New Report Casts Exclusion of Single Payer as a Question of Democracy and Human Rights
June 16, 2009 by Healthcare-NOW!
Filed under Single-Payer Resources
At a critical moment for health care reform in the United States, The National Economic & Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) has published an in-depth assessment of single payer proposals, finding that a single payer system goes further towards meeting key human rights principles than market-based plans.
The question of whether national leaders will consider a single payer system as an option for health care reform has become a question of basic democracy. Despite most Americans supporting a single payer solution, the Obama Administration and congressional leaders have denied it consideration. Key stakeholders such as health care professionals, patients and single payer advocates have been excluded from hearings regarding health reform, prompting courageous civil disobedience actions by health care advocates. One of the protesters at the recent Senate Finance Hearings, Dr Margaret Flowers of PNHP Maryland, said: “We have entered a new phase in the movement for health care as a human right: acts of civil disobedience. It is time to directly challenge corporate interests. History has shown that in order to gain human rights, we must be willing to speak out and risk arrest”.
In a recent article, Donna Smith of the California Nurses Association critically suggests that any health care reform bill that comes out of Washington will be falsely advertised as a “human rights victory”. But what would a true human rights victory look like? NESRI’s report addresses that question. The report analyzes four bills (Conyers HR676, Sanders S703/McDermott HR1200, Vermont S99/H100 and Minnesota SF118/HF135) against key human rights principles such as universality, equity, affordability and comprehensiveness. It shows that if health care reformers are serious about achieving a system that respects human rights, single payer proposals must be given consideration as they would vastly increase access to quality care for all individuals and secure long-term financial sustainability.
NESRI’s report is intended to support the efforts of human right to health care advocates by providing a serious analysis of the benefits of a single payer plan. Cathy Albisa, co-founder of NESRI, said: “We have a fundamental choice to make as a country; we can either be guided by human rights that reflect our founding values or we can continue down the path of special corporate interests. The kind of health care system our government puts in place and what weight is given to the opinion of the American people in the upcoming debate is an important barometer of the health of our democracy and our ability to move towards a more equitable society.”
“A Human Rights Assessment of Single Payer Plans” is available for download at www.nesri.org.
Our fight for equal access to healthcare for all is about democracy, human rights, civil rights, and basic human decency. WE MUST JOIN TOGETHER TO FIGHT FOR OUR CIVIL RIGHTS AND BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS. Health care is a basic human right.
Congress and our legislators are violating our human rights by keeping Single Payer reform off the table, and not allowing the Congressional Budget Office to compare the costs of various reform bills (which would clearly show that single payer is the best for the country economically). Our legislators have sold out to corporate interests to the detriment of the health and lives of the rest of us.
It’s time to take further action. Let’s start with Max Baucus, one of the worst offenders.
ACTION PLAN:
1. It’s time for Montanans to BEGIN CIRCULATING PETITIONS TO RECALL SENATOR BAUCUS. 50,000 signatures will trigger a recall election. The mere presence of petitions in circulation would concentrate the mind of Baucus on the interests of voters not donors. (This wonderful idea is from Tom Hagan).
2. Who can organize a petition?
a.) Montanans for Single Payer? See their website: http://montanansforsinglepayer.org/
Join their mailing list: info@montanansforsinglepayer.org
b.) Can Healthcare-NOW and other single payer organizations join with this effort to start the legal process to recall Baucus and other corrupt Senators?
3. Start the legal process to recall Sen. Grassley (Iowa) as well. He has accepted millions of dollars from the insurance and drug companies, and is the top Republican leader on the Senate Finance Committee. He’s blocking Single Payer reform as well.
3. Are there other states with strong Single Payer groups that could mount recall petitions against their Senators who have blocked single payer? Such action would send a strong message.
Aloha to all, We are an ad hoc group of citizens in Hawaii who are planning to march on Washington DC on Thursday, Oct. 1 to support single-payer universal health care. It is just coincidental that the MadAsHell Doctors and MillionMedMarch will all be congregating there on the same day!
But it works for all of us and adds to the critical mass that Washington — from the President on through Congress and down to the lowest insurance lobbyist — needs to physically SEE how many Americans demand this medical reform!
Won’t you join us in helping create the critical mass? You can email me at frankiestapleton@hotmail.com
Oh I agree – our government is certainly not serving the public if they are excluding single-payer. Human rights vs. Huge Corporation rights shouldn’t even be a question yet clearly has already been decided in favor of the Huge Corporations. Thank God some people are angry and fighting.
