Should government mandate the purchase of for-profit insurance products, backed up by threats to garnish wages or place a lien on homes?  Or should we move to a guaranteed healthcare system modeled on the single-payer financing that is working in Taiwan, Canada, and most of Europe?  

This very interesting debate is happening simultaneously at the national and state levels-because mandated insurance is the top priority of the insurance industry, and they’re pushing it everywhere they can.  

We’ll take a look below…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize for GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

In California, Arnold Schwarzenegger and most of the state’s insurers have lined up with Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez to push a mandate law through.  Its future is uncertain.  

At the Presidential level, Sens. Clinton and Edwards are attacking Sen. Obama for declining to endorse their mandate.  Obama rightly argues that people don’t have health insurance not because they don’t want it, but because they can’t afford it.  A difficult argument to make in a sound-bite world, but the right one.

The big Schwarzenegger/Nunez healthcare compromise is going for a hearing and a vote before the Senate Health Committee tomorrow.  No doubt the insurance lobbyists are working overtime to call in their chits.  At least one paper, the San Jose Mercury News, argues the Governor is “misplaying” his hand and “making a bad bet” with his healthcare bill.  Agreed.  They state:

The governor’s proposed budget cuts, which will do considerable damage to a health care system already in crisis, are only exacerbating the political challenge of passing his reforms.

(This editorial has one major factual error-saying that insurance corporations oppose the Schwarzenegger/Nunez bill.  In fact, major CA insurer but one is backing the bill.)

New American Media, a coalition of ethnic news sources, lists the top 5 Reasons ABX11 is a sham, and even reps from the insurance industry thinks it could go down.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts residents are learning what it’s like to live where the purchase of junk insurance is mandated by the power of the state: it’s a kick in the groin:

THE NEARLY 300,000 Massachusetts residents who signed up for health insurance under the state’s new initiative are in for a rude awakening. They may now have some form of coverage, but many of them, even the very poor who used to get free care, are going to be socked with steep medical bills.

Simultaneously, the mandate debate continues to roil the Presidential.  I’ll point out what Sen. Obama won’t–that an individual mandate is the top priority of the insurance industry right now, and that it will end our chance to achieve guaranteed, single-payer healthcare, by giving insurance companies more power and degrading group purchase of insurance.

And Ian Welsh just wants everyone to repeat after him: single-payer is cheaper than what we’ve got now (or would get under mandates.)

Lets not forget that small businesses across the country are being forced into bankruptcy by predatory insurance corporations protecting their huge health insurance profits.  We want more of that?

UPDATE: Please keep an eye out for the announcements from several major California unions that they oppose ABX1.1!

Okay, this is an extraordinary photo of a beyond-the-pale moment: Steve Maviglio, the Deputy Chief of Staff to Fabian Nunez, the Speaker of the California Assembly, directing Capitol police to arrest an un-insured patient for speaking to the media about healthcare reform.  That’s Maviglio on the far right, and Jerry Flanagan from ConsumerWatchDog in the middle.

Conversations with press like this happen every day, every hour in the Capitol; it’s why the building exists.

But I guess most conversations aren’t on the subject of the insurance industry’s number one priority-which is to pass an “individual mandate” law.  And most conversations don’t happen as a gigantic fake healthcare reform bill seems to be careening to an ugly defeat.

Which is why most conversations don’t end with patients being cited for a misdemeanor.

We’ll tell what happened and why, below

…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize for GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

It’s a good news-bad news situation.

The bad news is that the insurance industry has convinced some politicians on their payroll to hop aboard the individual mandate train, and pass a law requiring every person in the state to buy one of their products-no matter the cost or the quality.  The train’s rolling here in California, for a test run, before it goes national.

The good news is this bill is about to collapse, and this could well end this nasty little trend in healthcare reform, and open the door to replacing insurance companies altogether with universal, non-profit, single-payer coverage.  The kind that works in every other industrialized democracy.

