Nurses Leader On Healthcare Proposal: "A massive corporate bailout of health insurance industry"

A bailout for the U.S. health-care industry
By Rose Ann DeMoro
Ottawa Citizen
August 25, 2009

Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of the 86,000-member California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, the largest U.S. union of nurses.

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The fractured U.S. healthcare debate, replete with wild distortions of Canada's medicare, must seem incomprehensible to many north of our border.

News images of fabricated "death panels" or traumatized seniors on U.S. Medicare -- a government-funded program -- urging legislators to keep the government's hands "off my Medicare" must seem especially hard to fathom.

Equally puzzling, no doubt, has been the reaction of the administration and many of its allies in Congress whose response to the attacks is to move further away from comprehensive reform.

Entering the year with a Democratic president and strong majorities in both houses of Congress, and a clear public mandate to end our long health-care nightmare, President Barack Obama and Congressional leaders decided to compromise from the outset, and not pursue the most effective reform, Medicare for all.

Gambling they could bring along conservative opponents, the administration and Congressional leaders instead advanced a more limited plan that preserves the role of the insurance industry. Prospects of broader reform were further undermined by some liberal and progressive groups and labour unions, who chose to merely endorse the proposals of the administration and top Congressional Democrats, rather than fighting for a national system like single-payer, which many of them have long endorsed.

Overnight, the left flank was effectively gutted from the beginning of the fight. Most of the pressure has thus come from the right and those who embrace the status quo -- leading to further compromises by both Obama and the leading Democrats.

What's left is a proposal that will force the uninsured to buy private insurance with subsidies for low-income earners and only limited constraints on industry price gouging and care denials that characterize the collapsing insurance-based system.

In sum, it looks like another massive corporate bailout, following the earlier version for the banks, this time for an equally unpopular insurance industry, which will fuel even more public cynicism of the reform process and political system.

Please read the complete article at:

http://www.calnurses.org/media-center/in-the-news/2009/august/a-bailout-for-the-u-s-health-care-industry.html

To residents of all other industrialized countries, terrors over a government role in promoting and protecting the health and safety of its citizenry, and the reluctance of political leaders to effectively respond to these attacks must be especially confounding. Among major nations, only in the U.S. is health care not a fundamental right, but bartered for profit by a maze of health-care corporations. The result is that the U.S. continues to fall far behind other industrial nations in a variety of measurements, from access to care to equality in treatment, and even in the much discussed issue of waiting times for medical care.

While the U.S. spends twice as much as every other nation on per capita health care, there remain more than 45 million Americans with no health coverage and tens of millions more with insurance who are routinely denied medical care because their insurer doesn't want to pay for it.

By the time I went and K & R'ed this OP, industry trolls had dropped the topic to three recs!

<Sigh> Skinner, Earle G, are you getting how awful this crap is! Stop the un rec feature already!

to buy health insurance with government subsidies. If such a bill emerges on the President's desk I hope he sends it back again and again until they get it right. Opening up a new candy store of taxpayers' money for corporate welfare is not acceptable.

It's the old conservative strategy. Cut health care
spending to the point that basic services are
effected. You close down hospitals and surgical
wings as is being done in BC by 'Liberal Premier'
Gordon Campbell. All in the name of balancing the
budget which he threw into deficit with tax cuts.

The result is long wait lists for non critical
surgeries. The incoming president of the CMA
uses this intentional starvation of Health care
Funding as a pretext for saying the Canadian
Health Care system is 'imploding'.

The word imploding is typically used by RWers
in Canada to create the impression that Health
Care costs are out of control when in reality
tax giveaways to the corporate sector reduce
government revenue giving the impression that
health care costs are increasing.

And we all know the conservative solution to
the high cost of social programs: cut funding,
lower taxes. The next step is to privatize social
programs since we all know the private sector is much
more effective in controlling costs than that
bad ol wasteful government.

So Americans are not the only targets of the Corporate
Health Industry and their bosses in the Health Insurance
sector.

The Corporatists smell an historic opportunity opening up.
and are using the Health Care reform issue in the US to
undermine single payer in Canada.

So America you are not alone. Insurance companies have been
the sworn enemies of Government run health care and if they
are allowed to participate in health care reform they will
do everything in their power to sabotage it.

This isn't easy, and as much as Kennedy and Obama prefer S.P. in a more perfect world, Kennedy was making deals along with Baucus. He knew what a lift this was.