This Isn’t Reform, It’s Robbery

By Chris Hedges
Percentage change since 2002 in average premiums paid to large US health-insurance
companies: +87%
Percentage change in the profits of the top ten insurance companies: +428%
Chances that an American bankrupted by medical bills has health insurance: 7 in 10
—Harper’s Index, September 2009

Capitalists, as my friend Father Michael Doyle says, should never be allowed near a
health care system. They hold sick children hostage as they force parents to bankrupt
themselves in the desperate scramble to pay for medical care. The sick do not have a
choice. Medical care is not a consumable good. We can choose to buy a used car or a new
car, shop at a boutique or a thrift store, but there is no choice between illness and health.
And any debate about health care must acknowledge that the for-profit health care
industry is the problem and must be destroyed. This is an industry that hires doctors and
analysts to deny care to patients in order to increase profits. It is an industry that causes
half of all bankruptcies. And the 20,000 Americans who died last year because they did
not receive adequate care condemn these corporations as complicit in murder.

The current health care debate in Congress has nothing to do with death panels or public
options or socialized medicine. The real debate, the only one that counts, is how much
money our blood-sucking insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health services are
going to be able to siphon off from new health care legislation. The proposed plans
rattling around Congress all ensure that the profits for these corporations will increase
and the misery for ordinary Americans will be compounded. The corporate state, enabled
by both Democrats and Republicans, is yet again cannibalizing the Treasury. It is yet
again pushing Americans, especially the poor and the working class, into levels of
despair and rage that will continue to fuel the violent, proto-fascist movements leaping up
around the edges of American society. And the traditional watchdogs—those in public
office, the press and citizens groups—are as useless as the perfumed fops of another era
who busied their days with court intrigue at Versailles. Canada never looked so good.

The Democrats are collaborating with lobbyists for the insurance industry, the
pharmaceutical industry and for-profit health care providers to craft the current health
care reform legislation. “Corporate and industry players are inside the tent this time,”
says David Merritt, project director at Newt Gingrich’s Center for Health
Transformation, “so there is a vacuum on the outside.” And these lobbyists have already
killed a viable public option and made sure nothing in the bills will impede their growing
profits and capacity for abuse.

“It will basically be a government law that says you have to buy their defective product,”
says Dr. David Himmelstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a founder of
Physicians for a National Health Plan. “Next the government will tell us a Pinto in every
garage, a lead-coated toy to every child and melamine-laced puppy chow for every dog.”
“Health insurance is not a race to the top; it is a race to the bottom,” he told me from
Cambridge, Mass. “The way you make money is by abusing people. And if a public-
option plan is not ready and willing to abuse patients it is stuck with the expensive
patients. The premiums will go up until it is noncompetitive. The conditions that have
now been set for the plans include a hobbled public option. Under the best-case scenario
there will be tens of millions [who] will remain uninsured at the outset, and the number
will climb as more and more people are priced out of the insurance market.”

The inclusion of these corporations in the crafting of health care legislation has not
stopped figures like Rick Scott, the former head of theColumbia/HCA health care
company, from attempting to sabo tage any plan. Scott’s company was forced to pay a
$1.7 billion fraud settlement—the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history—
for stealing hundreds of millions from taxpayers by overbilling for medical care. Scott,
who made his money primarily from Medicare, is now saturating the airwaves in a
reputed $20 million ad campaign that is stoking the anger and fear of many Americans.
His ads are coordinated by CRC Public Relations, the group that masterminded the
“Swift boat” attacks against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

“They are using our money to campaign against us,” Dr. Himmelstein told me. “The
money for these commercials came from health care interests that collect fees from
American patients. We experienced this before in Massachusetts. We ran a ballot
initiative for universal health care in 2000 and the insurance industry spent $5 million on
it, including the insurance company I am insured by. They used my premiums to smear
an idea that 70 percent in Massachusetts, according to polls, favored before this smear
campaign. Universal health care was narrowly defeated.”

The bills now in Congress will, at best, impose on the country the failed model in
Massachusetts. That model will demand that Americans buy health insurance from
private insurers. There will be some subsidies for the very poor but not for anyone above
a modest income. Insurers will be allowed to continue to jack up premiums, including for
the elderly. The bankruptcies due to medical bills and swelling premiums will mount
along with rising deductibles and co-payments. Health care will be beyond the reach of
many families. In Massachusetts one in six people who have mandated insurance still say
they cannot afford care, and 30,000 people were evicted from the state program this
month because of budget cuts. Expect the same debacle nationwide.

“For someone my age who is making $40,000 a year you are required to lay out $5,000
for an insurance premium for coverage that covers nothing until you have spent $2,000
out of pocket,” Himmelstein said. “You are $7,000 out of pocket before you have any
coverage at all. For most people that means you are already bankrupt before you have
insurance. If anything, that has made them worse off. Instead of having that $5,000 to
cover some of their medical expenses they have laid it out in premiums.”

The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care—$7,129 per
capita—although 45.7 million Americans remain without health coverage and millions
more are inadequately covered. There are 14,000 Americans a day now losing their
health coverage. A report in the journal Health Affairs estimates that, if the system is left
unchanged, one of every five dollars spent by Americans in 2017 will go to health
coverage. Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third, 31 percent,
of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would
save more than $400 billion per year, enough, Physicians for a National Health Plan
points out, to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans. But the
proposed America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 (H.R. 3200 in the House)
will, rather than cut costs, add an estimated $239 billion over 10 years to the federal
deficit. This is very good for the corporations. It is very bad for us.

The lobbyists have, as they did with the obscene bailouts for banks and investment firms,
hijacked legislation in order to fleece the citizen. The five largest private health insurers
and their trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, spent more than $6 million on
lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug maker, spent more
than $9 million during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three months of this year. The
Washington Post reported that up to 30 members of Congress from both parties who hold
key committee memberships have major investments in health care companies totaling
between $11 million and $27 million. President Barack Obama’s director of health care
policy, who will not discuss single-payer as an option, has served on the boards of several
health care corporations.

Obama and the congressional leadership have shut out advocates of single-payer. The
press, including papers such as The New York Times, treats single-payer as a fringe
movement. The television networks rarely mention it. And yet between 45 and 60 percent
of doctors favor single-payer. Between 40 and 62 percent of the American people,
including 80 percent of registered Democrats, want universal, single-payer not-for-profit
health care for all Americans. The ability of the corporations to discredit and silence
voices that represent at least half of the population is another sad testament to the power
of our corporate state.

“We are considering a variety of striking efforts for early in the fall,” Dr. Himmelstein
said, “including protests outside state capitals by doctors around the country, video links
of conferences in 70 or 80 cities around the country, with protests and potential doctors
chaining themselves to the fence of the White House.”

Make sure you join them.

http://www.change-links.org/September2009c.pdf