The insurance industry is showing its true colors today, with a couple of odious bills premised on the assumption that subsidizing insurance corporations is the way to guarantee healthcare. As we move towardsJune 19th-the National Day of Protest Against Insurance Corporations—this anti-patient legislation reminds us why we fight the big insurers and word for guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model.
Let’s take a look.
Brought to you by the California Nurses Association, National Nurses Organizing Committee, and Leadership Conference on Guaranteed Healthcare.
Meet Virgil Smith, an Assemblymember from Michigan—who has been lucky enough to receive $2600 from Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
Luckily for BC/BS, Smith is chair of the House Insurance Committee, which puts him in the position to do two really big favors for them. First, pass a law taking the most expensive patients off their books and making taxpayers responsible for them, through a high-risk pool. Great business plan for them. Smith is also pushing a new law allowing for a greater rate band...in other words, charge the elderly and sick more (even though they might eventually end up in the risk pool.)
In a widely-criticized move, Smith recently changed the composition of a conference committee working out differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill. The upshot? No legal requirement for open meetings, meaning that the legislators, all paid by BC/BS, get to meet in secret and produce the final bill.
He argues: '"Having too many people in the room will add to the confusion," he said Wednesday.'
Meanwhile, Senators Bob Bennett and Ron Wyden, pushing their bill to mandate every person purchase for-profit insurance products. HILARIOUSLY, their argument now is that healthcare reform has to be...wait for it...bipartisan. Because they both take tons of money from insurance corporations, surely they can reach a compromise, right?
They wrote a letter to the Wall St. Journal today, talking about why their proposals are good for the paper’s target audience of business execs. On that one point they’re probably right. On other points? Can’t be.
Consider this:
We believe that every American should have affordable, private health insurance.
First of all, that is impossible. By definition, we cannot have insurance that is both affordable and private. Private insurance corporations disappear about one-third of care dollars they come into contact with...to overhead, profits, bureaucracy, etc. It will never work, whereas every other industrialized democracy has affordable,PUBLIC insurance.
This line, well, gets credit for chutzpah:
We don't want government-run health care. Our bill reinvents government run programs like Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program by exposing them to marketplace forces.
Hate to say it, but I will: this argument is fundamentally un-American. Medicare is the second-most beloved public program in America, behind Social Security, and that’s obviously what they’re talking about—handing even more of Medicare over to insurers, who provide the similar services as Mediare, only costing 13% more.
Finally, this has the whiff of desperation:
Today is not 1994. The political climate has changed, the health-care crisis has worsened and Americans are no longer looking for a solution; they are demanding one. The only way we can meet that demand is working in a bipartisan effort, incorporating both Republican and Democratic principles.
The Republican principles here are based on the idea that big businesses should prosper. That value has no place in a healthcare system that is set up to treat the vulnerable among us.
The American people know the solution, since we see it in Canada, France, Gernmany, Taiwan, and elsewhere: replace these insurance corporations with non-profit, universal coverage. It is time for a solution.