This is more of a national story, but considering the importance of the health care debate in California, I think this is a significant development.

WASHINGTON, April 16 – AARP, the lobby for older Americans, announced Monday that it would become a major participant in the nation’s health insurance market, offering a health maintenance organization to Medicare recipients and several other products to people 50 to 64 years old.

The products for people under 65 include a managed care plan, known as a preferred provider organization, and a high-deductible insurance policy that could be used with a health savings account.

When the new coverage becomes available next year, AARP will be the largest provider of private insurance to Medicare recipients. In addition to the new H.M.O., AARP will continue providing prescription drug coverage and policies to supplement Medicare, known as Medigap coverage.

William D. Novelli, the chief executive of AARP, said, “In launching these initiatives, we are driven by our mission to create a healthier America.”

This is the equivalent of the Sierra Club buying an oil company.

I suppose it’s to be expected that the AARP, a major power broker with a keen interest in seeing responsible health care legislation coming out of Congress, would step into the breach with the failure to pass that legislation.  But once you put this interest group into the insurance industry, it’s going to be phenomenally hard, next to impossible, for them to be a part of any health care solution that marginalizes or removes the insurance industry.

Pete Stark preferred to look on the bright side:

Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on health, welcomed AARP executives to the Medicare managed care market. “If they provide quality care at a fair price,” Mr. Stark said in an interview, “they could be a wonderful addition.”

But Judith A. Stein, director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a nonprofit group that counsels people on Medicare, said, “The new arrangements with insurance companies create a tremendous number of potential conflicts for AARP, which is a powerhouse, perceived as the most important voice for older people.” […]

“AARP will not be perceived as a truly independent advocate on Medicare if it’s making hefty profits by selling insurance products that provide Medicare coverage,” Ms. Stein said. “AARP’s role in this market could give a big boost to the privatization of Medicare.”

The conflicts of interest here are enormous.  The insurance industry has a definitive interest in their own survival.  Yet we know that a for-profit manager of health care is always going to be more concerned with profit than caring for patients.  In fact, the AARP tipped their hand within the article, saying that they would not be able to deny coverage to everyone between the ages of 50 and 64 (that should read “We won’t cover really sick people”).  Kevin Drum writes:

One of the great arguments among universal healthcare advocates is whether to press for a system that continues to make use of private insurance companies or to press for a purer single-payer system that gets rid of insurance companies altogether. The argument for working with the insurance industry is a political one: if we try to eliminate a role for insurance companies they’ll fight us tooth and nail, and that’s the last thing we need. Universal healthcare has enough powerful enemies as it is. The argument for pure single-payer is mostly (though not exclusively) economic: in our current system, healthcare administration uses up about 30% of all healthcare dollars, compared to 10% or less in countries with national systems […]

I think they’ll fight national healthcare just as hard no matter what the plan is, because the private health insurance industry is so big that even a reduced role means an enormous loss of revenue for them. What’s more, I think they’ll also judge (correctly) that even a reduced role is just the camel’s nose under the tent that will eventually lead to the end of private insurance entirely.

So trying to make nice with the insurance industry is a mug’s game. They just aren’t ever going to be on our side, and frankly, I don’t blame them. All that said, however, the fight against the entrenched interests of the insurance industry gets a lot harder when an organization that might have provided significant lobbying muscle for a single-payer system is depending on a private insurance business line for a big chunk of its revenue. It’s definitely not pleasant news for the good guys.

Obviously, the AARP as an entity cannot be stopped from forming a corporation and making a profit.  And generally they’ve been good on health care.  But you can’t very well act to change the system when you’re part of the system.  Also, because they’re such a political force, lawmakers are going to be a little more wary of shutting down the HMO of such a big benefactor.

As healthcare activists, here’s one thing we hear all the time: “of course SinglePayer is the only way to fix healthcare; but the country’s not ready for it yet; let’s go slow, instead.” Meaning the country’s ready for failed reforms and an even more powerful insurance industry?.  Commentator Maggie Mahar looks at this argument, notes its parallels with the passage of Medicare, and argues that we actually are ready for SinglePayer reform now.  Meanwhile, we find labor’s advocacy for SinglePayer increasing, while Robert Samuelson, Mitt Romney, and Arnold Schwarzenegger continue their work enriching the healthcare corporations.