Meet Ron Norton.  He’s on the far left in the picture, looking confused as to why Speaker Nunez thinks he’s a threat to the Capitol.  He’s been victimized by the Mitt Romney plan in Massachusetts, which is the basis for the Schwarzenegger, Clinton, and other individual mandate plans…and here’s what he’s got to say:

I’m Ron Norton, an adjunct professor of radiology and an administrator at a Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester, Massachusetts. But like 66% of our community college teachers, I’m considered an independent contractor and don’t get health insurance.

“After a few years of making about $21,000, I made closer to $40,000 last year because I’m also doing an administrative job. Under the Massachusetts insurance law my family won’t get subsidy because even though my wife has health insurance with her employer, her income is counted against my eligibility.

“Her small employer doesn’t offer family insurance. I imagine lots of California families are in the same situation.

“I’m 47 and have no health problems but the cheapest individual plan available in Massachusetts is $234 a month. That’s 6.8% of my salary. That “cheap” plan has a $2,000 per person pushing the cost up to 12.7% of my gross salary. Even if I bought the policy I still wouldn’t have affordable health care, and the number of doctors is very limited.

“I have a daughter, and it gets much worse if I want to insure her. The cheapest plan for the two of us is $440 a month, $5280 a year. That’s 11.6% of my income alone. The cheapest medium-range plan – without the huge deductibles – is $632 a month, nearly 20% of my own salary.

Details, details.  Doesn’t he know how much money these insurers have paid politicians to support their bill?

Hopefully, and apparently, not enough, as Capitol rumors are abounding now that the Schwarzenegger-Nunez bill is DOA.  Some reasons why:

First-the California Nurses Association has begun major advertising against it.  People generally people trust RNs more than insurance companies on healthcare issues.

Second-It’s becoming clear that voters don’t like this particular mandate. (Warning; .pdf, of poll.)

Third-California’s in a heap of budget trouble, and now is not the right time for multi-billion dollar public subsidies to already-profitable insurance corporations.

Fourth-the “insiders’ coalition” is breaking apart.  I mean, who really deep down likes insurance corporations?

Fifth-Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan is emerging as a total loser.

We might a few more arrests along the way, but we can see the light, and build a template for stopping fake healthcare reform and winning guaranteed healthcare. Or, as we sometimes call it, CheneyCare.

Everybody in, nobody out, nothing less.

The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee put out a simple call for a petition last week, demanding access for our patients to CheneyCare, the guaranteed, non-profit, quality healthcare available to Dick Cheney.  (Sign up if you haven’t already.)

What we didn’t expect was the hundreds of people who would write in with their stories of abuse at the hands of the insurance corporations.  This is a heart-breaking window into the pain and heartache that insurers inflict on America.  And now ABX11 would require everyone to purchase insurance products from these same corporations who are already ripping people off?  That’s nuts.

…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize for GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

What’s happening out there in the wide wide world of guaranteed healthcare reform…

The California Nurses Association is working to end ABX1 1, the “fake” healthcare reform proposal floating around Sacramento.  That bill was crafted by insurers and features an “individual mandate’–wonk talk for a law forcing people to purchase expensive insurance products no matter their cost or quality. Read all about it here.

On the national level, Barack Obama is launching an ad to spread the word about his healthcare plan.  His plan’s not perfect-he avoids universal, single-payer coverage-but he pledges to oppose the individual mandate scam that’s being pushed by Romney, Schwarzenegger, Clinton, et al.  That’s a good first step.  (For the record, CNA/NNOC has made no endorsement.)

Elswhere, Ian Welsh looks at the recent article finding that 100,000 Americans die each year due to our deficient healthcare system.  That’s 100,000 victims of the health insurance industry.  He writes:

So choose whether you support single payer health care. But remember that in making that choice you are making a profound statement about what you consider important – free market ideology or saving lives and pain – and that single payor healthcare has been proven to actually be cheaper than the current system. Immoral and impractical – all in one.

Finally, the Rutland Herald in Vermont thinks single-payer “may be upon us sooner than we think” and  The Time Goes By blog wants to sign up for CheneyCare.

From Nataline Sarkisyan to Angela Dispenza to ten-year-old Preston, we all deserve the kind of care that Dick Cheney has.

