Real People Denied Real Healthcare is a new, online series of videos featuring patients telling their stories of abuse and mistreatment at the hands of a health insurance industry that makes money by denying care-not providing it.  While Bonnie Drew, who is featured in the latest webisode of Real People Denied Real Heatlhcare, suffers from a lack of quality medical care, the health insurance giants are rolling out new credit cards so patients will be able to pay 30% interest, hospital managers are making millions, and 11-year-old asthmatic loser her healthcare for being adopted.  No wonder activists around the country continue their push for SinglePayer healthcare for all Americans.

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of SinglePayer Healthcare.

Bonnie Drew  thought she had health care-but when she got sick, she learned the bitter distinction between health insurance and healthcare.  Health insurance doesn’t guarantee you healthcare.

Watch Bonnie Drew’s heartbreaking story (and follow the links if you want to tell your own story).

Contrast her pain with what’s happening at the health insurance companies.  They are having such a good time bankrupting Americans that they are going to start introducing their own credit cards…with interest as high as 30%.

That’s right, you miss a payment (say you get a huge medical bill…or you’re sick) and you get charged 30% interest.

30% interest.

Aetna’s Healthy Living card, offered through Visa, has a 0 percent introductory annual percentage rate for the first 12 billing cycles, after which the standard APR financing rate is 9.9 percent for Platinum accounts and 15.99 percent for Preferred accounts. For late payments, the rate is 29.99 percent….

“Our intent in this is in providing our members a tool that we can use to help to fund their growing out-of-pocket expenses,” said Gene Cronin, senior product management specialist for Aetna. 

Wow, Gene, how helpful of Aetna to provide “members” with this “tool,” which by the way will remind them that even though YOU’RE the insurance company, THEY better be paying the health bills, oh and you’ll get to skim your interest off the top.

Meanwhile, hospital managers are making millions of dollars in pay and an 11-year-old asthmatic loses her health insurance for getting adopted.

Stories like these remind us why we have a movement for guaranteed healthcare in this country.  Writer Michael Corcoran thinks this movement has “the wind at our backs,” while a California consumer activist reminds us to make sure we’re really working for patients, and a California nurse points out that Walter Reed is symbolic of the Bush Administration’s disdain for all patients. 

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.

(Hmmm… Interesting… – promoted by atdleft)

While most Americans are demanding fundamental changes in our healthcare system, some politicians propose doing it gradually, incrementally, in a series of baby steps.  To nurses, and caregivers, this raises an obvious question–whose life doesn’t count?–as Rose Ann DeMoro, Executive Director of the California Nurses Association, asks us to consider  today.  Elsewhere, SinglePayer reform is on the march in California and Ohio, Obama’s audience wants to know his plan, bowling alleys are more important than hospitals and Bush’s Secretary of Health and Human Services has lost his mind.

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of SinglePayer Healthcare.

We know that the current health care crisis is, well, a crisis of life and death proportions notes Rose Ann DeMoro:

Every year, lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths, the equivalent of six times the number who died in the September 11 attacks.
Among those without insurance, lung cancer patients are less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatment; heart attack victims are less likely to receive angioplasty; people without pneumonia are less likely to receive X-rays or consultations; and people with colorectal cancer are 70% more likely to die within three years than people with health coverage.
The uninsured receive less preventive care, are diagnosed at more advanced disease stages, and receive less therapeutic care (drugs and surgical interventions). Not only do they incur greater pain and suffering down the road, they also face increased cost, at a time when medical bills already account for half of all personal bankruptcies and one third of credit card debt.

And that’s why gradualism is dangerous.  Whose life doesn’t count?

Gradualism – extending health coverage to some – is the mantra of the day, fawned over by some politicians and advocacy groups alike. The appearance of “bi-partisanship” or the staging of “strange bedfellows” is often the only purpose of grand pronouncements of support for universal health care. Whether the proposals actually solves the health care crisis is irrelevant or secondary to the hype.
The greater danger, we’re told, is doing nothing.
But what are we getting done?
Virtually all the gradual reforms being touted would reinforce a multi-tiered health care system with as many standards of care as there are dollars to purchase them, and further lock us into a private insurance-based model that holds our health hostage to the HMOs and big insurance companies for years to come.

