More Health Insurance Will Not Solve Our Health Care Woes

More insurance will not solve our health-care woes
by Deborah Burger:
Deborah Burger, a registered nurse, is a member of the Council of Presidents of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.

Providence Journal
May 28, 2008

YOU CAN TELL how far off track the discussion on health-care reform has gone when the idea of forcing everyone to buy corporate health insurance is sold as “universal health care.”

Compelling people to pay private insurance premiums is not “universal health care.” Especially when you let those insurers continue to charge as much as they want and do nothing to stop the all too routine practice of denying medical treatment or blocking access to specialists or diagnostic tests because the company doesn’t want to spend the money.

To insurers, health care is a commodity, like lumber or pork bellies. They make money by increasing the number of people, who they can get to pay premiums while containing their costs by restricting what they pay out in claims, or what they call “medical loss ratio,” a sure sign that’s not their priority. And their ever-rising charges force many to stare at financial ruin or self-ration care they need, as Karen could probably attest.

Rewarding those same insurers with millions of more customers will not change their behavior. It merely entrenches a dysfunctional system and distorts the role of government, which should be to protect people, not act as an insurance agent..

Please read the entire article at:

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_berger28_05-28-08_91938RS_v9.39d7fc6.html

more insurance is definitely NOT the answer. Paying corporations that only pretend to protect is not help for people with medical problems.

This article shows why the California Nurses' Association is one of the last examples of a true and great union, fighting for the people who work in the industry, for their patients, and fighting to educate the people of the United States as to what is happening here--this is why that creepy "D"LC group SEIU is trying to kill the nurses' union.

If any corporate-insurance schemes pass--and Clinton and Obama are the same on this issue--it will becoame just like mandatory auto insurance: forced coverage by an industry that is itself not regulated for what it must provide, steeply rising rates, "penalties" and "fees" for every God-damned thing they can dream up, reduced coverage, on and on... Things are so bad, with huge premium hikes if you do make any claim, that people typically do not claim any damage to their vehicles, pay for it themselves, then go on paying the insurance premuims. Big fucking help that law was. It was only made law to stop lawsuits, of course, never to help, or cover, us.

The same thing always happens whenever the medical industry wins a big victory and mandates coverage, with no regulations for themselves, as to what they will provide. This happened with "Medicare" Part D, (which disaster, by the way, Obama voted FOR), with huge premiums for the elderly, which they were lied-to about, price-gouging increases on prescription drug prices of hundreds, even thousands, of times over, and shifting lists of which drugs are even covered, so that often, people have to keep paying their sky-high premiums, and they are not getting coverage, (because of the corporate-written "donut hole" invention, killing coverage at a certain range of amount), and their prescriptions are suddenly not on their particular list of covered drugs anymore, and they can't change until the next set time-period. This is what we call insurance-corporate-written law. As Ted Kennedy has mentioned, the insurance industry keeps a larger staff of lawyers to deny claims, than to pay them.

Contrast that with the extremely low overhead and very well-run programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and you can't help but notice where things have to go. It has to be Government-insured!