May 14, 2009

• Single Payer Health Care

  You probably didn’t see this on the news on May 5th:

  
  And you probably didn’t hear about this story on May 12th either.

  The dirty little secret of the Health Care Debate is that the range of options for potential reform is being carefully controlled to only include certain possibilities. The whole range of possibilities represented by Single Payer systems are being purposefully excluded.

  Or March 5th, President Obama convened a health care summit at the White House to discuss possible options for providing Universal Healthcare to the American people. In his remarks on that day Obama stated categorically that “every voice has to be heard. Every idea must be considered. Every option must be on the table. There should be no sacred cows. “

  And yet in the meeting, of the 120 plus attendees there was one lone advocate of Single Payer or government funded National Health Insurance: Democratic Michigan Congressman John Conyers.  And he was a last minute addition after protest.

  Whatever you think of Single Payer, surely this seems oddly out of balance.  A CBS News survey taken in 2009 suggests that 59% of Americans favor the Government providing some for of Health Insurance at least for emergencies with 49% favoring Universal Health Insurance that covers everything provided by the Government.  Only 32% trust Private Enterprise to provide it.  This is up from 40% who believed the Government should provide some form of coverage in 1979.

  But surely even 40% of the actual populace favoring a system would have been enough to merit SIGNIFICANT representation in a Health Care Summit? With 59%, I would think that half of the representatives or more would be national health care advocates.

  That alone would be enough of a reason but when you take into account another survey from the Annals of Internal Medicine that suggests that 59% of Physicians are also in support of similar Government provided National Health Insurance the exclusion seems almost beyond belief. If the Summit is supposed to bring together experts in the Health Care field to come up with an answer to our looming Health Care crises, how is it that the actual Doctors themselves don’t count as experts enough to warrant significant representation at the Summit? At least 59% of them seem to have almost no representation at all.

  Congressional discussion on Health Care reform seemed likewise poised to follow the President’s lead and wholly exclude Single Payer as even a option worth considering. But you can’t wholly shut out the opinions of the majority and expect things to go smoothly. Hence the protests above.

  But what’s striking is how utterly dismissive the Congressmen are of the protesters who have come to have their voices heard. They can be heard laughing at the protesters as if they were some kind of a joke or amusement. A distraction from their far more “important” work of creating a system that represents the wants and needs of every party *except* for what the majority of the American people want.

  So, to deserve such ridicule and dismissal Single Payer must be some kind of a godawful system right? I mean it’s gotta be downright terrible. All those ignorant masses must be deluded to even consider it.

  And yet, it’s not. Australia and Canada both have pure Single Payer Universal Health Care systems. Britain has a slightly modified Universal National Health Insurance program where the government must first commision services that their universal fund can be spent toward. Germany and Belgium also have a Universal National Health Insurance System, the difference there being that they require compulsory private and public contributions to their health insurance funds. 

  So logic would suggest that these countries must all be doing terribly. If National Health Insurance doesn’t work and should be dismissed the outcomes in other nations foolhardy enough to adopt such plans must be suffering the consquences. And yet in a Commonwealth Fund study in 2007 of health care in the U.S. comparing it with that of Germany, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the U.S. ranked last overall and last in most of the metrics used.

  That alone should be enough to suggest that our current health care system is a disaster compared to that of other nations. But if you need more evidence read here: http://cthealth.server101.com/the_case_for_universal_health_care_in_the_united_states.htm

  The interesting thing about all this is that Obama actually has stated that he agrees with Single Payer. When he was a candidate.

  When speaking to the Illinois AFL-CIO on June 30, 2003 he said:

  “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program.” (applause) “I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

  And yet Single Payer is not on the table. It’s not in the news. It’s not being discussed.

  Obama clarified his stance later since 2007 to one apparently more amenable to the establishment. He now says:

  “Here’s the bottom line. If I were designing a system from scratch I would probably set up a single-payer system…But we’re not designing a system from scratch…And when we had a health care forum before I set up my health care plan here in Iowa there was a lot of resistance to a single-payer system. So what I believe is we should set up a series of choices….Over time it may be that we end up transitioning to such a system. For now, I just want to make sure every American is covered…I don’t want to wait for that perfect system…”

  Which is significantly better I suppose than believing that Single Payer is stupid and only fully Privatized systems should be implemented which many of his opponents believe.

  Still, the question to ask is why in the process of transitioning to a better system rather than trying to implement it all at once would or should the administration and Congress shut out the voices that advocated Single Payer? Do they believe that such persons have nothing to contribute? That you can learn nothing by examining Single Payer systems and incorporating some of their ideas into whatever hybrid system we ultimately come up with?

  That seems irrational.  By leaving out most advocates of Government funded Health Care, Congress and the President marginalize Single Payer advocates, reducing their influence and insuring that whatever system we do come up with will be all that much further away from the “perfect system” Obama envisions. We can get a lot closer to that RIGHT NOW if our leaders and the media were willing to treat this issue fairly and allow an open and honest debate to develop.

  I for one am glad that protesters are going to demonstrate at Congress for Single Payer Health Care. Doctors and Nurses and regular people like you and me are taking time out of their lives and risking arrest in order to make sure that all of our voices are heard in the health care debate and not just the special interests who spend millions to lobby Congress to ensure that they get exactly what they want.

  These people should not be laughed at. They should be given medals. They’re heroes. And all of our futures may well depend on all of us becoming more like them.

  • 3:31 pm
  • 3 Comments