Healthcare hero, and California State Senator, Sheila Kuehl is going to put the solution to the crisis on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk later this year.  He vetoed it once, but this time it will be more difficult.  Kuehl writes:

Real universal health care is demonstrably possible. SB 840 (the California Universal Healthcare Act), a bill I am carrying in the California Legislature, covers every California resident with comprehensive, affordable health benefits, and contains the growth of health-care spending while improving quality. Most importantly, it gives patients total choice of their doctors and hospital.
It works by consolidating the money we–employers, families and government–currently spend on health care. Everyone pays something in and everyone gets coverage–just one affordable premium–without co-pays or deductibles. This allows us to reduce the costs of administering our fragmented system from 30 percent of every health-care dollar down to 5 percent, a savings of $20 billion in the first year. 

California’s nurses are traveling up and down the state fighting for this SinglePayer proposal, while a group in Ohio is aiming to put a similar model on the ballot in 2009.

Elsewhere, presidential candidate Barack Obama is under some heat to release his healthcare plans.  Please Mr. Obama-be sure to deal with the parasitic health insurance companies that are bankrupting our care system and our nation, and to consider the idea that some version of SinglePayer is the only system that’s ever worked in a developed nation.  Same goes for the rest of you candidates…

Meanwhile, Bush’s Secretary of Health and Human Services seems either criminally insane or dangerously out-of-touch with the magnitude of our healthcare crisis, a bowling alley gets millions from the federal government while a near-by VA hospital is shuttered, and an astounding 85% of Alaskans think they’re paying too much for prescription drugs. 

The people are ready to take on the healthcare corporations-now where’s the leadership?

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.

(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?

There’s hope.  Read this:

“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.

(Movin’ on up! – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

A re-invigorated national nurses labor movement considers SinglePayer healthcare to be the most important issue facing our country.  In todays’ SinglePayer update, nurses criticize Schwarzenegger’s attempt to increase health insurance industry profits, lead the fightback against Chicago’s devastating health cuts, and remain in the crosshairs of the Bush labor department.  Elsewhere in the movement for SinglePayer healthcare, Pennsylvania patients are going to have to deal with even-bigger healthcare insurance giants, the mouthpiece of corporate America pipes up for mandated insurance, and the Nation criticizes unions who get into bed with bad-boss Wal-Mart.

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of SinglePayer Healthcare.

Nurses are ethically and professionally obligated to serve as patient advocates-a calling they take from the bedside to the statehouse.  Much of their bedside work goes unheralded, but as a national nurses labor movement has finally begun to emerge, their work at the statehouse is becoming ever more important.

In California, Kay McVay, President Emeritus of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association, calls Arnold Schwarzenegger to task for proposing a “second-best” health plan that would require the average patient to shell out an unaffordable one-fourth of their income-in premiums and deductibles ALONE.  Can you afford to subsidize the insurers?  McVay notes:

A recent New York Times-CBS poll shows 64 percent of Americans believe the government should guarantee health insurance for all; 55 percent identified it as the top domestic priority for Congress and the president. In California, 60 percent favor a publicly funded universal health care system, like {California’s}SB840 and Medicare, over the current system. The public is ahead of the politicians and policy wonks.

Meanwhile, the Chicago machine continues its effort to protect their patronage jobs while cutting back healthcare.  Here is-no joke-the suggestion from the county’s health commissioner to immigrants: fly back to your home country and let your family care for you.  Chicago nurses are teaming up with immigrant rights activists to demand his resignation.  Read about it here and here.

The hospital industry and their allies in the White House have noticed this activism, and are gunning for nurses’ unions, attempting to divide and conquer RNs.  A new bill fights back against this tactic, which you might have first read about in coverage of a National Labor Relations Board decision known as Kentucky River.  Excellent coverage here by Nancy Scola.

Meanwhile our national healthcare nightmare drags on.  Pennsylvania customers will soon face an even more-behemoth insurance colossus attempting to deny them care.  Is this merger good for anyone?

Those same care-denying insurance corporations now have the the discredited Heritage Foundation pimping for them in Washington DC, and cheerleadering for the idea of forcing everyone to buy insurance from them.  Hmmmm…wonder where their funding comes from? 

Finally, The Nation criticizes labor groups who get into bed with Wal-Mart on the healthcare issue while ignoring the fact that Wal-Mart doesn’t care one bit about the health of their own employees.

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.

