With an unusual overflow crowd of more than 200 people, the House Education and Labor Committee, sub-committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions heard testimony from Geri Jenkins, RN, co-president of CNA/NNOC, during its historic convening of an official hearing on single payer healthcare reform yesterday. Jenkins provided members with the RNs' perspective on the failings so rampant in healthcare delivery today and how a single payer system would address those failings.
Nurses, doctors, and patient advocates have long demanded such a hearing and debate, for the simple reason that there is no logic by which you can defend our current system—and political expediency is not a sufficient answer to ignore the strengths of the best solution to our healthcare crisis.
Yesterday's hearing marked an important start to this debate and in the words of Chairman Andrews "This is the beginning of the conversation, not the end." Which is wonderful, because as Nurse Jenkins said, "People talk about evidence based practice, we need evidence based policy."
You can see the hearing here, read her testimony here, or view the press release here. Or Washington Independent wrote it up here. And activist Donna Smith asked who we should listen to: the pompous or the populst.
The opponent to single-payer who appeared at the hearing, David Glatzer, proved more than he set out to. He is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who had the unenviable job of arguing that Canadian healthcare is worse that American, so we shouldn’t look North for inspiration. (Despite what Canadians say.) The Manhattan Insitute? It’s funded by corporations like Cigna, one of the largest health insurers.
This makes the point: only an insurance lobbyist could love our healthcare system.
Or a politician afraid of the insurance lobby.
John Conyers counseled these politicians who have tried to take single-payer off the table, "Now we have Obama himself...(People said) please folks, you cant elect a person of power to the highest most powerful government pos on earth. It’s impossible, get a grip."
We all know how that turned out.
Conyers continued, "Here’s how I’m going to help my President. He is getting some mis-advice about healthcare...We’re at a point now...to take this opportunity as a matter of Constitutional right to healthcare... from the moment they’re born till the moment they leave earth."
And those plans build on preserving the profits on the health insurance corporations who have wrecked our system? "There’s some notion that universal single-payer healthcare is off the table....that raises a very important question. If you take the most popular healthcare reform measure and take it off the table, heavens knows what...you’re left with."
Dr. Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, also criticized the insurer-first policies being proposed in Congress. "The reason our healh system is in such trouble is that it is set up to generate profits not to provide care. To pay for care, we rely on hundreds on investor-owned insurance companies that profit by refusing coverage to the sickest patients and limiting services to the others. And they claim roughly 20 off the top of the premium dollars for profits and overhead."
The Beltway insiders who are tying to take single-payer off the table recognize, in the words of Dr. Walter Tsou, that "It is clear that cost controls mean that someone’s ox gets gored...either the taxpayers, physicians and hospitals, or the private health insurance industry. When some Congressional leaders declare that ‘single-payer is off the table,’ they are in effect saying that health insurance will be protected, leaving the pain to patients, taxpayers and healthcare providers."
I’ll leave you with two highlights from the hearing:
From Rep. Phil Hare, Democrat of Illinois: "If this system isn’t broken I don’t know what broken is."
And, more cheerfully, from Rep. John Kline, Republican of Minnesota: "The reality is that we’re only a few steps away from a single payer system."
Let’s hope he’s right—even if he hopes he isn’t.
Here’s what you can do:
- Go fax the committee chairs of the relevant committees here and demand they consider, debate, and score single-payer reforms; then
- Call the members of the HELP subcommittee here (thanks for the list PNHP!):
Democrats:
George Miller, Chairman CA 7th 202-225-2095
Robert Andrews, Chair Subcommittee HELP, NJ-1st 202-225-6501
David Wu OR-1st 202-225-0855
Phil Hare IL-17th 202-225-5905
John F. Tierney MA-6th 202-225-8020
Dennis J. Kucinich OH-10th 202-225-5871
Marcia Fudge OH-11th 202-225-7032
Dale E. Kildee MI-5th 202-225-3611
Carolyn McCarthy NY-4th 202-225-5516
Rush Holt NJ-12th 202-225-5801
Joe Sestak PA-7th 202-225-2011
David Loebsack IA-2nd 202-225-6576
Yvette Clarke NY-11th 202-225-6231
Joe Courtney CT-2nd 202-225-2076