Pre-existing condition?  No problem.  Guaranteed healthcare?  Of course.  Heartless insurance bureaucrats meddling in medical decisions?  No way.  A single standard of quality care?  Nothing less will do.  

But why just Cheney?  Why not everyone?

Want to sign up for it?

…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize for GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

Activist nurses around the country are going to take the case for CheneyCare directly to the Presidential candidates this year-but we need your help.  Go sign up.  We’ll send nurses in scrubs to carry the petition on your behalf to every member of Congress and Presidential candidate from both parties.  Patients need to keep pressure on politicians to really fix the healthcare system and ensure guaranteed healthcare for all Americans.

Nurses are running ads about CheneyCare today in major newspapers across the country.  As the Presidential race swings into high gear, it’s time for the pateints’ revolt to match it, and display the kind of intensity and organization that will force the politicians to listen to us-and not the insurance donors.  It’s time for the patients’ revolt, and Dick Cheney, and the care he receives but we don’t, is the perfect symbol to make it happen.  Take a look at the full ad, today in the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, and USA Today.

In case you missed it, The Wall St. Journal noted:

Vice President Dick Cheney would “probably be dead by now” if not for his federally funded health care, according to an eye-catching ad calling for universal health care that will run…in newspapers. The ad is union-funded by the California Nurses Association and its national arm, the National Nurses Organizing Committee, which represents 75,000 nurses.

You know you’ve succeeded when this happens:

The vice president’s office said the ad isn’t worth more than a no comment. “Something this outrageous does not warrant a response,” said Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cheney.

We are building a grand coalition.  

And the insurance industry?  Well, who really likes them except for the politicians whose pockets they line?

(Tragically, the girl in question, Nataline Sarkisyan, died yesterday evening after this diary was posted. nyceve at Daily Kos has more about the netroots’ role in forcing CIGNA to capitulate. – promoted by Robert in Monterey)

I am pasting a release below about the Dec. 20 “Patient’s Revolt” that forced heartless CIGNA corporation to approve the liver transplant that could save the life of 17-year-old Nataline Sarkysian.

It’s been an emotional day involving hundreds of people, but there are a couple of lessons I want to take away.

First–we have power.  We shouldn’t be afraid to use it.  A unique coalition of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, a union, together with netroots and the Armenian Community shamed a global insurance corporation into doing the right thing.

Second–we shouldn’t have to do this…and every candidate pushing to mandate individuals purchase insurance products from the likes of CIGNA, who would still be in the business of profiting through the denial of care, should think long and hard.  Are the CIGNA’s of the world really the people who should control our healthcare dollars?

Here is the full release.  Highlights:

CIGNA CAPITULATES TO PATIENT REVOLT

Following Massive Protest, Insurer Authorizes

Transplant for 17-year-old Nataline Sarkysian

CNA/NNOC-Sponsored Protest Sparks Flood of Calls from Across U.S.

In a stunning turn-around, insurance giant Cigna has capitulated to community demands, and protests that the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee helped to generate, and agreed to a critically needed liver transplant for Nataline Sarkysian, a 17-year-old girl in the intensive care unit at UCLA Medical Center.

A national web of friends and family of Nataline, CNA/NNOC registered nurses, doctors, members of the Armenian community, healthcare advocates and netroots supporters pitched in on an unprecedented national day of action on Nataline’s belief.  

The centerpiece of the protests was an impassioned rally today sponsored by CNA/NNOC with the substantial help of the local Armenian community that drew 150 people to the Glendale offices of Cigna. Hundreds of phone callers clogged the lines of Cigna offices around the country, all demanding that Cigna reverse its prior denial of care.  

“This is an incredible turnaround generated by a massive outpouring around the country that proves that an enraged public can make a difference and achieve results,” said CNA/NNOC Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro. “Cigna had to back down in the face of a mobilized network of patient advocates and healthcare activists who would not take no for an answer.”

The netroot protest was organized by Eve Gittelson an influential health policy blogger who writes on Daily Kos as nyceve, and many of the calls were also the product of work by the Armenian National Committee.