(Another important update from the frontline…
When will we ever learn that this health care system is killing us? – promoted by atdleft)

Nathan Wilkes’ health insurance worked great-until his son was born with hemophilia.  Since then, he’s tasted the boot of a vindictive health insurance corporation angry that they’ve had to pay for the care they promise.  His employer’s premiums have gone up, his co-workers’ co-pays have gone up, and now they’re all avoiding going to the hospital.  Other carriers won’t touch him and his insurer put a million dollar annual cap on care-which Mr. Wilkes’ son Thomas will pass in a matter of months.  In his words, he’s become, “A canary in the coalmine of healthcare.”  His best option seems to be to divorce his wife so that she can be unemployed and eligible for Medicare.  His son is the face of our healthcare crisis. Today’s SinglePayer update also looks at nurses on the march in Texas, the fight for the soul of Louisiana’s healthcare system, and a new study showing healthcare “tax credits” don’t work.

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of SinglePayer Healthcare.

Watch the heart-wrenching video:

This is how we organize our healthcare?  We put the insurance corporations in charge of it, when they have a legal obligation to care only about their own profits?

In the words of Mr. Wilkes:  “The only health proposal that doesn’t bankrupt families unfortunate enough to face a serious illness is a SinglePayer, national health plan.”

Mr. Wilkes’ story made him an advocate for single-payer healthcare, in the hopes that our care can be organized for the good of patients, not the profit of insurers.

Elsewhere, Texas nurses are on the march demanding support for a new law guaranteeing they only have to care for a safe number of patients at any given time.  The so-called safe RN-to-patient laws originated in California and are now up in legislatures across the country.

Meanwhile, a huge battle is raging over Louisiana healthcare.  Republican Senator David Vitter is leading the pushback against the Bush administration.  They want to take all the money that goes into the public health system, and instead use it to buy health insurance for one-third to one-half of the state’s uninsured population-who would likely find it hard to get to a hospital with the public system closed.  That clear?  Me neither. 

One problem with private insurance is that insurance corporations waste one-third of care dollars on overhead-as opposed to Medicare which only spends about 3% of care dollars on overhead.  Now we learn that “health coverage tax credits,” which are designed to get people to buy private insurance, ALSO waste one-third of THEIR care dollars.  So, one-third for the IRS, one-third for the insurer, one-third for patient care.  Do you think THAT is a good alternative to the SinglePayer systems working well around the world?  Me neither.

Finally, some great grass-roots coverage of the healthcare crisis in Connecticut.

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.

(Insurance denied because they can’t cherry pick? B-R-O-K-E-N – promoted by blogswarm)

More than a healthcare crisis-this nation has a widespread health insurance crisis.  Just today, the LA Times reports that professional associations are increasingly shut out of the health insurance market because group purchasing doesn’t let insurers cherry pick the healthiest customers.  This comes on the heels of last week’s news that Blue Cross is being fined $1 million for illegally dumping patients off the rolls, a new look at how elderly patients are being fleeced by their mercenary insurers, and complaints from doctors that they spend more time fighting corporate denials of care than tending to their patients.  Given this health insurance crisis that demands a solution, it’s no wonder the Sacramento Bee comes close to endorsing the SinglePayer system, and doing away with these bad actors. 

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of SinglePayer Healthcare.

The latest canary in the insurance coal mines are the professional associations that offer their members health insurnace.  As Lisa Girion of the LA Times, who has been on a tear lately, writes:

Health plans offered by professional associations were once havens for millions of people who couldn’t get coverage anywhere else. But as medical costs have soared, groups representing professions as varied as law and golf have been forced to stop offering the benefit or been dropped by insurers.

More than 8,000 people with coverage through the California Assn. of Realtors could be next if Blue Shield of California succeeds with its plan to cancel the group’s health coverage.

“It’s a real stab in the heart,” said Marcy Garber, 62, an Encino real estate agent whose history of breast cancer makes her an almost-certain reject if she seeks similar coverage on her own.

Why are the insurance companies leaving this market?  Because they can’t cherrypick customers:

Insurance carriers began pulling out of association markets about 10 years ago amid mandates requiring the groups – like employers – to offer coverage to all members who wanted to buy it, regardless of preexisting conditions. Unlike employers, however, who typically pick up the much of the premiums for employees, most associations do not share in the costs. Instead, they arrange for their members to purchase coverage at group, rather than individual, rates.

Another real estate agent, Hector Aguirre, 39, of Rancho Cucamonga, also thought the group’s coverage was safe. He pays nearly $1,000 a month for coverage for himself and his family. His wife has lupus and a daughter needs daily shots of an expensive growth hormone.

“I always thought it had more control and more pull because it’s such a huge umbrella under the whole California Assn. of Realtors,” Aguirre said.

