In 2010, there was finally good news for millions of uninsured children and families when the President and Congress took a major step towards ensuring affordable and comprehensive health coverage for millions of children and families in America. With the passage of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the Affordable Care Act), more than 35 million Americans including more than 95 percent of children will have access to the critical health coverage they need to survive and thrive. Among other important protections, the Affordable Care Act prohibits insurers from denying health coverage to children who desperately need it—those already sick with “pre-existing conditions.” Children like Katie H. in Texas who suffers from severe seizure-like attacks that last as long as 11 hours caused by an undiagnosed neuro-developmental disorder. Katie is also deaf in one ear, has a feeding disorder, and requires daily medication for asthma. In her short life, she has already made numerous visits to the emergency room and had several hospital stays.
When Katie lost her health coverage her father tried to buy private insurance through his employer but he couldn’t afford the nearly $1,000 a month cost, about 30 percent of his salary. No other private insurer would offer the family coverage for Katie due to her pre-existing conditions. Today millions of children like Katie will be able to receive the health coverage they need to grow up healthy or in less pain because of protections in the Affordable Care Act. In our wealthy nation no child should be born at low birthweight, at risk of future health and learning difficulties, because of preventable causes, or die in the first year of life because their mothers did not have adequate prenatal or postnatal care. Undiagnosed, untreated, and poorly managed health and mental health problems increase a child’s chances of falling behind in school or having disciplinary problems and lower a child’s chances of succeeding in and out of school. Without access to comprehensive, affordable health care, more children will do poorly in school at a time when we need to be improving our global competitiveness. Good health at birth and throughout childhood is essential for them as children and as productive future workers. (more…)
By Sen. Bernie Sanders
Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont
Let’s be clear. Our health care system is disintegrating. Today, 46 million people have no health insurance and even more are underinsured with high deductibles and co-payments. At a time when 60 million people, including many with insurance, do not have access to a medical home, more than 18,000 Americans die every year from preventable illnesses because they do not get to the doctor when they should. This is six times the number who died at the tragedy of 9/11 – but this occurs every year.
In the midst of this horrendous lack of coverage, the U.S. spends far more per capita on health care than any other nation – and health care costs continue to soar. At $2.4 trillion dollars, and 18 percent of our GDP, the skyrocketing cost of health care in this country is unsustainable both from a personal and macro-economic perspective.
At the individual level, the average American spends about $7,900 per year on health care. Despite that huge outlay, a recent study found that medical problems contributed to 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007. From a business perspective, General Motors spends more on health care per automobile than on steel while small business owners are forced to divert hard-earned profits into health coverage for their employees – rather than new business investments. And, because of rising costs, many businesses are cutting back drastically on their level of health care coverage or are doing away with it entirely.
Further, despite the fact that we spend almost twice as much per person on health care as any other country, our health care outcomes lag behind many other nations. We get poor value for what we spend. According to the World Health Organization the United States ranks 37th in terms of health system performance and we are far behind many other countries in terms of such important indices as infant mortality, life expectancy and preventable deaths.
As the health care debate heats up in Washington, we as a nation have to answer two very fundamental questions. First, should all Americans be entitled to health care as a right and not a privilege – which is the way every other major country treats health care and the way we respond to such other basic needs as education, police and fire protection? Second, if we are to provide quality health care to all, how do we accomplish that in the most cost-effective way possible?
I think the answer to the first question is pretty clear, and one of the reasons that Barack Obama was elected president. Most Americans do believe that all of us should have health care coverage, and that nobody should be left out of the system. The real debate is how we accomplish that goal in an affordable and sustainable way. In that regard, I think the evidence is overwhelming that we must end the private insurance company domination of health care in our country and move toward a publicly-funded, single-payer Medicare for All approach.
Our current private health insurance system is the most costly, wasteful, complicated and bureaucratic in the world. Its function is not to provide quality health care for all, but to make huge profits for those who own the companies. With thousands of different health benefit programs designed to maximize profits, private health insurance companies spend an incredible (30 percent) of each health care dollar on administration and billing, exorbitant CEO compensation packages, advertising, lobbying and campaign contributions. Public programs like Medicare, Medicaid and the VA are administered for far less.
In recent years, while we have experienced an acute shortage of primary health care doctors as well as nurses and dentists, we are paying for a huge increase in health care bureaucrats and bill collectors. Over the last three decades, the number of administrative personnel has grown by 25 times the numbers of physicians. Not surprisingly, while health care costs are soaring, so are the profits of private health insurance companies. From 2003 to 2007, the combined profits of the nation’s major health insurance companies increased by 170 percent. And, while more and more Americans are losing their jobs and health insurance, the top executives in the industry are receiving lavish compensation packages. It’s not just William McGuire, the former head of United Health, who several years ago accumulated stock options worth an estimated $1.6 billion or Cigna CEO Edward Hanway who made more than $120 million in the last five years. The reality is that CEO compensation for the top seven health insurance companies now averages $14.2 million.
