(More deadly wrongdoings by the insurance industry… Now why do we let these folks decide the fates of our lives? – promoted by atdleft)
Kimberly Tuzzi can’t afford dialysis; she might just die instead. We meet her today, and look at why she and others like her can’t afford healthcare: because drug companies spend $25 million a month on lobbying, hospital execs earn $10 million a year, and insurance corporations give bonuses for kicking sick people off the rolls. It’s no wonder that health experts and nurses are calling for a humane, SinglePayer system to fix our national healthcare disgrace.
Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of SinglePayer Healthcare.
The sad thing about Kim’s story is how common it must be:
Kimberly Tuzzi may simply tell the doctor to make her comfortable while her body shuts down.
The 39-year-old Scranton woman believes her juvenile diabetes has ravaged her kidneys. She cannot afford tests to find out for sure, let alone pay for dialysis treatments if they confirm her fears….
“I am either so sick somebody has to drive me to the doctor’s office or take me to an emergency room, or I wait for it to pass. That’s how I get my health care,” she said.
When you’re fighting for your health, the last thing you want is to also be taking a faceless, powerful corporate bureaucracy dedicated to denying you care. Kim Tuzzi’s story is one of the many tragedies that together make up our healthcare crisis.
For example, just today we also read that kids aren’t getting vaccines because drug companies keep raising the prices and that even the well-off are afraid that healthcare costs will destroy their retirement.
What’s so wrong here? Why can’t anyone afford healthcare anymore?
Let’s see: the big drug companies are spending about $25 million per month lobbying…you’re paying for this in higher drug prices.
And hospital chains are paying the CEOs ten million dollars a year…you’re paying for their boathouse.
You’re also paying bonuses to insurance bureaucrats who kick sick people off the rolls and helping fund “cost shifts” that are designed to ensure individuals not insurers pay for care.
We’re wasting all this money on healthcare, and everybody’s getting a cut except for patients. What are we gonna do?
“I am proposing the federal government as the single payer of health care in this country. Only the federal government has the ability to fund one large risk pool through a payroll deduction. As the single payer, the federal government could negotiate hospital and physician payments even more effectively than it does now with Medicare.
“A single pool of funds, collected and administered by the government, would expand Medicare and replace Medicaid, SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program), the VA health-care system, and private health insurance, including the health care aspect of Worker’s Compensation. … Also eliminated would be the tax credit – or subsidy – given to companies for providing health insurance to their employees. In other words, the current, inefficient patchwork of payment systems would disappear, to be replaced by one nationwide program available to every citizen.”
The writer was Robert Gumbiner, an M.D. and a pioneer of the controversial concept of managed care, which has been a vain attempt to reduce the soaring costs of the volatile for-profit health-care system. Gumbiner founded FHP, in California, one of the nation’s earliest and largest HMOs, which was swallowed up in a merger with PacifiCare 10 years ago.
And even something as traumatic as Hurricane Katrina can move along our national movement for SinglePayer healthcare and healthcare justice, as a Kentucky nurse eloquently writes in this article.
If you want to join the fight for single-payer healthcare, sign up with SinglePayer.com, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee. You can share your story about surviving the healthcare industry here, and start contacting media here.