“Natalie is now seriously ill and still has significant hurdles in her fight for her life, but thankfully our combined voices and protests have finally given her and her family hope,” said Geri Jenkins, RN, a member of the CNA/NNOC Council of Presidents who works in a transplant unit at the University of California San Diego Medical Center.

“However, it is deplorable and appalling that CIGNA needed to have hundreds of people pounding on their doors and besieging them with calls to take the humanitarian step they should have done long before today,” said Jenkins who spoke at the Glendale rally.

Nataline’s mother, Hilda Sarkisyan, expressed her profound thanks to CNA/NNOC. “We couldn’t have done this without you helping us to stand up against this insurance company and forcing them to finally do the right thing. It is not right in this country for it to take a rally, a protest, and a major press conference to get an insurance company to listen.”

“Every politician who thinks the answer to our healthcare crisis is more insurance should stop and think about Nataline Sarkysian,” said DeMoro. “Insurance is not care. Paying for insurance coverage is not the same as assuring you will receive appropriate care, even when recommended by a physician as it was for Nataline. Insurance corporations profit by denying care to the sick, and that is no way to run a humane healthcare system.”

DeMoro said that CNA/NNOC will continue to encourage patient protests and publicize stories about insurance companies’ denial of care, as it has all year through its www.guaranteedhealthcare.org web site, while pressing for real healthcare reform “that takes medical decisions out of the hands of insurers and places them where they belong, in the hands of healthcare professionals and their families.”

If we are ever going to get genuine healthcare reform, we need to make sure politicians listen to nurses-not insurance companies-on the issue.  

That’s why the all the energy among activist nurses around the country are such good news.

We’ll take a look at what’s up below …cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize for GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model

Starting in Nevada, RNs at St. Mary’s in Reno voted overwhelmingly to join the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.  Go read that incredible story.  Joining CNA/NNOC will give these RNs, at long last, a statewide voice in pushing for guaranteed, single-payer healthcare, which is vital for Nevada.  It also helps CNA/NNOC continue its rapid national expansion, which gives us the ability to do this.

In our home state of California, 5000 RNs are striking today and tomorrow against the troubled healthcare giant Sutter, which is infamous for short-staffing its units, thereby endangering patients.  Fights for a safe ratio of nurses to patients is a key part of the larger fight for healthcare reform; in essence what it does is guarantee a minimum level of care for patients within hospitals.  (Along with an earlier strike in October against Sutter, these are the largest nurses’ strikes this nation has seen in a decade.)

Finally, great news for the movement for guaranteed, single-payer healthcare: Colorado has become the 29th state labor federation to endorse John Conyers’ HR 676 “Medicare for All” bill.  The labor movement is coalescing around single-payer healthcare, meaning it is the only reform proposal with an organized, motivated grassroots base working for its passage.  Who really gets excited by the idea of forcing every person to purchase expensive, wasteful insurance products from the very corporations who brought you the healthcare crisis?

While politicians debate individual mandates-a/k/a forcing Americans to purchase expensive, unworkable insurance products from the very corporations who brought you our healthcare disaster-more evidence rolls in about how Americans are being bankrupted by their health insurance.

…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize for GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

Remember as you look at these stories that the big insurance companies take one-third of care dollars off the top, for profits, lobbying, CEO salaries, bureaucracy and overhead.  Medicare, America’s single-payer system, by contrast takes 3% off the top for all that.  Not even the mafia takes a third.

A new report today finds that in the last year health insurance costs rose ten percent.  Yes, that’s higher than the rate of medical inflation-meaning insurers are grabbing and keeping more money for themselves.  Imagine the financial impact if insurers can mandate those double-digit annual rises on every single patient, not just the ones they now cover.

The Wall St. Journal (sub. req’d) looks at Americans who get sick, and then go bankrupt when they bump up against their insurance caps.  Think you’re covered?  Think again!

The Journal cited a study, the Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey, report that that 26% of Americans with health insurance had trouble paying medical bills in 2005 alone.  What did they do?

