Posts tagged ‘Public plan’
Watch Robert Reich, Former Secretary of Labor, On Why We Need a Public Option (And what it is!)
In a new video, Robert Reich speaks about the necessity of a public option in health care reform. Secretary Reich wrote us today summarizing his thoughts:
“A true public option is necessary to pressure private insurers to compete on quality and price, and to pressure drug companies and other medical providers to offer better deals. It’s the only way to expand coverage while continuing to reduce overall costs. Every American should have the freedom to choose a public insurance plan if they wish. ”
Watch Robert Reich now, and spread the word.
Watch and See Why We Need A Public Health Plan
An animated cartoon is worth a thousand words:
Wake Up, America!
In a column in the Washington Post on August 24th, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele purported to be worried about the damage health care reform will do to Medicare.
Really? Talk about raiding Medicare: Can you say “Medicare Advantage”? The last Administration privatized Medicare in 2003 with the Medicare Advantage system that lured private insurance into the program by paying huge subsidies of more than 14% on top of what the traditional, public Medicare program is paid for the same services.
Can you say “Part D”? The last Administration created the incomprehensible Part D prescription drug program that made Medicare drug coverage available ONLY through private plans and actually wrote into law a PROHIBITION against Medicare negotiating prices with drug companies. Talk about a boondoggle for Big Pharma!
The Bush Administration created a windfall for private insurance and pharmaceutical companies – all at the expense of the cost-effective public Medicare program, seniors, and taxpayers.
Come on, America, Wake Up! Don’t buy into using health care reform to create another welfare program for private insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Haven’t we given them enough by giving them Medicare?
So, I was at a Town Hall meeting …
Congressman Joe Courtney hosted a Town Hall meeting on Thursday (August 6th) to discuss health care reform. This is the third such meeting I’ve been at since mid July. The first two were sparsely attended and extremely civil. People listened, had questions, and told their own stories about problems and concerns regarding health care coverage. Last week’s meeting was entirely different. How?
- The room was packed. Standing room only. Hundreds of people in attendance, in the most out of the way area in CT on a summer night!
- The atmosphere was heated, literally and figuratively.
- People in opposition to health care reform had signs and repeated points. Suddenly there was talk of forced euthanasia, the Constitution, and limits on care for “retarded children” and older people. None of this was mentioned at the earlier meetings just a few weeks ago.
- When one woman ( a veteran) spoke about the problems getting health care coverage for her special-needs child she was shouted down with the question: “Why don’t you move?” When she asked back, “where is your compassion, my husband and I both served this country and have done everything right,” she was greeted with hoots.
- When a local farmer spoke about the loss of her family farm and cows and her brother’s chronic illness, she was told to hurry up and sit down.
- When a woman with cancer told about not being able to get a needed study covered by her private insurance, someone yelled out, “Why don’t you just switch plans?” As she had explained, she said, “I can’t, I have a pre-existing condition!” “Awww,” said a group seated together in the crowd, feigning sympathy.
Now I am reading about these same points being made and attitudes reflected in similar atmoshpheres throughout the country.
While many people did come to listen and learn, too many did not. Of course this was organized. It’s the only explanation for the dramatic difference between the meetings before and after the Congressional Recess and for the repeated talking points and style. Unfortunately, it appears to be aimed at intimidating, not at community building, discourse, or learning. While Congressman Courtney was prepared, respectful and even-tempered throughout, few people could have heard and too many people left scared and sad. What a shame.
For the health of our country, we need to reform. We need to back away from this noise soon, before someone gets hurt.
Oh – and we need health care reform with a true public option. It’s the only way to get coverage for everyone at a price taxpayers can afford.
Medicare, We Hardly Know Ya
44 years ago Medicare was enacted into law. All of today’s dire warnings about a public health option – socialism and government barring the doctor’s door – were made in opposition to Medicare. Despite such opposition from “conservative,” leaders, including Senator Bob Dole, Medicare passed.
Before Medicare, 50% of everyone 65 or older had NO health insurance. Now, as a result of Medicare, almost all older people are insured. Medicare, which is national, government-run health insurance, succeeded in insuring older people where private insurance failed. And, until the Bush Administration privatized Medicare with the extraordinarily subsidized private “Medicare Advantage” and Part D plans, Medicare was remarkably cost-effective too. It’s private Medicare, not the traditional, public program, that’s bleeding taxpayers of billions of dollars.
Medicare has been a success, fiscally and morally. It took on the job of insuring health coverage and care to people that private insurance had abandoned. Since 2003, on the other hand, private Medicare plans have cost us all tens of billions of dollars that went to support the private insurance industry, not to providing health care. In addition, private Medicare plans have too often engaged in marketing abuses and restrictive coverage practices.
As Paul Krugman recognizes in today’s New York Times, people with Medicare love it. They do not want government to fool around with the traditional program. Ironically, these are sometimes the same people who worry that a public health care option will cause long waits for health care and government invasions into their private medical decisions. They, and their family members, (which accounts for pretty much all of us), forget that the traditional Medicare program is a public health insurance option.
Hello, America, meet Medicare: Our 44 year-old public health insurance option that provides care to all its enrollees, anywhere in the country, and that has provided health and economic security for millions of older people, people with disabilities, and their families.
Happy anniversary, Medicare. Thank you for showing us what a true public insurance program can offer.
Yes, Virginia, A Public Health Insurance Option Will Save Money and Provide Access To Good Care
Once again, probing, independent minds have concluded that a public health option will save money and provide stable access to health care. A new Commonwealth Fund report finds “A public insurance plan can help drive new efficiencies in the system that will produce large cost reductions. Without a public plan, much of those potential savings will be lost,”
With a public option and a standard set of benefits across all private and public plans, everyone will be better able to access coverage they can understand, at a price taxpayers can afford.
