array of corporate lawyers and lobbyists that they can afford since they’re denying us care.
Thoughts, anyone?
Ladkiddo here. I thought it was important to give you a brief summary of NHI as proposed by HR676 as per their website:
What Is National Health Insurance (NHI)?
To begin with, it is NOT “Socialized Medicine”, far from it in fact. Also, it does not mean that our medical system will be taken over by the government and run like the post office as many of our opposition friends would mistakenly have you believe.
Basically, House Resolution (H.R.) 676, the “New Expanded Medicare” bill now in sub-committee in the House of Representatives simply creates a new and far more functional “single payer” method of paying for medical services while leaving the medical system itself completely alone and intact. This will eliminate the hundreds of complicated and redundant payment plans currently imposed on the system by private “for profit” health insurance companies and save literally BILLIONS of dollars every year by eliminating such wasteful duplication. This will allow your doctors offices and hospitals to function much more efficiently and serve your needs much more effectively as well. Just imagine what a huge benefit this will be!
Taxes: We all know that nothing of any real value is ever free, but if you think of the taxes that will be required to support national health insurance as simply a lower cost alternative to the staggering private health insurance premiums that most of us already have to pay but which will be totally eliminated under the new system, then it becomes immediately clear that this could be a really good deal after all!
Related posts:
- Live streaming of Single Payer Health Care Option hearings, today
- Lack of support for Universal, Single-payer, Health Care reform will cost Senators dearly.
- Single-payer, Single-payer, Single-payer
- Quebec, Canada: Single-Payer, Low Cost, Low Waiting Time Healthcare - Updated
- Bill Moyers Journal discusses Single Payer
Not sure I favor the idea, but have heard some of the HCAN supporters talk about the possibility of allowing a national system to exist side-by-side with private insurers (which would cost more, due to both profit and also lack of scale), at least for a while. That way, nobody can claim that they were “forced into” a government-run plan. There will have to be some form of transition, and running the old and the new systems side-by-side for awhile would allow people to see for themselves why NHI is preferrable to for-profit insurance…
This discussion is about the efficacy of public policy proposals. Nobody can deny that single payer is the best public policy proposal for creating an efficient payment system. Big deal. I can rattle off a dozen public policy proposals that would make the US a better place to live. So what. It doesn’t mean anything if we aren’t powerful enough to make it happen. Here in Rochester the Interfaith Health Care Coalition has been working for Single Payer for several years. The group is facilitated by Sister Beth Levally, an aid to Louise Slaughter. New York is the bluest of the blue states. Louise is one of the most liberal Congressmembers. Yet the IHCC has not been able to get Louise to sign on. And so there you have it. That is the state of our power to get single payer. We can’t even get Louise on board. Our healthcare system kills six times more people than 9/11 every year. If we don’t think clearly about power and public policy then we haven’t done shit to protect those families from losing loved ones.
SOMETHING is going to happen in congress around healthcare. But it isn’t going to be single payer. You can either be at the table using the bits of power we do have to move the public policy 10 degrees to the left or you can be outside the room holding placards for single payer.
That’s how I see it. Unless the single payer movement can sign on the congress members and senators in the most densely democratic state in the nation, then I must ask why are we spending our energy on something that we can’t make happen. We might as well be calling for nationalization of the oil industry. It’s just as likely to happen.
Jon - welcome -
I’m sure you saw this post - We do have Congressman signed on. There is a kick off next week to redouble efforts for HR-676. As Massa says in this vid - it won’t be pure single payer but…
http://rochesterturning.com/2009/02/19/massa-will-be-national-co-chair-of-hr-676/
Yes, we have Congressmembers signed on. But we don’t have all of them. And we don’t even have a majority of them. And we don’t have EITHER Senator. So if NY can’t deliver it’s delegation for Single Payer then how do we get the numbers to pass legislation on the hill? Witness the stimulus fight.