Realtor Terry Lucoff, 60, of Malibu, who pays a monthly premium of more than $600, fears that if he loses his coverage he will be unable to obtain new coverage that will allow him to continue seeing his regular doctors because he has been diagnosed with a kidney condition.

“If they can do this to the California Realtors association, they can do it to anybody,” he said.

It is truly, grotesquely surreal that the American medical system is organized around and by huge corporations that only want to serve healthy customers, and that make money by denying the healthcare they are chartered to insure.

Is it any wonder everyone hates them?  But look, there’s more from the car-wreck that is our insurance market.

Girion again: 

Blue Cross of California “routinely” violated state law when it canceled individual health insurance coverage after policyholders got pregnant or sick, making no attempt to determine whether they did anything to merit such “harsh” treatment, according to a state investigation of practices that appear to be industrywide….

As a result of its unprecedented investigation, the Department of Managed Health Care on Thursday said that it had fined Blue Cross $1 million – an amount immediately criticized by canceled policyholders and consumer advocates as too small to matter to an insurer whose parent company, WellPoint Inc., earned $3.1 billion in profit last year on revenue of $57 billion.

Stunningly:

Regulators examined 90 randomly selected cases of policy cancellations – out of about 1,000 a year in California – and found violations in each one.

Insurance companies aren’t just abusing sick people; they’re abusing old people, too:

  Interviews by The New York Times and confidential depositions indicate that some long-term-care insurers have developed procedures that make it difficult – if not impossible – for policyholders to get paid. A review of more than 400 of the thousands of grievances and lawsuits filed in recent years shows elderly policyholders confronting unnecessary delays and overwhelming bureaucracies. In California alone, nearly one in every four long-term-care claims was denied in 2005, according to the state.

And now doctors are reporting that all the time they spend with insurance corporation bureaucrats harms their patients.

So, I ask all the politicians who are supporting insurance mandates: do we really want to force the entire nation to sign up with their heartless corporations?  Do want to increase their influence over the delivery of care in our health system?

The Sacramento Bee doesn’t think so–and kind-of/almost endorse SinglePayer healthcare as the way to deal with our sick health insurance market:

Blue Cross denies wrongdoing. That’s fine. There is a larger lesson here: This health insurance market, the one for individuals or families who don’t automatically get covered through their jobs, is sick. Insurers try to avoid covering people who need care. And many Californians avoid getting insurance until it is in their financial interest to do so. It’s a game, and the game must end somehow. That can only happen by blowing up the individual health insurance market that exists today and replacing it with something that makes more sense. And that can only happen with the California Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

There are two basic choices here when it comes to health insurance. One is to get rid of private health insurance altogether and replace it with a program in which the government directly pays doctors and hospitals to provide care. That’s known as single-payer. It is championed by some Democrats, but opposed by the governor. Single-payer isn’t a likely short-term compromise, but the more we look at this mess, single-payer seems to be an increasingly likely long-term solution because of the many ills of the private insurance market.

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.

(Yes, go nurses! : ) – promoted by atdleft)

Roxy Carr is where any of us could be: medically bankrupt.  She’s both the face of our nation’s healthcare crisis, and symptomatic of the most important aspect of that crisis, affordability.  While private insurance companies enjoy record profits, average Americans find they can barely afford medical care, and they are one crisis away from seeing their life savings gone.  Coincidence?  We learn more about just how unaffordable Massachusetts’ healthcare reform plan is for residents, why a Minnesota plan is even worse, and how California’s plan is failing as a result.  Meanwhile, Connecticut unions fight for the kind of SinglePayer insurance that makes care affordable–and the national AFL-CIO endorses a similar proposal.

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of SinglePayer Healthcare.

Meet Roxy Carr of Twin Falls, ID:

She was making $6.25 an hour working for an employer that didn’t offer health insurance, and she certainly couldn’t afford to purchase her own policy. After paying rent and utility bills and putting gas in the car and food on the table, there was nothing left to pay for the expensive medications she needed to manage her diabetes.

“I juggled bills to afford medications,” Carr said. “I was robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

Carr couldn’t juggle forever. Complications from her diabetes eventually landed her in the hospital, adding yet another bill to the growing stack on her table waiting to be paid. One day, she woke up and discovered she was more than $45,000 in debt. So she did the only thing she believed she could do: She filed medical bankruptcy.