39% used up all their savings

28% covered it with credit cards

26% were unable to pay for basic necessities

11% took out a second mortgage or a loan

And THIS is the answer to our health care crisis?

From Iowa to California to Massachusetts, the national healthcare debates are finally starting to hit the key point: the problem of the health insurance corporations.  We’ll take a look below…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize for GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

The key issue is being played out now on the Presidential campaign, in exchanges between Sens. Clinton and Obama.

Clinton (and Edwards, Romney, Schwarzenegger, etc.) supports the individual mandate, requiring every person to carry health insurance, most likely purchased from one of the huge insurance corporations that have been busily gutting out health care system for their own profits.  Obama is put into a difficult spot by charges that he doesn’t support “universal” care, but argues that the reason people don’t carry insurance is because they can’t afford-not, usually, that they don’t want it. 

Of course, both sides are ignoring the key point: every other industrialized democracy is successfully operating some version of a single-payer system; only we put insurance companies ahead of public health needs.  Nonetheless, it’s important to decide if we want to hand over more customers, influence, adn revenues to the same insurance corporations that are speedily wrecking our health care system.

Out in California, Schwarzenegger and the legislature is considering their own mandates, cheered on lustily by insurance donors greedy for more profits.  One key problem? 

public health officials who provide most of the care for millions of uninsured residents are increasingly concerned that the proposed system could leave big financial holes in the state’s safety net.

Which only makes sense…if you channel billions in public subsidies to insurance corporations, and guarantee their profits, of course the public health systems take a huge financial hit.  That’s where the money comes from. 

The good news for Californians?  A deeply-divided state government might just make this harmful “reform” impossible to pass.

Meanwhile, kids in California are about to start getting dropped from the public rolls, while the politicians debate their plan for insurance company subsidies.  Unvelievable.

Massachusetts is starting to experience the problems with its own mandate experiment.  Short answer: only people who get subsidized insurance are signing up, while the insurance corporations are gleefully jacking up rates 10 to 12 per cent a year on everyone else. 

Finally did you catch NYCEve taking on the NYT editorial board?  Wow.

The Wall St. Journal reports on the new marketing plans for the health insurance companies: push health care reform, reap $100 billion in annual public subsidies!

We’ll take a look at that, as well as the GOP candidates who don’t care about cancer, the Sacramento insiders letting kids’ health fail run out, and new problems with the “Massachusetts mandate” law.

…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize for GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

It’s like the insurance companies wrote the law themselves.  Across the country, “healthcare reform” proposals are moving forward that would leave the current broken healthcare system intact, protect the role of the insurers, AND give them tens of billions of dollars in new revenues from government funds?

Democratic presidential candidates like to beat up on insurance companies, but there is a lot for the industry to like in their health-care plans — starting with plenty of new business.

“Here’s the potential for a whole new pool of lives for them to cover, with payment behind it,” said Benjamin Isgur, assistant director of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute, which examined the presidential health plans’ impact on industry. The study, a comprehensive look at health-care plans offered by candidates in both parties, also concludes that doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers would likely benefit since more patients with insurance suggest more would seek care and be able to pay their bills.

The leading Democratic candidates all propose boosting spending — by around $100 billion a year — mostly to help people buy private insurance plans.

Of course the insurance corporations are not dumb:

The early signals from the insurance industry, which played a major roll in killing health-care reform in 1994, are positive. The industry’s chief lobbyist, Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, says she is encouraged by the debate so far and says her group is focused on trying to get universal insurance enacted rather than stopping it. “At 20,000 or 30,000 feet, we have heard encouraging statements from Democrats and Republicans,” she says.

Meanwhile, the same “individual mandate” law in Massachusetts is good for insurers, but blowing a hole in the state budget.  And that hole is not fixable, since there is simply not enough public money to give protect the massive profits of the health insurance corporations.

GOP candidates who have survived cancer seem to show no compassion for other cancer survivors, at least if you trust their healthcare plans, and Sacramento insiders are showing precious little compassion for kids in that state who are about to get tossed off the healthcare rolls.