Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen is a potential Secretary of Health and Human Services. His selection would be a disaster for American patients.
Former insurance company executive and Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen (D) ripped patient advocates like me today:
"advocacy groups don’t matter nearly as much as the pharmaceutical groups, the hospitals, the doctors’ groups. There’s a lot of very powerful interest groups that will play in this thing."
Let us not forget that it is Phil Bredesen, and his former colleagues in the insurance industry, who are a major part of the problem. It is Phil Bredesen’s former colleagues at insurance companies who are forcing patients to endure substandard treatments as a cost saving measure. It is Phil Bredesen’s former colleagues in the insurance industry who randomly issue bogus denials for life-saving treatments. People like Phil Bredesen, who got rich by helping to establish the flawed modern HMO system, should be kept as far away as possible from up-coming health care reforms.
Implicit in Bredesen’s statement is that doctors support the status quo. As a patient, I’ve talked with a fleet of doctors–they all ask what I do, and most offer their opinions on the health care system–over the past four years. None of them are happy with the current system. They feel that they don’t make enough to cover the extra expenses that come with 70 hour weeks. They feel they aren’t given enough freedom to treat patients by insurance bureaucrats, and that they waste time which could be used saving lives fighting with insurance bureaucrats.
The interests of doctors and prescription drug companies are divergent too. Doctors want their patients to get healthy and return to their normal lives as quickly as possible. Drugs like Remicade, which cost tens of thousands of dollars per year, are often precluded from use in working class patient populations. Doctors who take their oaths seriously believe they have to provide the best possible treatment regardless of a patient’s finances. These doctors spend countless hours tracking down charities and organizing help for their patients. They frequently say they feel more like social workers than doctors.
Physician dissatisfaction with the health care status quo Governor Bredesen represents is reflected in Connecticut. There, a group of doctors filed a class action lawsuit alleging that AETNA and CIGNA conspired to keep reimbursements to doctors low, and out of pocket expenditures by patients high. Doctors in the Northeast appear to be sick of an insurance system which takes and takes in order to pay hundred million dollar salaries to Bredesen’s fellow Insurance Company CEOs, but never gives anything of substance back.
As we move forward with health insurance reform, we need to build a better system. We must put power back into the doctors. We must enable patients to fully fight their diseases by eliminating the requirement that patients fight with insurance companies to get the treatments they need to get healthy again. And we must reduce the number of of uninsured Americans.
Phil Bredesen is ill-suited to handle any of these tasks. He made his fortune founding one of the nation’s largest for-profit insurance companies. As Governor, he slashed Medicaid funding and cut off the dignity of care for many Tennesseans. Now, he’s saying that his corporate buddies in the insurance industry and the prescription drug industry matter more than the concerns of doctors and patients. With his statements today, Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen proved he’d a HHS Secretary who puts patients last.
H/T Kos.