Obama's Health Care Bill Is Enough to Make You Sick
"Obama's numerous betrayals-from his failure to implement serious
environmental reform at Copenhagen, to his expansion of the current wars, to
his refusal to create jobs for our desperate class of unemployed and
underemployed, to his gutting of public education, to his callous disregard
for the rights of workers and funneling of trillions in taxpayer money to
banks-is a shameful list. Passing universal, single-payer nonprofit health
care for all Americans might have delivered to Obama, who may well be a
one-term president, at least one worthwhile achievement. Single-payer
nonprofit health care has widespread popular support, with nearly two-thirds
of the public behind it. It is backed by 59 percent of doctors. And it would
have helped roll back, at least a bit, the corporate assault on the
citizenry."
By Chris Hedges
Truthdig: July 12, 2010
A close reading of the new health care legislation, which will conveniently
take effect in 2014 after the next presidential election, is deeply
depressing. The legislation not only mocks the lofty promises made by
President Barack Obama, exposing most as lies, but sadly reconfirms that our
nation is hostage to unchecked corporate greed and abuse. The simple truth,
that single-payer nonprofit health care for all Americans would dramatically
reduce costs and save lives, that the for-profit health care system is the
problem and must be destroyed, is censored out of the public debate by a
media that relies on these corporations as major advertisers and sponsors,
as well as a morally bankrupt Democratic Party that is as bought off by
corporations as the Republicans.
The 2,000-page piece of legislation, according to figures compiled by
Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP), will leave at least 23 million
people without insurance, a figure that translates into an estimated 23,000
unnecessary deaths a year among people who cannot afford care. It will
permit prices to climb so that many of us will soon be paying close to 10
percent of our annual income to buy commercial health insurance, although
this coverage will only pay for about 70 percent of our medical expenses.
Those who become seriously ill, lose their incomes and cannot pay
skyrocketing premiums will be denied coverage. And at least $447 billion in
taxpayer subsidies will now be handed to insurance firms. We will be forced
by law to buy their defective products. There is no check in the new
legislation to halt rising health care costs. The elderly can be charged
three times the rates provided to the young. Companies with predominantly
female work forces can be charged higher gender-based rates. The dizzying
array of technical loopholes in the bill-written in by armies of insurance
and pharmaceutical lobbyists-means that these companies, which profit off
human sickness, suffering and death, can continue their grim game of trading
away human life for money.
"They named this legislation the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,
and as the tradition of this nation goes, any words they put into the name
of a piece of legislation means the opposite," said single-payer activist
Dr. Margaret Flowers when I heard her and Helen Redmond dissect the
legislation in Chicago at the Socialism 2010 Conference last month. "It
neither protects patients nor leads to affordable care."
"This legislation moves us further in the direction of the commodification
of health care," Flowers went on. "It requires people to purchase health
insurance. It takes public dollars to subsidize the purchase of that private
insurance. It not only forces people to purchase this private product, but
uses public dollars and gives them directly to these corporations. In
return, there are no caps on premiums. Insurance companies can continue to
raise premiums. We estimate that because they are required to cover people
with pre-existing conditions, although we will see if this happens, they
will argue that they will have to raise premiums."
The legislation included a few tiny improvements that have been used as bait
to sell it to the public. The bill promises, for example, to expand
community health centers and increase access to primary-care doctors. It
allows children to stay on their parent's plan until they turn 26. It will
include those with pre-existing conditions in insurance plans, although
Flowers warns that many technicalities and loopholes make it easy for
insurance companies to drop patients. Most of the more than 30 million
people currently without insurance, and the 45,000 who die each year because
they lack medical care, essentially remain left out in the cold, and things
will not get better for the rest of us.
"We are still a nation full of health care hostages," Redmond said. "We live
in fear of losing our health care. Millions of people have lost their health
care. We fear bankruptcy. The inability to pay medical bills is the No. 1
cause of bankruptcy. We fear not being able to afford medications. Millions
of people skip medications. They skip these medications to the detriment of
their health. We are not free. And we won't be free until health care is a
human right, until health care is not tied to a job, because we still have
an employment-based system, and until health care has nothing to do with
immigration status. We don't care if you are documented or undocumented. It
should not matter what your health care status is, if you have a disease or
you don't. It should not matter how much money you have or don't, because
many of our programs are based on income eligibility rules. Until we abolish
the private, for-profit health insurance industry in this county we are not
free. Until we take the profit motive out of health care we cannot live in
the way we want to live. This legislation doesn't do any of that. It doesn't
change those basic facts of our health care system."
Redmond held up a syringe.
"I take a medication that costs $1,700 every single month," she said. "I
inject this medication. It costs $425 a week for 50 milligrams of
medication. I would do almost anything to get this medication because
without it I don't have much of a life. The pharmaceutical industry knows
this. They price these drugs accordingly to the level of desperation that
people feel. Billy Tauzin, the former CEO of [the trade organization of] Big
Pharma, negotiated a secret deal with President Obama to extend the patents
of biologics, this new revolutionary class of drugs, for 12 years. And Obama
also promised in this deal that he would not negotiate drug prices for
Medicare."