While Roxy had no insurance, many people with insurance have similar problems in the face of deductibles, co-pays, and uncovered costs.  In fact, three-quarters of those bankrupted by illness had insurance, according to a Harvard study. 

So we drive our patients to bankruptcy, and then what happens to them? 

The bankruptcy wasn’t the end of Carr’s story. Still uninsured, she ended up in an emergency room one night when she fell ill. She was diagnosed with shingles – a skin rash caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox. An emergency room doctor examined her, ran some tests and gave her a shot for pain. She was there for three hours, and the bill came to $3,700. Carr could have received the same treatment in a doctor’s office for less than $200.

That’s right we send them into bizarro world where they have to spend even more money on health maintenance.

As Roxy learned, the big problem with our health system is affordability-so many interests are sucking care dollars out of the system that regular, working Americans can’t afford care, especially if they actually get sick. 

Massachusetts has led the way in healthcare reform lately, implementing the dastardly “individual mandates” that require people to buy insurance from private insurers, and impoverish themselves while enriching the insurers.  Who’s hit hardest?  The middle class:

The economic pressure in the state’s new plan falls on those in the middle, the almost poor, several experts told The Standard-Times.
  “For the low-income family earning $36,000 a year before taxes, how do they pay what amounts to 6 to 8 percent of their income for health care, perhaps $2,400 a year?” asked Alan Sager, a professor of health policy and management at the Boston University School of Public Health.

Health costs can be crippling, even to families with health insurance, writes Yale University professor Jacob S. Hacker in his 2006 Oxford University Press book, “The Great Risk Shift.”

In 2003, 82 million Americans were without health insurance at some point, Mr. Hacker reported.
  “And yet, these ordinary Americans at extraordinary risk have for years remained largely unnoticed, an inconvenient blot on the heralded success story of the American economy,” Mr. Hacker wrote.

As people learn about these problems in Massachusetts, copy-cat programs in states like California are starting to run into trouble:

As California lawmakers work out a health insurance overhaul that could contain a similar requirement for individuals, advocacy groups here say the Massachusetts example raises questions about whether it’s possible to come up with affordable health insurance for people to buy on their own.

“Our big concern is that without guarantees that costs will be controlled, we’re certain to stick some patients with health plans that simply aren’t affordable,” said Carmen Balber of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Los Angeles, an organization that wants the state to limit how much insurers can charge

It’s even worse than that in a Minnesota proposal.  The plan actually wants to garnish employees wages to pay for their private insurance.  Not only do are you MANDATED to buy insurance, but they will helpfully take it our of your paycheck for you. You won’t be surprised to hear that:

The proposal grew out of a task force of insurers and health care providers from Blue Cross and Blue Shield, HealthPartners, Mayo Clinic and elsewhere.

The opposition is being led by the Minnesota Nurses Association.  Go nurses!

More and more labor unions are supporting the answer to the affordability problem-a SinglePayer system that does away with the bloat of the insurance industry middleman.  Connecticut’s unions are the latest to join the fight.  Nationally, the AFL-CIO recently endorsed Medicare for All, and the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee will affiliate with them.

If the unions don’t succeed, we might see more of the global outsourcing of medicine, a/k/a “medical tourism,” that has devastated other industries in this country. 

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.

(More reporting from the front lines on what’s happening in health care – promoted by atdleft)

Bonnie Terry had a job, insurance, and a recent diagnosis of cancer.  Her story from there is one more of the millions of tragedies that make up what we call the healthcare crisis.  She lost her job, then her insurance, then her doctor, then her life.  Bonnie Terry was killed as much by her cancer as by a healthcare sector designed to maximize profits for private insurance companies and minimize care for sick people; that’s not healthcare-that’s murder by spreadsheet.  Also, we celebrate the accomplishments of a noted AIDS activist, learn more about the already out-of-control cost of the Massachusetts plan, cheer the medical students aiming to reverse the hateful policies of the American Medical Association, and read about an interfaith group of religious leaders calling for healthcare for all…children.

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of SinglePayer Healthcare.
 

Bonnie Terry is the face of America’s healthcare crisis.  As reported by Nicole Foy, Bonnie was a homeless activist and missionary for the Methodist Church who was overwhelmed at age 49 to be diagnosed with breast cancer.  She had insurance through her job, and upon her diagnosis:

The statistics seemed to be in her favor. Over 90 percent of women in her position survive at least five years. About 70 percent make it to the 10-year mark.
{Her physician} suggested neoadjuvant therapy, a way of shrinking the tumor so it’s easier to take out.
That meant chemotherapy first, surgery second, then radiation. Wagner didn’t want to lose any time. She suggested {Dr. Robert Drengler,} an oncologist at South Texas Oncology and Hematology, and urged Bonnie to begin chemotherapy immediately.

