The Healthcare Fight: Where the Battle Lines are Drawn

I logged in to the Internet this morning, perused the political news and came upon this link:

Top Blue Dog Boasts: "We Held Bill Hostage," Killed Single Payer

Rep. Mike Ross on Thursday boasted about how his Blue Dog coalition "held the [health care] bill hostage in committee for 10 days" and prevented a single payer plan.

We ensured that if there is a government option, it will be just that -- an option -- and it won't be mandated on anybody. If it had been based on Medicare rates, I can assure you that it would have eventually ended up resulting in a single payer-type system, because Medicare has really good rates, because they're negotiating for every senior in America. Private insurance companies could not have competed with that. And so we would have at the end of the day ended up with single payer. Now we've leveled the playing field, if there is a government option they'll have to go out again and negotiate with providers just like private insurance companies do. That was important to me to insure that we don't end up with some type of single payer system.

What type of legislation did we end up with after the Blue Dogs have done their work on it. You can read it for yourself -- all 1,017 pages of it in the PDF.

Say what? You say you don’t have the time or energy to go through a thousand-page document and you are not a lawyer who can easily decipher legal language? Thankfully here are a couple of summaries that break it down for regular folks:

• Open Congress
• House Committee on Education and Labor

This bill is what being fought over the summer in town hall meetings all over the country before the Congress sets out to vote for it in the Fall. The House version of the public option is where the battle lines are currently drawn.

Single payer? Nah – it’s not even on the table. Strangely enough, buried under all the nasty battles and rhetorical skirmishes over this version of the public option, there were two pieces of legislation that were presented to Congress that dealt with enacting single-payer healthcare earlier this year

• HR 676
• S 703

It is interesting to see the miniscule activity on their Open Congress profiles and their obscurity relative to the widespread coverage on the fight over HR 3200. It is interesting to me how (a) HR 676 and S 703 are really the types of healthcare programs that are truly “universal healthcare” in scope; and (b) many Americans (page 7 of the pdf) seem to be in favor of universal healthcare (page 4 of the pdf) yet there was not a significant public uproar to support the enactment of these bills into law. These bills weren’t even part of the vigorous public debate on healthcare.

The First Lady Talks Health Care

17 Year Old Girl Dies After Insurance Company Interferes With Doctors Care

Another Story of Legal Murder By An American Corporation

This comes just after Bush vetoed an expansion of S-Chip (twice).

This also comes at a time when Americans are close to crowning Hillary Clinton as their next leader...even though she is one of the top recipients of corrupt Lobbying money from the health insurance industry and the drug companies. And she is supposed to reform healthcare? She is supposed to be the "change" candidate?

This is why I believe American voters are politically/intellectually lazy. It's much easier for Americans to be told how to vote (by the Corporate media) than to do their homework and vote for their best interests. This kind of laziness is the reason why the Country is in the hole that it's in now. And with Clinton, the hole will only get deeper. She will sell you out to the Corporations completely....and send you right down the river with no paddle and no life jacket...

I just hope that the people of Iowa are paying attention....

Saturday December 22, 2007
The Guardian

The family of a California teenager plan to sue her health insurer which refused to pay for a liver transplant until hours before and she died on Thursday night.
Her family's lawyer, Mark Geragos, will ask the Los Angeles district attorney to press murder or manslaughter charges against Cigna HealthCare, arguing that the firm "maliciously killed" Nataline Sarkisyan by its reluctance to pay for her treatment. The company reversed its stance after protesters called for a rethink, but the decision came too late.

The 17-year-old from Glendale, California, had been in a coma for weeks after complications following a bone marrow transplant to counter leukaemia.
After the operation, her liver failed and doctors referred her for an emergency transplant. Although she was fully insured and had a matching donor, Cigna refused to pay on the grounds that her healthcare plan "does not cover experimental, investigational and unproven services".

Cigna's rejection on December 11 led Sarkisyan's doctors at UCLA medical centre, including the head of its transplant unit, to write a letter to protest that the treatment which they proposed was neither experimental nor unproven. They called on the firm to urgently review its decision.

In the absence of a response from Cigna, doctors told the Sarkisyan family that the only alternative would be for the family to pay. But they could not afford the immediate down payment of $75,000 (£38,000).

The family, backed by nurses, relatives and Sarkisyan's friends, mounted a protest of 150 people outside Cigna's Glendale offices. "Cigna cannot decide who is going to live and who is going to die," the teenager's mother, Hilda Sarkisyan, told the crowd.

The demo was amplified by an internet campaign orchestrated by the liberal Daily Kos website and other blogs that bombarded Cigna's HQ in Philadephia. In the middle of the rally, a note was handed to Mrs Sarkisyan saying that Cigna had decided to reverse its decision.

"Cigna HealthCare has decided to make an exception in this rare and unusual case and we will provide coverage should she proceed with the requested liver transplant," it said in a statement.
The news drew cheers from the crowd, but they quickly grew sombre when they heard Sarkisyan's condition had deteriorated. A few hours later, her life support was switched off.

"She passed away, and the insurance [company] is responsible for this," Mrs Sarkisyan told the Los Angeles Daily News.

"Why did it take public humiliation for a multibillion-dollar insurance company to force them to provide appropriate medical care?" asked Charles Idelson of the California Nurses Association.

"This is what's wrong with our health system - insurers decide treatment, not doctors."

The protests over Sarkisyan's case point to growing public disenchantment with the healthcare system in America.

