By Donna Smith
CHICAGO – Over the past 365 days, I have spent 72 days on a bus touring various states and talking about healthcare reform. I’ve learned a lot about a lot. I’ve been in 39 states and the District of Columbia. The most critical lesson I’ve learned, of course, is that most of us share common wishes for one another: good health, a safe home and happy kids with bright futures.
That’s the bottom line for many Americans, not extreme wealth or social status or even extravagant vacations. Good health, a safe home and happy kids.
Sounds pretty simple to me. But I also learned we have some pretty wide ranging ideas about how to achieve those goals. We’ve been taught some fairly poor strategies for coping, like trusting people who do not have our best interests at heart to somehow protect us. Health insurance companies are only interested in our health and well-being to the extent that we do not use the benefits we pay for. The less we use the healthcare system, the more our insurance companies can retain of our premiums.
But then there are the hospitals, clinics and other providers. They make money and stay in business when we do use the services they provide. If we stay completely well, that’s the best possible scenario for almost everybody – ourselves and our insurance companies – but not for our hospitals and other providers as they need us to use services and equipment. But providers do love healthcare reform plans that include the notion that more of us will bring a payment source with us – via private insurance or properly funded public programs -- when the pesky human tendency to get sick and need care does strike.
We are still but fuel for the economic engines in force in the healthcare industry. That’s the reality. Under a complex private-public mix of coverage, the economic engine of the health industry stays fueled – even if that costs us billions or even trillions more than a more humane and simple single payer, publicly funded plan.
Keeping the for-profit motives alive in healthcare may have become even more likely now – with an economic collapse and Wall Street losses and high unemployment claims and record foreclosures. Any tweaking of any of our major economic systems will be done with an eye to what that tweaking might, could or should do to the overall economic health of the nation right now and in the very near future.
And healthcare certainly is one of those major economic systems. It's a huge percentage of the GDP (gross domestic product) and growing. No one tinkers with the GDP right now without some serious nods to those with the economic power in this nation.
Any plan that even might cause more uncertainty for the economy will be less likely to succeed – provided we have the right information upon which to make these choices. Just as we were lured into war in Iraq based on faulty intelligence, trusting predictions that come from tainted sources or from even normally reliable sources now driven by alternate agendas could lead to devastating consequences.
I listened in on a conference call yesterday hosted by Families USA during which those who wish to create a Massachusetts-like plan for the nation’s healthcare system reported all the progress they already have in the U.S. Senate – reports of open hearings, meetings with all the major "stakeholders" at the infamous table, fore-shadowing the huge "war chest" gathering even now to push the agenda for the already drafted plan, and the misleading statements about a lack of any progress on healthcare reform in the House.
Anyone working on healthcare reform knows there has been a bill – HR676, The National Health Insurance Act – with 91 co-sponsors as offered by Rep. John Conyers, D-MI, for a very long time in the House. For those now working on reform to completely ignore that effort spoke volumes to me about the misinformation and lying that even those who sound like reformers will use to push their agenda forward. If their position is strong enough the truth is no threat at all.
Acknowledging HR676, publicly funded, privately delivered healthcare – truthfully – must be part of this discussion. Would this new and powerful health reform coalition I heard on the call truly like to discard Conyers’ work and dishonor the effort he and many, many members of the Congressional Black Caucus along with scores of other Congressional members have made on this issue? Really? Now? That’s mind-boggling stuff, as far as I’m concerned.
The call was tightly controlled – we were told that hundreds of callers were on the line. We were told that even with hundreds of callers on the line, the information provided was intended to be "off the record." Nuts. I cannot accept that any group would think all of us on that call are so naïve to believe they had somehow allowed us into their confidence and trusted us with some level of inclusiveness in the process.
It was painfully clear that the process is thundering forward with only certain chosen stakeholders. Notably, veterans and the disabled are not among those stakeholders, we were told. Not everyone can participate, we were told, as the process cannot withstand too many voices.
It felt a little like the good old boys hitching up their pants and telling the little people how lucky they are to be invited to listen – shhhh, but don’t tell anyone. With all the power and all the money and all the mute buttons under tight control, we won’t get the best answers, we’ll get just what we’re spoon fed. That’s not what our new President said he would value in the process going forward, and all of us will have to be honest enough and brave to hold him to that.
We need and have to see the realities about how a Massachusetts-like plan for the nation will strap the federal budget and how such a plan – as the call indicated is coming right around the corner – will meet our national needs to lower the deaths caused by lack of access to care and denial of care by insurance company policies now embraced by the for-profit model for delivery. If the new plan doesn’t cost the nation less and give us better outcomes, then it’s following a different agenda than simply fixing healthcare – and we ought to be told honestly what that agenda is.
The call I heard was intended for some informational purposes, but it was clearly also intended to manipulate. And I so hope we’ll get beyond this sort of ridiculous posturing and pandering to real discussion based on the best and most honest information. I don’t like being worked.
The issue of healthcare reform is too critical for us to allow heavily funded special interests to force a massive pre-emptive bail-out of the for-profit healthcare industry that will make the Wall Street bail-out look like peanuts.
President-elect Obama clearly stated during the campaign that healthcare is a human right, and we were all so proud to hear him say that. We worked hard to elect him.
So, if healthcare is a human right, then is it not deserving of that level of inclusiveness in policy-making? To now have a costly and complex and discriminatory private agenda drive this process is not the way to go – and passing a plan that moves the human rights agenda in the wrong direction is, well, wrong.
Our new President has to now infuse this healthcare policy-making effort with the appropriate human rights energy. That would be a huge signal that the change we seek truly is on its way.