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Next Let's Have a Bailout For Our Broken Health Care System
By Rose Ann DeMoro
Executive Director
California Nurses Association
Now that Washington has moved so quickly on a bailout for Wall Street, we can only wonder what it would take to mobilize the federal government to solve the nation’s health care crisis.
While eyes were focused on the financial meltdown the past week, you had to read deep in the news to find the reports of steep declines in the amount of prescriptions being filled and the number of physician office visits, and the disclosure that 57 million Americans, 43 million of them people with insurance, are struggling with medical bills, the single most common path to bankruptcy.
In homes and hospitals across America, our healthcare system is dying a quiet death.
The millions of Americans who endure their pain away from the spotlight of Wall Street or the glare of TV lights, deserve sweeping systemic solutions as well.
Consider how far a $700 billion federal outlay would go in healthcare. It would provide health insurance for 58.3 million families, or all prescription drug costs in the U.S. for 3.2 years, or all out-of-pocket costs for patients for 2.7 years, or all Medicaid and State Children's Health Program spending for 3.9 years.
Many of the same "free market" think tanks and policy wonks who were cheerleading the taxpayer bailout for banks and stock firms decry any meaningful effort to enact universal health care legislation as an assault on the marketplace.
As more families self-ration care or sink into dwindling savings to pay staggering medical bills, those same voices continue to advocate more deregulation and more commercialized medical care which have so exacerbated the present health care mess
Take John McCain's health plan. The reason for high healthcare costs, he says, is too much coverage and too much care.
McCain's solution is one of the most draconian ever proposed in a political campaign. McCain wants to tax the health care benefits for people who get coverage on the job as an incentive to get workers to drop their employer plans, and buy individual plans, typically with fewer covered services and higher deductibles and co-pays, on the private market.
He expects that the higher out-of-pocket costs would discourage individuals from seeking care, as a key means to cut health spending. That will cut costs, in the most brutal and inhumane way.
McCain also wants to strip away hard won public protections that consumers have won in many states, such as requirements that insurers cover such "frills" as cancer screening, diabetic supplies and minimum maternity stays.
That's the meaning of McCain's recent statement that "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation."
Those words appeared in the American Academy of Actuaries magazine, a direct promise to the insurance industry to help them remove obstacles to greater profits.
Reduced regulations and oversight failed spectacularly on Wall Street. They'd make the healthcare crisis worse, as well.
One enduring lesson of the financial collapse is a new acceptance of government intervention and public oversight from both sides of the political aisle in an arena of perceived broad public interests that have been compromised by corporate abuse and greed. It’s needed –in the financial services industry and in health care too.
An easy starting point is Medicare, the efficient, government-run program our seniors count on. Expanding and improving it to cover most Americans would end the health insecurity of American families, control costs through means like negotiated fee schedules and global budgeting, and put health care choices back in the hands of patients and their doctors, not the insurance industry.
We’ve seen how our national government can spring into action when the financiers and well-connected are in crisis. Congress and the next president must bring the same urgency to protecting the well-being of all Americans endangered by our fractured and failing healthcare system.
Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of the 85,000-member California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
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