Politicians vying to be the Democratic candidate for the presidential race next year have prepared plans for reform to bring the 47 million uninsured Americans into the healthcare net, and to improve terms for those already insured like Sarkisyan.

The subject was given an added boost this summer by Michael Moore's documentary on the state of the American health service, Sicko.

Moore refers to the case of Sarkisyan on his website, under the simple banner: "Justice delayed is justice denied."

Following the teenager's death, Cigna issued another statement yesterday.

"Their loss is immeasurable, and our thoughts and prayers are with them," it said. "We deeply hope that the outpouring of concern, care and love that are being expressed for Nataline's family help them at this time."

The company recently posted figures for its third-quarter performance this year, which showed profits up 22%. Next year it expects to earn an income of up to $1.2bn.

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Also See Coverage from Rawstory

Nurses Association Says Cigna Should Have Listened To Her Doctors and Approved The Transplant

Every American Should See The Film Sicko

I just got home from watching Sicko. I had not been to a movie in about 3 years. Mostly because the movies that have been coming out lately have been lame...and they did nothing to "move" me to want to see them. And it's also because I basically hate to go out. Also, my favorite movie theater in Richmond Heights (inner ring St. Louis burb) has been pretty much destroyed...so I had to cut down on my trips to the show. But when I do go, I now have to drive to a burb (a quieter one) farther out.

Anyway... I had an idea of what Moore was going to cover based on all the reviews and the publicity. But that still didn't prepare me for this one. I will offer no spoilers...but I will say that this film should be required viewing for all Americans, regardless of social/economic status (teens on up). And unlike Fahrenheit 9/11, this film has no political bent.

If anyone wants to know why the Angry Independent is so angry.... go watch the film Sicko. This film sums up quite a bit of my frustration. There are so many things that the film touches on...that I won't attempt to do a review. But it goes beyond healthcare and flirts with the wider questions of how we got here, who the hell are we as a nation, who are we as supposedly civilized human beings, who we are as a so-called "Democracy", and where are our priorities?

I knew of the problems with the healthcare industry, but Moore has a way of giving you a look under the rug to see just how dirty things really are. The health system in the U.S. is basically a criminal racket (like the mob) run by Corporations that are not concerned whatsoever about the best interests of patients. They are primarily concerned with profits. As a result, the U.S. healthcare system has decayed to a pretty dismal level in terms of patient care. It's now pretty much a broken system.

This is the problem with having a critical sector like public health owned and controlled by the private sector. This should have never happened. It should have become a publicly run system a long time ago. Private doctors and private insurers here in the U.S. get cudos and bonuses for cutting off your healthcare and thus protecting (and increasing) the profits of their corporations. The current private U.S. system has created a race to the bottom in terms of patient care, and has motivated health workers to focus on profit over people. This has allowed greed and corruption to take control of the system. This is the nature of private business... which is why it is the wrong framework for providing healthcare.

In contrast, national health systems in other countries focus on prevention and on the needs of the human being, rather than on the profits of a corporation. The systems are not driven by profit. Once you remove the element of private corporate profits- (Healthcare as a business)- the focus is placed on the patient. In the U.S., workers in the private healthcare industry are rewarded with cash bonuses based on the number of people they turn away (many of whom ultimately get sicker and die). They are offered incentives for making you sicker. But in State controlled health systems overseas, healthcare workers (Doctors in the UK for example) are given bonuses based on the number of people who they can make healthier. The focus of a good State run health system (People) is completely the opposite of what the focus is in the current private health system in the U.S. (Profits).

Just imagine if other critical sectors of the society were controlled by private interests instead of public interests. Could you imagine private police forces? This is already happening ladies and gentleman in certain corners of American society. Imagine a situation where private corporations offered police services to cities and counties across the nation. The private corporation would be responsible of setting standards and the concern would be to provide service at the cheapest cost. The city would be concerned with obtaining the lowest bid contract. And the company would have an interest in paying police the least amount possible to provide the service as a way of maximizing profits.

Could you imagine a private FDA? Well guess what.... we already have that by proxy. The FDA is owned and operated by the private drug industry.... they not only have the FDA and the Congress people in their pockets... these Corporations have their own people working in the government....and vice versa, retired government folks go on to work as corporate officers or board members of the companies that they regulate (something that should be outright illegal). This is why we have so many drugs making people sick...and so many drugs flooding the market in general...and at such high prices that many people can't even afford the decent (low risk & relatively safe) drugs that they need.

Could you imagine private soldiers and private militias driven by profits and accountable to no one? This is already happening as well.

Private ambulance companies??? This is an industry that has been around for a while and it is growing. Many communities are turning to private ambulance services because they are cheaper. Cheaper often = ambulance crews who earn just a few bucks above minimum wage. The city of St. Louis uses private ambulance companies to augment the small St. Louis Fire Department fleet. If something major happens in the city of St. Louis...like a 9/11 type mass casualty event... there would not be nearly enough ambulance crews to deal with it (Not even with the St. Louis Metro Mutual Aid System, which is a pretty impressive system). Such a major disaster in St. Louis would be a calamity....because again, the focus is on profits, rather than Public Safety and Health. I recall one case where a man waited over 20 minutes for one of the private ambulances to arrive. The man, a heart attack victim, did not survive. The private ambulance company continues to take ambulance calls for the city.

But the list goes on and on. We are slowly losing critical sectors or institutions to private corporate interests.... Sectors like public health should not be profit driven industries.

I give the film 4 1/2 Stars out of 5. And it should be considered for an Oscar (for a Documentary) in my humble opinion.

That's all for now....