Remember, Single Payer aims to drive a dagger through the heart of one of the most powerful industries in the history of western capitalism. That’s a fine goal. But let’s hold ourselves accountable for our activism. How are we doing? Let’s be honest about assessing our momentum.
I hear some people say that we should go into negotiations with the biggest demand possible. That way we won’t start with a compromise. But that is naive about how these negotiations actually happen. Not everybody get’s to the table. And if you aren’t at the table you have no impact on the resultant public policy.
Positive polls and union local endorsements for single payer are good but they don’t always get you to the table. And by the way, there’s a difference between locals signing on and the national union sign-ons. It’s about resources and deployment of numbers. The national gets you that, and without the national all you’ve got is a piece of paper from a local. It isn’t insignificant but we need to be honest about what cards we have to put on the table.
Grassroots organizers always go into battle with a winnable demand and a backup demand (plan B).
Welcoming competition between Medicare and private insurers is the best approach. Let people have a choice between the two and make their decision based on their own experience. Edwards proposed this during the ‘08 primary. We all know that privatization isn’t a panacea (consider the war in Iraq, 401Ks/Madoff/Stanford and Fanny Mae/Mac).
Beginning the discussion with a single-payer proposal makes it easy to sell the well-documented and common sense advantage of a government program.
By coming in with a muddled combination of private, employer-based and federal workers systems you can confuse everyone and discourage debate on the real issue, which is: “Is there a working model in the US for providing our own healthcare coverage which is more efficient than that of for-profit vendors?” Guess what approach the insurance lobbyists will promote. Unfortunately Obama has signed on to that one too.
How are we doing? well - I think that for the past several years- health care reform wasn’t going anywhere. Then last November there was an election but again - Washington power base didn’t change until late January and it was consumed by the economic stimulus.
Of course, it doesn’t help that Health care fell by the wayside with a still unfilled Cabinet position.
The point here of course is that Healthcare reform is coming back to the table.
Yes winnable demands and plan B but that also doesn’t mean starting from a position of weakness by giving away critical demands.
Take Louise - why would she even listen to HR 676 when for the past several years is was not going to be passed - Heck it wasn’t going forward.
That is not the case now.
If I understand Jon’s point he is saying there are no clean hands in politics–no perfect moral purity. But in any situation of compromise you also have to ask if what you are getting is good enough to warrant the compromise.
I’m not so sure at this point that it is.
Maybe but, I see this coupled with the other comments more of a take what we can get with regards to healthcare.
My point earlier was our electeds were not ready for healthcare and single payer didnt’ have a chance to be passed. Now that the electeds have changed that is not the case.
Why would anyone say that the single payer coalition is not at the table? The single payer coalition is firmly seated at the table. Through grassroots feedback solicited on http://www.change.org, the 20 million member single payer coalition Healthcare-NOW!–www.healthcare-now.org–(comprised of Physicians for a National Health Program, Progressive Democrats of America and California Nurses’ Association), created a seat at the table for themselves–which seems neither naive nor ineffective.
Furthermore, on Friday, February 20th’s 1370 Connection with Bob Smith, Congresswoman Louise Slaughter admitted to only recently viewing Michael Moore’s documentary “SiCKO”, and was clearly moved by what she saw in the movie, as she said that “she could not get it out of her head”. In politics, it can take as little as one powerful member of Congress, like Rep. Slaughter, championing a bill to create a sea change of support for the legislation. If the single payer coalition continues to play its cards right, it is within the realm of possibility for Congress to enact health care reform in a way that leaves HR 676 substantively intact.
The single payer coalition has a concrete plan in place for signing members of Congress onto HR676, via the Leadership Conference on Guaranteed Health Care (www.guaranteedhealthcare4all.org). By contrast, HCAN, the coalition in favor of an incremental approach to health care reform, currently has no bill before Congress. So of the two coalitions, it would appear that the single payer group is way ahead in the game.
[...] agree that we should keep the pressure on Schumer and others. I’ve previously voiced my concerns about HCAN’s compromise positions on single-payer. Check out the comments on that one– [...]