Congress Does Health Care
It’s easy to forget that President Jimmy Carter tried but failed to get a
national health program, even though Democrats controlled both Houses of
Congress. Sixteen years later, President Bill Clinton waltzed into the Oval
Office with a Democratic majority in both Houses and put his wife in charge
of creating a health care program. Opponents of the plan demolished and
derided it so thoroughly that the idea of government sponsored health care
was never mentioned again. Until now.
Now it’s déjà vu all over again! But wait, President Obama says it’s
different this time. He’s invited all sorts of people to come to the health
care bargaining table. And he was especially happy to welcome Karen Ignagni
of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the group that ran the misleading
“Harry and Louise” advertisements that helped destroy the Clinton plan.
Obama said he knew things were different when Karen told him, "We want to
work with you.”
Isn’t that what the fox says to the chickens? Isn’t that what the insurance
industry has always said? The insurance companies want to work with the
president and congress to make sure that whatever health care program
emerges, the financing will be run by insurance companies. Financing health
care is what health insurance companies do, it’s their reason for being,
it’s how they make money. They have never, ever worked
with anybody to reduce their profits.
Democratic Senator Max Baucus and his Senate Finance Committee have
jurisdiction over major public health insurance programs and have been
holding hearings. Like Obama, Senator Baucus has invited all sorts of people
to come and testify — representatives from
pharmaceutical groups, insurance companies, HMOs and the like. Oddly enough,
the only group he’s forgotten to invite are those people who favor a
single-payer system, a system which has broad popular support.
Or maybe Senator Baucus’s forgetfulness isn’t so odd. After all, at last
count the Senator had received a total of $3,902,785 from the health
insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, HMOs and the like. Come to
think of it, Max Baucus helped Bush pass the lousy Medicare Part D bill and
voted to prevent Medicare from seeking lower drug prices from pharmaceutical
companies.
As for Barack Obama, he believes it’s too late to construct a single-payer
health system. “People don’t have time to wait,” Obama said. “They need
relief now. So my attitude is let’s build up the system we got, let’s make
it more efficient, we may be over time —- as we make the system more
efficient and everybody’s covered —- decide that there are other ways for us
to provide care more effectively.”
The “system we got” is commercial health insurance and building it up means
getting everybody, one way or another, signed onto a private health
insurance policy. And if it’s difficult to change the system now, it will be
near impossible to change it when insurance companies have enrolled
everybody in the country, have hired even more employees, and have poured
even more money into Congress.
As for government health insurance, Max Baucus says, “That’s an option. It’s
on the table.” Yes, it’s on the table so it can be embalmed and put away for
a long, long time. Max says it’s worth considering as a “fallback” to be
resuscitated only if the commercial health insurers don’t do the job
adequately. Of course, it may take some time, some years in fact, to decide
whether they’re adequate.
Senator Olympia Snowe, the generally moderate Maine Republican, said a
bipartisan group on the Senate Finance Committee is considering a delay of
several years before thinking about a “public option” health insurance plan.
It’s no secret that the health insurance industry doesn’t want competition
from the government.
Big money-making insurance companies, such as Aetna, say they would be at a
disadvantage in a system that included government health insurance that, in
effect, offered Medicare’s lower costs to anybody who signed up for it. And
Medco Health Solutions threatened that such a plan would undo the
cooperative effort to improve national health-care policy. By the way, Medco
spent $990,000 in the first quarter of this year lobbying about health care
information technology, antitrust laws and Medicare rules.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which
compares trends among thirty industrialized countries, reports that the US
spends more per capita on health care than any other nation; the cost is
rising faster in the US than in anywhere else and a greater proportion of
the cost goes to administration than in any other country. And yet,
according to the Commonwealth Fund, we rank lowest among industrialized
countries “in preventing deaths through use of timely and effective medical
care.” The World Health Organization says our health care system rates 37th
in the world in terms of quality and fairness. The health care system now
being patched together in Congress has as its core principle that the
government must NOT provide health insurance and that everybody must be
covered by commercial health insurance. The bed wetters in Congress fear
anything like Medicare but swoon over insurance companies. It’s time they
grew up.
—Gene Mirabelli