I think it is time to put our bodies on the line into the mechanisms of the society that are blocking single payer, universal health care for all. We need to go to the insurance companies with as many people as possible, with increasing numbers and frequency with people who have been kicked of or denied coverage because of “exceeding their lifetime coverage amounts” or “pre-existing conditions” and demand coverage. If we and their supporters are arrested for trespassing, we will have health care coverage in jail. Either way we win. We must go to the offices of the real “death panels” and their lobbyists in DC, and show that picture to the media. There are 536 people in DC who will pass the legislation. The death assurance industry may have the money to buy off the Government, but we have the numbers. This is the 21st Century health rights movement. Pass HR 676 and SB 703. ” It isn’t nice to go to prison, it isn’t nice to go to jail. But if that is freedoms price, we don’t mind, we don’t mind.” Judy Collins, “It isn’t nice.”
If all else fails, when people line up to protest and still no consideration for Single Payer… Does that mean we can engage in a Civil War against government and targeted corporations that clearly stand in the way of legislation? Isn’t this fascism we are facing right now and if so, that means we would have to fight against both corporations, media, and government to clearly get our system straight. But if the media makes single payer unseen, lobbyists continue to win favors of our congress, and the people who blindly follow Fox News to the T all makes this unsuccessful, what do we do then? I’m saying that our voices and facts laid out hasn’t swayed anyone yet so what should we do then?
October 15th is the national day of action. Anyone in Phoenix know of a health insurance HQ to target? Tucson doesn’t seem to offer much beyond a few office suites.
Stop Paying our premiums! Can their be a dialogue on this?
It took me about a month, twenty years ago, on entering private medical practice for the first time, to realize that the United States needed “Health Care Reform”. After serving the previous fifteen years in the US Army Medical Corps, I started my first civilian medical job. I was asked to come to a hospital (Somewhere USA, Not Madison) by another surgeon to perform an ear operation on a 3 year old boy at the same time as he would be performing an eye operation. This would save the child from two anesthetics on two different days. Since I had never worked at that hospital, and apparently in order to set me straight from the start, one of the head doctors at this hospital, came up to me in the preoperative holding area, and boldly shoved the child’s chart in my face, pointed to the child’s insurance (Medicaid (Welfare) and shamefully told me, “ if all you are going to do, is to bring this “****” in here, then we don’t need you to come here.” The poor little guy sitting in the corner with his Mom, was smiling at us with his cute partially toothless grin, and coke-bottle glasses. He didn’t realize what one of his doctors called him because of his health insurance coverage.
Again, several months later I was called to a different hospital (one that I normally did not work at either) in the same city by an operating nurse who asked if I took Medicaid “welfare patients”. She asked me if I would come to their operating room to take a coin out of 2 year old child’s esophagus. She informed me that their hospital doctors in my specialty did not take welfare patients and they were looking for someone to do the operation as the child had choked on a coin. “Apparently someone forgot to screen this child’s insurance before he came to the operating room.” I cancelled my clinic patients and drove across town, performed an esophagoscopy and removed the coin.
Obviously, the doctors in these above scenarios did not support “the Public Option” (Medicaid).
What had happened to our Health Care System? What had changed? Where was the honor that we had in the Army Medical Corps? We treated everyone from Generals to Privates and their families with the same respect. In accordance with Geneva Conventions, we even treated enemy soldiers during the Iraq War in our Combat Support Hospitals with the same care that we treated our own.
In a significant measure the United States Private Health System had changed into “Big Business”. In some measure the humanitarian emphasis had eroded.
Although spurning the pharmaceutical industry as “conflict of interest” entities, not suitable for proper patient care, surprisingly doctors saw no apparent conflict of interest in merging with the Health Insurance Industry. Doctors and the Health Insurance Business became so closely aligned that their DNA intertwined to form a new species. This powerful new combined-arms team became the forme fruste of our new United States Health Care Industry. Doctors armed with new found business tactics, and the Health Insurance Industry armed with the legitimacy of the Doctor’s legal authority to pre- and proscribe health care became the de facto United States Health Care System.
The business meeting replaced the medical conference to discuss “patient care” issues. To cope with the ever burgeoning bureaucracy, more and more doctors went into administration. More doctors have their MBA’s then carry black bags and make house calls. Mergers, Acquisitions, Expansions, Contracts, Covered Lives, Marketing Strategy, Demographics, Competition Threat Forecasts, Actuarial Science, and Health Insurance became the focus of many of our doctor in leadership positions. Time was spent on avoiding insurance business risk, trying to avoid the high risk patients, finding the better payer groups, etc. Hospitals became less hospitable. Doctor’s began to discharge patients so rapidly, that in the mid 1980’s the majority of States passed consumer protection laws like (“Drive By Delivery Laws”) to protect mothers/newborns from being discharged from the hospital too soon.
Currently, the U.S. health care system is outrageously expensive, yet inadequate. Despite spending more than twice as much as the rest of the industrialized nations ($7,129 per capita), the United States performs poorly in comparison on major health indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality and immunization rates. Expenditures in the United States on health care surpassed $2.2 trillion in 2007, more than three times the $714 billion spent in 1990, and over eight times the $253 billion spent in 1980. The reason we spend more and get less than the rest of the world is because we have a patchwork system of for-profit payers. Combined, this needless administration consumes one-third (31 percent) of Americans’ health dollars.