We get it. We need health care reform. We need a public option. We don’t believe in fairy tales. Tell Congress!
Is Senator Lieberman Kidding?
I am appalled that Senator Lieberman has announced his opposition to a public plan in health care reform. Can he really believe a PUBLIC option can’t be afforded after our experience with Medicare and Medicare private plans! As Medicare has shown, private plans are what we can’t afford. Study after study shows that Medicare, our only experience with a national health insurance, is spending about 14% more in private plans than it would pay for the same care in the traditional, public Medicare program. The extra payments to private Medicare plans equal about $15 billion a year! Come on – if we really are worrying about cost, a public plan is what we CAN afford. It’s private insurance that’s killing Medicare and that will bankrupt health care “reform”.
Mr. President: Listen to Your Doctor!
The (President’s) doctor orders Medicare for all. He’s right. If conventional wisdom is correct, and a single payer system is not “on the table,” surely the President and reform leaders must at least insist on a public health insurance option.
If the goal of health care reform is to provide coverage for all as cost-effectively as possible, a public health insurance plan MUST be included in any health care reform package. We can’t afford to be scared again by dire warnings about Big Government. Big Insurance costs a lot more than a public program and it helps people get health coverage a lot less. Ask anyone who really knows about the public Medicare program and private Medicare plans.
Support a true public health insurance option! It’s best for people who need health care and most cost-effective for taxpayers. Isn’t that what the President and his doctor ordered?
From the Desk of Judith Stein
A True Public Plan: The Only Affordable Way to Provide Health
Care Reform
Have you read Paul Krugman in today’s NY Times? As he asks, what is health care reform for, people or insurance companies? We were already bamboozled into giving Medicare to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries in 2003. To the tune of about $15 billion a year! Are we really going to be scared into doing that again? Write your Congress people. Write the President. Tell them to support a TRUE public health plan option. And tell your friends to tell their congresspeople and president too!
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June 22, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Health Care Showdown
By PAUL KRUGMAN
America’s political scene has changed immensely since the last time a Democratic president tried to reform health care. So has the health care picture: with costs soaring and insurance dwindling, nobody can now say with a straight face that the U.S. health care system is O.K. And if surveys like the New York Times/CBS News poll released last weekend are any indication, voters are ready for major change.
The question now is whether we will nonetheless fail to get that change, because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like it’s 1993.
And yes, I mean Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogans — Government-run health care! Socialism! Europe! — hoping that someone still cares.
The polls suggest that hardly anyone does. Voters, it seems, strongly favor a universal guarantee of coverage, and they mostly accept the idea that higher taxes may be needed to achieve that guarantee. What’s more, they overwhelmingly favor precisely the feature of Democratic plans that Republicans denounce most fiercely as “socialized medicine” — the creation of a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers.
Or to put it another way, in effect voters support the health care plan jointly released by three House committees last week, which relies on a combination of subsidies and regulation to achieve universal coverage, and introduces a public plan to compete with insurers and hold down costs.
Yet it remains all too possible that health care reform will fail, as it has so many times before.
I’m not that worried about the issue of costs. Yes, the Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary cost estimates for Senate plans were higher than expected, and caused considerable consternation last week. But the fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance — even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts. Furthermore, Democratic leaders know that they have to pass a health care bill for the sake of their own survival. One way or another, the numbers will be brought in line.
The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by “centrist” Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements of reform. I use scare quotes around “centrist,” by the way, because if the center means the position held by most Americans, the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.
What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs.
Whatever may be motivating these Democrats, they don’t seem able to explain their reasons in public.
Thus Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska initially declared that the public option — which, remember, has overwhelming popular support — was a “deal-breaker.” Why? Because he didn’t think private insurers could compete: “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the day.” Um, isn’t the purpose of health care reform to protect American citizens, not insurance companies?
Mr. Nelson softened his stand after reform advocates began a public campaign targeting him for his position on the public option.
And Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota offers a perfectly circular argument: we can’t have the public option, because if we do, health care reform won’t get the votes of senators like him. “In a 60-vote environment,” he says (implicitly rejecting the idea, embraced by President Obama, of bypassing the filibuster if necessary), “you’ve got to attract some Republicans as well as holding virtually all the Democrats together, and that, I don’t believe, is possible with a pure public option.”
Honestly, I don’t know what these Democrats are trying to achieve. Yes, some of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex — but who in politics doesn’t? If I had to guess, I’d say that what’s really going on is that relatively conservative Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating the bipartisan center that used to run America.
But this fantasy can’t be allowed to stand in the way of giving America the health care reform it needs. This time, the alleged center must not hold.
From the Desk of Judith Stein….
Update: Real reform still possible
Apparently the President will support use of the Senate “Reconciliation” process to move health care reform if the super-majority of 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster can’t be garnered to pass a good plan. We heard this last week from a senior senator – he hoped a bipartisan vote would be possible, but indicated that certain principles need to be met by any health care bill, and that Reconciliation would be considered if those principles would otherwise be sacrificed. Amen to that.
Let’s not accept “something’s better than nothing” again! That mantra helped pass the 2003 law that gave us private Medicare Advantage, Part D, and windfalls for corporations – at the expense of Medicare participants and taxpayers. Been there, done that. This time we need a good plan with a solid public option that puts people above profits.
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April 24th
CMA Health Policy Consultants’ contacts in DC indicate that a public option in health care reform is in jeopardy. Is it possible that after all the problems Medicare has had with private plans, and the plans’ exorbitant additional costs, that we will actually let corporate greed trump the interests of sick people and taxpayers once again?
CMA Health Policy Blog 