Obama's numerous betrayals-from his failure to implement serious
environmental reform at Copenhagen, to his expansion of the current wars, to
his refusal to create jobs for our desperate class of unemployed and
underemployed, to his gutting of public education, to his callous disregard
for the rights of workers and funneling of trillions in taxpayer money to
banks-is a shameful list. Passing universal, single-payer nonprofit health
care for all Americans might have delivered to Obama, who may well be a
one-term president, at least one worthwhile achievement. Single-payer
nonprofit health care has widespread popular support, with nearly two-thirds
of the public behind it. It is backed by 59 percent of doctors. And it would
have helped roll back, at least a bit, the corporate assault on the
citizenry.
Medical bills lead to 62 percent of personal bankruptcies, and nearly 80
percent of these people had insurance. The U.S. spends twice as much as
other industrialized nations on health care, $8,160 per capita. Private
insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume 31 percent of every health care
dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save
more than $400 billion per year-enough, PNHP estimates, to provide
comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.
Candidate Obama promised to protect women's rights under Roe. v. Wade,
something this legislation does not do. He told voters he would create a
public option and then refused to consider it. The health care reform bill,
to quote a statement released by PNHP, has instead "saddled Americans with
an expensive package of onerous individual mandates, new taxes on workers'
health plans, countless sweetheart deals with the insurers and Big Pharma,
and a perpetuation of the fragmented, dysfunctional, and unsustainable
system that is taking such a heavy toll on our health and economy today."
"Obama said he was going to have everybody at the table," Redmond said, "but
that was a lie. Our voice was not allowed to be there. There was a blackout
on our movement. We did not get media attention. We did actions all over the
country but we could not get coverage. We had the 'Mad as Hell Doctors' go
across the country in a caravan, and they had rallies and meetings. If that
had been a bunch of AMA Republican doctors, Cooper Anderson would have been
on the caravan reporting live. NPR would have done a series. Instead, they
did not get much coverage. And neither did the sit-ins and arrests at
insurance companies, although we have never seen that level of activity.
They turned us into a fringe movement, although poll after poll shows that
the majority of people want some kind of single-payer system."
Our for-profit health system is driven by insurance companies whose goal is
to avoid covering the elderly and the sick. These groups, most in need of
medical care, diminish profits. Medicare, paid for by the government,
removes responsibility for many of the old. Medicaid, also paid for by the
government, removes the poor people, who have a greater tendency to have
chronic health problems. Hefty premiums, which those who are seriously ill
and lose their jobs often cannot pay, remove the very sick. If you are
healthy and employed, which means you are less likely to need expensive or
complex treatment, the insurance companies swoop down like birds of prey.
These corporations need to control our perceptions of health care. Patients
must be viewed as consumers. Doctors, identified as "health care providers,"
must be seen as salespeople.
Insurance companies, which will soon be able to use billions in taxpayer
dollars to bolster their lobbying efforts and campaign contributions, know
that single-payer nonprofit insurance means their extinction. And they will
employ considerable resources to make sure single-payer nonprofit coverage
is denied to the public. They correctly see this as a battle for their
lives. And if human beings have to die so they can survive, they are willing
to make us pay this price.
The for-profit health care industry, along with the Democratic Party,
consciously set out to confuse the public debate. It created Health Care for
America NOW! in 2008 and provided it with tens of millions of dollars to
supposedly build a public campaign for a public option. But the organization
had no intention of permitting a public option. The organization was, as Dr.
Flowers said, "a very clever way to distract members of the single-payer
movement and co-op some of them. They told them that the public option would
become single payer, that it was a back door to single payer, although there
was no evidence that was true."
Physicians for a National Health Plan attempted to fight back. It worked
with a number of organizations under a coalition called the Leadership
Conference for Guaranteed Health Care. The group, which included the
National Nurse's Union and Health Care Now, sought meetings with members of
Congress. Flowers and other advocates asked Congress members to include them
in committee debates about the health care bill. But when the first debate
on the health care reform took place in the Senate Finance Committee,
chaired by Sen. Max Baucus, a politician who gets over 80 percent of his
campaign contributions from outside his home state of Montana, they were
locked out. Baucus invited 41 people to testify. None backed single payer.
The Leadership Conference, which represents more than 20 million people,
again requested that one of their members testify. Baucus again refused.
When the second committee meeting took place, Flowers and seven other
activists stood one by one in the room and asked why the voices of the
patients and the health care providers were not being heard. The eight were
arrested and removed from the committee hearing.
Single-payer advocates were eventually heard on a few of the House and
Senate committees. But the hearings were a charade, part of Washington's
cynical political theater. It was the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists
who were in charge. They dominated the public debate. They wrote the
legislation. They determined who received lavish campaign contributions and
who did not. And they won.
"We are talking about life and death, about the difference between living
your life and dying," Redmond said. "And once again it came down to the
Democratic Party trumping the needs of the people."
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