Health care? Bush doesn’t care.

I’m getting sick and tired of this health care crisis. Isn’t that ironic? Fortunately, I love irony, so I feel enough energy and anger to continue the fight. Here’s the latest roundup of what’s-what, who’s-who, and what have they done for us lately:

What’s What – You can find comparisons of the Senate and House versions of the pending health care legislation in the New York Times here. Short story: The Senate bill helps children increasingly over five years, funding the increase in the federal health care program through increased tobacco taxes; the House bill helps many of the rest of us along with kids over ten years, funding the increase through higher tobacco taxes and reduced planned payments to for-profit HMOs that offer private Medicare coverage, while increasing subsidies to low-income Medicare beneficiaries for health care and stand-alone prescription drug coverage.

Who’s Who –Democratic and Republican Representatives voted generally along party lines to pass the House bill, which President Bush (motto: “Who cares?”) threatens to veto. David Lazarus of the San Francisco Chronicle (July 25) sets the page on fire with, “President Bush says he’ll veto any such legislation, warning that it would lead the nation ‘down the path to government-run health care for every American.’ Like that would be a bad thing. What’s particularly galling about Bush’s position is that it’s coming from a man who just underwent a colonoscopy performed at the taxpayer-funded, state-of-the-art medical facility at Camp David by an elite team of doctors from the taxpayer-funded National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.” Read the rest of Lazarus’s argument on why government-run health care wouldn’t be such a bad thing for all of us here.

What have they done for us lately? – More has been done to us than for us, but you knew that. Highlights:

The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights reports (July12) that since 2001 the top five health insurers and their lobbying associations have contributed $3,395,896 to Governor Schwarzenegger, members of the California legislature, and political parties in California alone.

The Center for Policy and Budget Priorities states (August 1 revision), in comparing the House and Senate bills and the Bush administration’s health care budget proposals in 2006, “An analysis of the health-insurance tax proposals that the Bush Administration included in its budget last year, conducted by the very economist (Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T.) whose work on SCHIP crowd-out has been touted in recent weeks by HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt and conservative activists, found that 77 percent of the benefits under the Administration’s health tax proposals would go to people who already are insured.  This is more than double the crowd-out percentage under the House and Senate bills.  (Professor Gruber’s analysis of the Administration tax proposals also found that the net result of the [Bush administration’s] proposals would be to modestly increase the ranks of the uninsured, because a number of employers would respond by dropping coverage.)” [The italics are mine.] But wait, the CPBP’s research has also found that “In many such cases, particularly among the low-income families that the House and Senate bills target, the private insurance that is available to the family may contain significant gaps in the coverage it provides or may require large deductibles and cost-sharing charges that the family has difficulty affording.”  Thus, Professor Gruber explains that “although public programs suffer from significant crowd-out effects, they still constitute the most efficient way to cover more of the uninsured.”

Then there are the insidious ways big pharma and insurance affect us that you don’t notice until a hyper-vigilant person points out the little clues. Listen carefully to a drug company’s commercial – it will urge you to “ask your prescriber,” not your physician. What’s behind this? We know doctors are unhappy with insurance companies’ restrictions upon the quality of care they can deliver, and doctors know that for-profit insurance paperwork administration consumes 31 percent of our health costs. Surely you’ve noticed for years that “nurse practitioners” have become an increasing presence in doctors’ offices, as a cost-cutting measure – and I must observe that I have received excellent care from nurse practitioners. But have you noticed the growing number of “advanced registered nurse practitioners” at mini-clinics in retail stores with pharmacies? (See map of Minute Clinics in CVS stores around W. Palm Beach, Florida, an area with a large senior citizen population. Minute Clinic is just one example of this growing for-profit service industry.) Because this new certification allows nurses to prescribe drugs, some of the best nurses are leaving traditional nursing for this specialization. They can bill insurers and be reimbursed in the same way as physicians. So medical school applications fall, and there’s a shortage of traditional nurses. Big pharma and insurance are influencing medical professionals to “follow the money” to the most lucrative set of activities in their field – not caring for patients in a holistic manner, but prescribing drugs at the site where they can be dispensed, to the advantage of the retailer. What? You thought those in-store pharmacy clinics were there for your convenience?

The detrimental effects of our for-profit health insurance industry on this nation’s overall longevity and well-being has been convincingly documented. Only those in power who are more convinced by the green lining their pockets than by the black ink of objective research remain unconvinced that a federal health care program is the best solution.

The Associated Press reports on August 3 that the Senate vote (68-31) would, for the first time in Bush’s tenure, be enough to override a presidential veto of the Senate bill (which would then have to be reconciled with the more ambitious House bill) . The New York Times (August 1) quotes Republican governors calling Bush “oblivious to the political risks” of a veto. Political risks? Never mind that a veto is even more oblivious to the health risks of the electorate.

We need to remind our elected officials that WE elected them. Our taxes pay them and pay for their (federal program) health care. Let’s tell them what we want. Go on, write the email – click here.

Tags: Center-for-Policy-and-Budget-Priorities, David-Lazarus, Foundation-for-Taxpayer-and-Consumer-Rights, SCHIP

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 11:03 am and is filed under Directors Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.