Moving toward a national health insurance program which provides cost-effective universal, comprehensive and quality health care for all will not be easy. The powerful special interests – the insurance companies, drug companies and medical equipment suppliers – will wage an all-out fight to make sure that we maintain the current system which enables them to make billions of dollars. In recent years they have spent hundreds of millions on lobbying, campaign contributions and advertising and, with unlimited resources, they will continue spending as much as they need.
But, at the end of the day, as difficult as it may be, the fight for a national health care program will prevail. Like the civil rights movement, the struggle for women’s rights and other grass-roots efforts, justice in this country is often delayed – but it will not be denied. We shall overcome!
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Over and over again, I hear from Oregonians that we need real health care reform that provides every American with access to quality, affordable care. That is why Congress and President Obama are so focused on this issue.
Of course there are folks in the insurance and hospital industries, from the medical profession, and both political parties who will have different ideas about how to achieve our goal. But I was shocked when I read a memo from Republican strategist Dr. Frank Luntz laying out plans to dismantle any effort to give all Americans access to quality health care. Dr. Luntz, the man who developed language designed to promote preemptive war in Iraq and distract from the severity of global warming, is at it again — this time with a messaging strategy designed to sink our historic opportunity for health care reform.
Let’s be clear: this is not a strategy to push certain ideas about health reform. It is a strategy intended solely to kill reform efforts altogether. In his own words, Dr. Luntz has stated, “You’re not going to get what you want, but you can kill what they’re trying to do.”
Not surprisingly, since the American public is strongly in favor of fixing the broken health care system, the Luntz strategy is predicated on deception.
In his memo, Dr. Luntz lays out multiple ways that opponents of health care reform can trick and manipulate the American public. One strategy that stood out to me is to call efforts to reform our broken health care system a “bailout for the insurance industry.” This is ridiculous. This statement is developed to serve the same interests who stopped at nothing to derail health care reform in the 90′s, who blocked health care coverage for low-income children, and whose top Medicare priority for 15 years has been transferring money from seniors and taxpayers to the insurance industry.
When support for a prescription drug benefit in Medicare became too powerful to ignore, President Bush and his allies created the convoluted system we now have. Rather than simply add a prescription drug benefit to the tried, true, and popular Medicare program as Democrats wanted, they devised a giveaway for insurance companies. For years Dr. Luntz’s clients have virtually abdicated health care policy making to the insurance industry; the last thing it needs is a bailout.
Today though, even the insurance industry is engaged in constructive negotiations about how to repair the health care system. Unfortunately for the vast majority of Americans who support reform, however, Dr. Luntz’s new game plan to stop change is being embraced by leaders in the Republican Party. In a briefing where Dr. Luntz presented his strategy to Republican House members, Rep. Mike Pence from Indiana, the chairman of the House Republican Conference, made it official by saying, “Frank is back.”
So expect a massive misinformation campaign coming to a health care debate near you. Opponents using Dr. Luntz’s doublespeak will argue for a “balanced, common sense approach” to health care but what they really want is to keep the system the way it is. They’ll say that a public plan will not be “patient centered,” but their real goal is to block accessible health care for every American. They’ll say reform will deny Americans “choice” even when every American will be allowed to keep their health insurance and their doctor. They’ll claim that the “quality of care will go down,” while callously ignoring the fact that millions of Americans have no health care at all and millions more are denied the medications and procedures they need.
What we are seeing, yet again, is that while Dr. Luntz and his clients may have excellent polling data, they are utterly clueless about what the American people want.
But, I have to give Dr. Luntz credit on one front: he points out that Republicans need to appear to be on the “right side of reform” or they lose the health care argument. The problem is that you can’t fake support for reform. You’re either for improving the quality and affordability of health care or you’re against it. You’re either for expanding coverage to every American or you’re against it. At the end of the day, no matter what talking points they use, each member of Congress is going to have to vote for or against improving our broken health care system.
With small businesses and families being buried by rising costs, with 47 million uninsured, millions more underinsured and American companies losing ground against their global competitors, it is evident to anyone that our health care system is broken. There are Republicans and Democrats, insurance executives and patient advocates, physicians and hospital representatives all working to meet one of America’s most pressing challenges. We certainly do not all agree on what a reformed health system should look like or how to get there, but there are people on all sides who are negotiating in good faith. The country deserves that debate on the merits, not poll-tested attack lines intended to prolong the broken system we have today.