Then she lost her job.  The Methodist Board of Global Missionaries chose not to offer her COBRA extensions of her health insurance, so she purchased one of the high-premium, low-cap “junk insurance” plans being pushed by Romney, Schwarzenegger and others in the “mandated insurance” crowd.  What happened?

Bonnie began racking up medical debt and was forced to rely on donations to try and pay for her care.
Accepting financial help was difficult for Bonnie, who always had prided herself on paying bills in full and on time. She wasn’t one to ask for special favors.
Amid chemo and radiation treatments, she sent handwritten thank you notes on floral stationery to her hundreds of supporters.

That’s right-she raised money from hundreds of supporters to pay for her chemo, instead of focusing on her recovery.  Her insurance ran out just as her cancer returned. 

By the spring, when she first felt the swelling again under her arm and returned to Drengler, cancer was roaring through her body. ….
In the chart, Dr. Ronald Drengler described Bonnie’s prognosis as “very guarded.” He called for palliative treatment, care for patients for whom there is no cure.
Then the chart noted Bonnie had lost her health insurance – and, consequently, her status as Drengler’s patient. It read: “Will be seeking enrollment with University group,” meaning CareLink, Bexar County’s public medical program for the poor. …
Bonnie later would tell friends she was hurt but not surprised that Drengler dropped her as a patient because she had no insurance. He has to pay the bills, too, she said. (Drengler did not return calls seeking comment for this article.)
It would be seven weeks after Drengler’s fateful words – back, with a vengeance -until Bonnie received her first chemo treatment to try to stop her aggressive disease.

Dr. Drengler seems to have forgotten his oath to first do no harm.  What happened to Bonnie when she entered a public health system that has been systematically underfunded by politicians on the payroll of the insurance companies and other healthcare corporations?

Once she lost insurance, tests took longer. Doctors rotated. Care wasn’t centralized. There were mountains of bills to pay, forms to fill out, documentation to turn in, public payment programs to apply to.
The stress of it all seemed to zap what little energy Bonnie had left to deal with the cancer spreading stealthily through her body.

Bonnie said:

“I’m on a learning expedition, learning how to access a system that I never had to use before. It is so difficult being poor. I would rather get up and go to work as I have been doing every day of my life than sit in offices begging for services that are so caught up with bureaucracy.”

Here’s why we should all be motivated by Bonnie:

Realizing she couldn’t get in for several weeks to Bexar County’s busy breast cancer clinic for the indigent, Bonnie, then 48, took a trip whose very itinerary spoke to America’s health care crisis.
As cancer cells coursed through her bloodstream, invading her lungs and bones, she flew with Moose and other friends to Washington, D.C., to lobby for increased funding for cancer research and improved access to medical care….
Though many in Bonnie’s circle believe poor access to health care hastened her death, it isn’t clear whether delays in her treatment are directly to blame for her dying when she did. What is clear is that she waged an uphill battle on two fronts: one against an aggressive form of breast cancer and the other against a sluggish and largely impersonal medical system.

Bonnie’s life and death reminds me of the life and death of my friend Bob Hattoy, a legendary AIDS activist who died this weekend.  He took his struggles with sickness and used it as motivation to fight for better healthcare for our country.  In a speech before the 1992 Democratic Convention, Bob, said, 

  “We are part of the American family and, Mr. President, your family has AIDS and we’re dying and you’re doing nothing about it.”

Except it’s not just AIDS-it’s breast cancer, and diabetes, and childhood diseases, and accidents-and murder by spreadsheet committed every day by insurance and healthcare corporations.

So we fight for SinglePayer healthcare so that Bonnie and Bob, and all the members of our family, can concentrate on getting well, not on managing their bankruptcy and begging for care.

In this movement, one of the important struggles is Massachusetts; the new insurance plans that patients are required by the government to buy have come out and here’s the bottom line: if you earn $30,000 per year, you will be required to pay $4,000 in premiums and deductibles before you get one iota of healthcare.  Elsewhere we read that a group of religious leaders got together and agreed that all children deserve healthcare-but they seem to have forgotten about adults like Bonnie and Bob.  But we are all patients, which is the strength of our movement, and we end on a hopeful note, as a group of idealistic medical students is committed to overturning the harmful legacy of the American Medical Association, which is notorious for blocking healthcare reform. 