Moreover, the other advanced nations provide comprehensive coverage to their entire populations, while the U.S. leaves 45.7 million completely uninsured and millions more inadequately covered. Spain has a constitutional law guaranteeing health care for all of its citizens. The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not have a single payer government national health plan covering all of its citizens.
More Americans die of lack of health insurance than terrorism, homicide, drunk driving and HIV combined. Lack of health insurance kills 45,000 American adults a year, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. One out of three Americans under age 65 had no private or public health insurance for some or all of 2007-2008. Even with health insurance, many Americans are a medical crisis away from bankruptcy. Research shows 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical, a share up 50 percent since 2001. Most of the medically bankrupt had health insurance. American Manufacturing is down, but not American Manufacturing of poor people. In Canada, where they have a single payer government managed health insurance system, bankruptcy filings due to medical bills are precisely zero (0).
Contrary to myth, the United States does not have the world’s best health care. We’re No. 1 in health care spending, but No. 50 in life expectancy, just before Albania. In Japan, people live four years longer than Americans. Canadians live three years longer. Forty-three countries have better infant mortality rates.
Our Health Care System is unjust. It is unjust in part for some of the following reasons: Much of the medical research in our country is supported with public tax money through the National Institute of Health Grants. At present, this benefits only those lucky enough to have “good health insurance”.
Many of our hospitals were founded by the hard work of ALL citizens, not just corporate health care institutions. In the late 1800’s Catholic nuns from St. Louis hitched their horses to wagons and rode into the North West Territories armed with a Mission Statement from God to “cure the sick, care for the poor, comfort the dying” and built our first hospitals. They built these hospitals for ALL citizens, not just the patients with “good” insurance.
Our Health Care System is unjust because patients are discriminated against based on their ability to pay. Some doctors and dentists will not see “No insurance / Self Pay “ or Medicaid patients, even though their degrees were obtained at publicly funded medical and dental schools.
Our Health Care System is unjust because Doctors charge different patients different prices for the same service based on their insurance or employer. If one would go to a gas station and be told that you have to pay $8 a gallon of gas but that your neighbor has to pay $3 because of who you work for – there would be civil war. But this is how health care is billed. Often the person without insurance is charged more for the same service.
It is unjust because patients do not have the liberty to pick their own doctor. Every time their employer switches health insurances as a business decision, the employees often have to switch doctors. This is an inefficient system, particularly for those with chronic diseases, such as cancer, asthma, etc.
It is unjust because, although many of the discoveries of medicine were not the work of American Medical/Insurance Industry, the discoveries are then used to create private profit for our present Health Care System. For example, when the Austrian Pathologist Karl Landsteiner won the Nobel Peace Prize for his 1903 discovery of the ABO Blood Groups which made blood transfusions safe, saving billions of lives, he gave his discovery to humankind, not a patent lawyer.
Our healthcare system is unjust for the reason that people without health insurance just as likely had fathers and grandfathers who laid on the sands of Normandy and Iwo Jima, and whose sons and daughters are serving and dying in the service of our country today.
Our health system is unjust because of huge profit taking. Health insurance executives don’t worry about going bankrupt from getting sick. Forbes reports that two large Health Care Corporation CEO’s made $121 million and $57 million respectively in the last five years. While The Medical /Insurance Industry, and Pharmaceutical industries make billions in private profits, our citizens are lining up at a county fair, in neglected health, with their teeth rotting from their heads, just to be seen once at a free medical/dental clinic set up in a barn with freshly swept farm animal stalls.
Health Care is an essential human service which should be part of a public trust, not sold as a for-profit commodity. It has the same essentiality as Clean Air, Clean Water, Roads, Rivers, Police and Fire Protection and should be afforded the stature of Public control.
I’ve often wondered why educated people and our leaders cannot see the injustice of our healthcare system. In a historical context however, it is inconceivable to think that the man who wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, as he looked out his window he could see his slaves working in his fields.
To right the injustices perpetrated by the British against his countrymen, Thomas Jefferson would write the words which lent justification and strength to his fellow patriots to fight the world’s most powerful army and navy. However, Jefferson’s quill had not the power to convince his countrymen to right an injustice perpetrated by themselves against another people. This would be a conflagration for another time, another generation.
Let us encourage our congresswomen and men to have the moral courage to pass legislation long overdue, to create equality in health care. They should establish a national healthcare insurance plan as a civil right of American citizenship.
Some say that we don’t want a Canadian or British style healthcare system. I say let’s make America’s healthcare system look like the United States space program compared to Britain’s or Canada’s! If we put our nation’s collective will together – Americans can do anything. Let us create a national health insurance plan to restore to every American their dutiful respect and “unalienable rights”.
Thomas Jefferson’s last words in the Declaration of Independence now ring out as a living document for us today. “And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”
Timothy Shaw, M.D. F.A.C.S.
Madison, Wisconsin