Democrats Debate Universal Coverage Candidates on health-care reform: all talk and no solutions

[Omaha Steve]

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/May2007/sullivan0507.html

Democrats Debate Universal Coverage
Candidates on health-care reform: all talk and no solutions

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By Kip Sullivan

The U.S. has entered a new phase in its everlasting debate about how to fix the health care mess. As Drew Altman, president of the fastidiously nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, put it to the Washington Post in March, “We’re at the beginning of the next great debate about health reform.” We are entering this stage not because Americans have changed (they have supported universal health insurance by large majorities since the Depression), but because the nation’s economic and political elite have become much more willing to call for universal health insurance or, as the more timid of them say, “affordable health care.” America has not heard this much chatter about health-care reform from business leaders, labor leaders, the media, and politicians since the years 1992 to 1994 when universal coverage through HMOs was all the rage.

The health insurance industry itself is contributing to the chatter. This industry—which has opposed universal health insurance since its inception in the early 1930s, and which funded the Harry and Louise ads opposing Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Health Security Act of 1993—has come to understand that its survival depends on how state legislatures and Congress respond to the growing number of uninsured. The industry correctly perceives that it will collapse unless government can be persuaded to funnel more dollars to insurance companies to replace the dollars the industry is losing as employers flee the health insur- ance market.

On November 13, 2006, the insurance industry executed what we might call a 150-degree turn when its trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), released a proposal calling for universal coverage of children within three years and 95 percent coverage of adults within ten years. Not surprisingly, AHIP proposed that the taxpayers subsidize the purchase of insurance from health insurance companies. In January of this year, a coalition, including AHIP and a rogues’ gallery of establishment groups— AARP, the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer, and the Chamber of Commerce of the United States— called on the U.S. taxpayer to halve the number of uninsured by financing richer tax credits for people who buy health insurance and by expanding Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

The labor movement is also contributing to the renewed pressure for reform. On March 6, the 47-member executive committee of the AFL-CIO endorsed, at long last, achieving universal coverage by expanding Medicare to cover the entire U.S. population. The AFL-CIO could not bring itself to use the phrase “single payer,” but because a Medicare-for-all program is the equivalent of a single-payer system, the federation’s announcement was an indirect endorsement of single payer. Under a single-payer system, one government agency, not hundreds of insurance companies, reimburses clinics and hospitals and sets limits on what clinics, hospitals, and drug companies can charge. The AFL-CIO’s endorsement of Medicare for all was hailed by single-payer advocates around the country. “We recognize that the AFL-CIO is unlikely to lead the charge for single payer without more grassroots pressure,” said Dr. Ida Hellender, director of Physicians for a National Health Program, one of the leading single-payer organizations in the U.S., “but we feel this endorsement is a very important step for labor and a significant boost for the single-payer movement.”
sullivantitleA

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the largest of the unions to break with the AFL-CIO two years ago, has been much less helpful to the single-payer movement, but it has worked hard to intensify the health-care reform debate. Andy Stern, SEIU’s president, has made it clear he opposes any system that continues to rely on employers fund it, as well as a single-payer system.

Stern made his dislike of single payer obvious at a forum sponsored by the Brookings Institute in June 2006. After blasting the current employer-based system as unsustainable, he criticized “people who say let’s just go to Medicare for all…. There are not going to be single payers…in America,” he told the audience. Then Stern uttered this spectacular non sequitur: “I think the single-payer issue is a stalking horse for I am not sure what because we are going to have a multi-payer system….” In an interview with the Los Angeles Times on March 12, that is, six days after the AFL-CIO endorsed Medicare for all, Stern conceded that “single payer would be the most efficient system,” but then he repeated his claim that “Americans want to have an American solution, not a Canadian solution.” Stern did not explain why a universal system built on Medicare would be “un-American.”

FULL story at link.

[1932]

1. His criticism of Edwards' plan is really narrow:

why not just open up Medicare/ can it become a single-payer system?

But Edwards’s larger point—that establishing a single-payer system in one piece of legislation is going to be very difficult—is well taken. No single-payer system in the world was installed overnight. (California came close to pulling that off last year. The legislature in that state enacted a single-payer bill last summer, only to see Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger veto it in September.)
...

Edwards’s method—letting market forces create a single-payer gradually—might work. (If it did, the irony would be indescribably delicious.) And it might not. The critical questions are whether the Medicare-like programs he has in mind would be true copies of the existing Medicare program, and whether these programs would start off with a large enough enrollee base to withstand “adverse selection,” which means disproportionate enrollment by sick people.
...

Edwards deserves credit for putting a detailed proposal in front of the public and for being willing to describe single payer as good policy. But he needs to explain why creating numerous mini-Medicare programs for the non-elderly is a better idea than building on the existing Medicare base of 43 million people.

[papau]

4. Edwards Plan works - there'd be no "adverse selection" to the lowest cost alternative -no other plan

that has a chance in hell of doing something mote than subsidizing the Health insurance companies is on offer except DK's Medicare for all (which I like) - but DK is polling at 1%

[papau]

2. Thank God Dem Senator Conrad has given up for now any Social Security /Health Change

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070518/pl_nm/usa_congress_boomers_dc

Retirement, health reform may be delayed: senator

By Richard Cowan Fri May 18, 6:21 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fixing U.S. retirement and health-care programs that threaten to bankrupt the government might be impossible before the next president arrives in 2009, a Democratic senator who had hoped to broker a deal this year said on Friday.

..."politically difficult subjects such as tax increases, lower benefits and Social Security privatization. Bush has unsuccessfully promoted the latter."

Conrad and others have insisted all topics be included in the negotiation. "

Indeed, Obama and Conrad say the same thing "all options are on the table" re Soc Sec - thank God its delayed.

AS TO SOCIAL SECURITY NOTHING NEEDS TO BE DONE BASED ON THE 3rd OFFICIAL TRUSTEES PROJECTION. Based on the 2nd projection removing the wage cap while also using the higher wages for higher benefits solves that projection. If you want to get real conservative based on the 1st projection, throw in increasing the retirement age from Reagan's 67 to 70 beginning at 2030 at 1/12th of a year per year, while retaining early retirement earliest age as age 62.

The Medical cost crisis has but one solution - single payer national health. Obama now endorses the Hillary health data system improvements and he estimates they'd save $75 billion - like that will affect a $2 trillion cost that grows over $100 billion due to inflation each year.

[antigop]

5. Conrad needs to go

If he won't even commit to keeping Social Security, then he shouldn't call himself a Democrat.

And who are the "others"?

"Conrad and others have insisted all topics be included in the negotiation."

[Selatius]

3. To support mandatory health insurance laws instead of single-payer is supporting corporate welfare

We are tired of being forced into that kind of scheme. We don't want another mandatory auto insurance fiasco that swept this country already because in many states that require it, there is no exemption for poor people who cannot afford auto insurance, so when they get pulled over, they get punished by getting a ticket, the very same people who are least able to pay. The only winner here is the insurance company. We don't need a repeat of that.