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.

(More reporting from the front lines, direct from our own in-house health care advocate – promoted by atdleft)

It’s not just America’s soldiers who are sitting in decrepit rooms begging for healthcare-all of us are in Walter Reed, writes a nurse leader today.  The Bush administration might fire a couple generals, but won’t show the door to the parasitic insurance companies that are hurting the rest of us.  Healthcare is, however, a big issue in the 2008 Presidential race already, writes a Washington Post reporter, but a major study by the American Association of Pediatrics suggests that the most common plans pushed by candidates will end up DECREASING preventive care and sentencing a generation of children to chronic health problems.  Lastly we take a look at anti-patient, right-wing propaganda blaming our true healthcare problem on sick people and Medicare.

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of SinglePayer Healthcare.

Deborah Burger, RN, is President of the National Nurses Organizing Committee and has worked in hospitals for 30 years.  Over that time she has seen the criminal neglect of the sick and today writes:

The Bush administration’s attitude toward our wounded veterans parallels its behavior toward the rest of our healthcare system – neglect, inadequate funding, and privatization.
It also illustrates a disturbing pattern of misplaced priorities, record spending on a disastrous war while our healthcare security for veterans and millions of other Americans is left behind…

Since President Bush arrived in Washington, the number of uninsured has ballooned by 11%. It’s not much better for the insured. Nearly half say their insurer has refused to pay a medical bill they received, about a third say they have hesitated seeking needed care due to cost. Today half of all bankruptcies, and a third of credit card debt, is directly linked to medical bills.
Concurrently, the number of public hospitals in America has fallen by 30% the past 30 years, a period in which the combined debt of state and local governments has grown by 852% to nearly $200 billion.
It’s affecting huge proportions of our population. New York is preparing to close or merge dozens of hospitals, and Chicago officials just signed off on plans to shut or downsize 19 community and school based clinics….

The U.S. spends more, far more, on health care than any other nation, but much of it is diverted into the pockets of corporate CEOs, gobbled up in record profits for the healthcare industry, and consumed by administrative waste. Just last week the commission that advises Congress on Medicare reported that Medicare has to spend 12% more for care that is administered through private insurers than through traditional Medicare…

While Bush is unlikely to change his attitude, perhaps the next President will.  Christopher Lee in the Washington Post writes today that health is already a focus, with multiple candidates from both parties campaigning on the issue.

The problem?  The trendy policy prescription of “mandated insurance” does literally NOTHING to contain the healthcare costs that are bankrupting Americans.  As such, there is a huge vacuum for whatever candidate will have the guts to take on the private insurance companies that are the cause-not the fix-of those skyrocketing costs.  Such a SinglePayer system has been proven to work in every other developed nation in the world, but the candidates currently fear a backlash from the insurance lobby.  A real leader would take them on and fight to care for the sick and dying in this country who are living their thousands of “Walter Reed” tragedies.  Lee writes:

Although fixing health care is back in vogue, some analysts worry that the prescriptions of the presidential candidates miss the heart of the problem. All the talk about creating universal coverage has obscured the fact that most voters already have insurance, some analysts say, and what they are most concerned about is curbing costs.

“They want some more active government effort to change the way the insurance system works, and to put some more pressure on doctors and pharmaceuticals and hospitals to give a better deal to working people,” said Robert Blendon, a professor and public opinion expert at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The cost issue is a very important driving issue, and politicians haven’t figured out how to touch that nerve yet.”

Taking on costs is more difficult politically because it generally involves challenging powerful interests with a financial stake in the current system, including hospitals, doctors, and drug and insurance companies, said John Rother, policy director for AARP, the seniors lobby.

Even worse, the American Academy of Pediatrics thinks that the “mandated insurance” plans are a health hazard because they discourage parents from taking their kids to receive medical care.  Many of the plans that families will be mandated to buy are just junk insurance, with high deductibles and co-pays, and low caps.  Reuters:

But the American Academy of Pediatrics has joined a chorus of critics that fear high deductibles in the plans will lead patients to skip preventive care, such as immunizations and annual physicals in children. That could lead to costlier treatment down the road, for example, if a patient winds up in an emergency room.
“Faced with difficult choices, families may seek to ‘load up’ on a scheduled visit to save money or delay care until after the deductible is met,” the group wrote in the March issue of the journal, Pediatrics. The group represents 60,000 physicians in the United States specializing in treating children.