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

-In a rebuke to the “yes…but” crowd of people who admit SinglePayer is the only way to fix healthcare BUT think it’s not time yet, author Maggie Mahar writes of the striking parallels with the campaign for Medicare:

Ultimately, President Johnson succeeded by pulling doctors into his tent {for Medicare}. This could be done today–polls show that roughly 50% of U.S. physicians favor national health insurance. But public support was key.
And today, public support is building, especially among aging baby-boomers.
If you are forty and healthy, you may not feel the change in the zeitgeist. But today, boomers over 50 are beginning to face serious health problems. They talk about healthcare with an intensity that they once reserved for real estate. …
To build public support for radical health care reform we also need to train our sights on those on those who are making excessive profits in our money-driven health care system. A good campaign needs a good enemy-and the for-profit health care industry fits the bill perfectly.
Even Obama has suggested (however cautiously) that we should being to question the profitability of U.S. healthcare: “Another, more controversial area we need to look at is how much of our health care spending is going toward the record-breaking profits earned by the drug and health care industry,” he noted in January. “It’s perfectly understandable for a corporation to try and make a profit, but when those profits are soaring higher and higher each year while millions lose their coverage and premiums skyrocket, we have a responsibility to ask why.”
That Obama would dare to make such a remark shows how the mood of the country is changing. 

–PNHP activist Don McCanne joins Maggie Mahar at TPM Book Club and lays out a compelling case for why only SinglePayer will actually work.

-Labor continues to rally around HR 676, John Conyers’ SinglePayer bill, as the 100,000 members of the New York Capitol Area Labor Federation endorse the bill.  This makes SinglePayer the only real healthcare plan with a constituency (except that health insurers love mandated insurance), and ensures that Democratic Presidential candidates will have to grapple with this as some point.  They’re joined by The two largest healthcare unions in California, who are both working for SinglePayer.

–Meanwhile, discredited grump Robert Samuelson brilliantly figures out who’s causing the healthcare crisis: old people! 
He writes:

In our careless self-absorption, we are committing a political and economic crime against our children and perhaps — when they awaken to their victimization — even ourselves.

No mention of the mercenary insurance corporations bleeding us dry?  Bizarre.

–Employers continue to drop health coverage, pushing more risk onto individuals.

–And finally, even Mitt Romney seems ashamed of his healthcare plan mandating people sign up with private insurers.  Why aren’t other politicians embarrassed to copy it?  Arnold Schwarzenegger is not only copying it-but dreaming of the penalties he’ll impose if people don’t sign up.

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.

(cross posted to MyDD and dKos. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

It’s now been one year (ok, one year tomorrow, but who’s quibbling?) since the passage of Massachusetts’s supposed “universal” health care plan, and perhaps we could learn a little from the experiment.  Now, Massachusetts and California are very different states. First of all, prior to passage MA had about 375,000 uninsureds. California has over 6.5 million uninsureds.  That’s a lot.  Throw in demographic differences and the shape of the government budget, and you have some fairly different situations. 

But, there are still some lessons available in our cross-continent counterpart.  Flip it!

First, universal is a state of mind. More of a nirvana like concept that will only be attained by single payer.  Face it, it’s just not going to happen as long as private insurance companies are acting as bagmen for Wall Street to victimize the nation’s infirmed. Since enactment, the rate of uninsured has gone down by 110,000 or about 1/3! Whoop-de-frickin’ doo.

Now, the “individual mandate part has still yet to go into action, so that will make things all better right? Right? I mean, forcing people to buy insurance from the bagmen will work, right? Well, I should hope so, as it’s going to cost the middle class dearly:

Marilyn Glazer-Weisner, 55, of Swampscott is one of those feeling squeezed. Glazer-Weisner said she and her husband Alan, 56, earn too much to qualify for subsidized plans.

Glazer-Weisner says she’s paying $534 a month for a plan with a $2,000 deductible.

“It’s way too much money. I’m self-employed and my husband is self-employed. We’re both in our 50s. We can’t afford it. We’re getting killed,” she said. “I’m a cancer survivor for seven years and I’d like to stay that way.” (AP@Boston Globe 4/11/07)

See, that’s the thing about individual mandate, it uses revenue from healthy, formerly uninsureds, to pay for money-losing patients.  And that’s fine, and dandy, but why do we need a middle man in there? See, who are these healthy uninsureds that we are propping up Blue Cross and Kaiser with? They are young and lower to middle class. Individual mandate is a tax that strikes the middle class. It is an overwhelmingly regressive tax.

And even if you could stomach a regressive tax, where does the money go? Not to be reinvested in the health care system, but to Wall Street corporatists (like Bill Frist, MD). SO, Massachusetts imposes a regressive tax and then hands it over to the insurance industry aka what Harry Reid calls the “enemy of most everything we do today.” 

So, sure, if that’s what you’re into, break out the bubbly. But make sure you’ve got $553 left over to pay for your monthly health insurance premium.

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.