Only a SinglePayer system prioritizes care NOT insurance industry profits.  Policy wonks can read the report here.

Finally the anti-healthcare right-wing continues their jihad against America’s patients.  Their propaganda machine today kicks out lies that that the real problem in healthcare is people in this country use too much of it and that Medicare is too expensive.  Kick those patients and seniors out the door and we won’t have a healthcare problem anymore; plus it will be a boon to the mortuary industry. 

I take this as proof that the healthcare industry is worried by the growing national consensus that it’s time for change.

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.

(As the bumper sticker on my good friend’s car says, “Poverty and health care are moral values.” Now ain’t that the truth! – promoted by atdleft)

That title’s not about some far-off war fought by child soldiers; right here in America, kids without insurance end up being killed off by hospital neglect for the sin of not being attractive customers, according to a new report.  That’s why RNs demand that any healthcare reform guarantee a single standard of care for all patients–something that only a SinglePayer system provides.  And in case you don’t believe that private insurance corporations undermine quality healthcare, Congress just found $65 billion in a budget giveaway that can now be used to actually provide care.  Elsewhere, RNs continue their patient advocacy as Schwarzenegger’s healthcare plan runs into trouble, our public health system is on alert stage red, there’s a die-in in Cook County, and a new nurse-run clinic opens in New Orleans.

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of SinglePayer Healthcare.

Healthcare isn’t a commodity, it’s a right-and when we forget that, tragedy follows.  We’re reminded of this again in USA Today, which reports that:

WASHINGTON – Hospitalized children who lack health insurance are twice as likely to die from their injuries as those with insurance, a new study reports.
Uninsured children also are less likely to get expensive treatment or rehabilitation and are discharged earlier, says the study by the health care advocacy group Families USA.

Just one example:

Those with traumatic brain injuries were 32% less likely to receive aggressive treatment known as intracranial pressure monitoring. On average, they were discharged after five days, rather than eight days for insured patients.

This is what’s known as a multi-tiered health system.  Some patients can buy care, others can’t.

Please note that all “individual mandate” plans (requiring everyone to buy private insurance) offered by Romney, Schwarzenegger, Edwards, etc won’t change this dynamic at all.  Some kids will have gold-plated insurance; but poor kids will only have high-deductible, low-cap catastrophic insurance.  For-profit hospitals with cash registers where their hearts should be will aggressively treat the kids with good insurance and passively neglect those with bad insurance.  Only a SinglePayer health plan, like “Medicare for All,” guarantees a single standard of care for all Americans.

Responding to the story, the hospital industry gives us the weasel quote of the day:

“I consider the study irresponsible because it is not sufficiently thorough,” said Chip Kahn, president of the Federation of American Hospitals. “I’m worried that this will get people to focus on hospitals, rather than the kids.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports another way healthcare corporations are killing patients: private insurance corporations lobbied Congress to divert 65 billion care dollars away from patients and into their overhead, CEO paychecks, and lobbying budgets. 

A commission that advises Congress told lawmakers that Medicare spends about 12 percent more for care administered through private insurers than when the same care is provided through traditional Medicare.
The commission recommended eliminating that gap, which would save about $65 billion over five years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Rep. Frank Pallone, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health, said the report confirms his belief that the private insurers are overpaid. Pallone, D-N.J., said he wants to steer those overpayments into other health programs.
“The reason they were paid that extra amount is because of their relationship with the Republicans,” Pallone said. “It’s a special-interest advantage that was given to them because of their relationship with the Republican majority. There’s no other rationale for it.”

Stories like this are what motivate Registered Nurses to continue their tradition of taking patient advocacy from the bedside to the statehouse.  Here’s what they’re up to just today: Governor Schwarzenegger is having trouble finding supporters of his incredibly complex health insurance proposal, and is about to be hit with a series of ads from the California Nurses Association (CNA) making clear it makes things much, much worse.  Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the CNA, notes that our public health system is on alert stage red, with Schwarzenegger and Bush threatening to make it even worse.  Cook County RNs from the National Nurses Organizing Committee stage a die-in to fight for their patients after the Board of Commissioners proposes slashing the healthcare budget 17%.  And RNs in New Orleans, helped by CNA funding, have opened their own clinic as they fight to get healthcare to those affected by Katrina and its aftermath.

Finally, don’t think America is ready for SinglePayer healthcare?  America disagrees, as nyceve points out.

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.