Even RNs Can't Get Healthcare--Today's SinglePayer Update

David Welch is the face of America’s healthcare crisis.  A nurse, he figured that finding healthcare was the least of his worries.  Then he had a minor skin cancer removed from his nose and changed jobs; whoops--all of a sudden he’s uninsurable and has joined the ranks of the 47 million without healthcare.  What is he going to do?  What would any of us do?  Elsewhere, USA Today makes the point that many of the people going bankrupt are those WITH health insurance, Congress is looking to take money from insurance companies and use it to provide care, and the President of the California Nurses Association reminds us that the only way to ensure healthcare reform is by cleaning up our political system.

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Watch David Welch’s story.  He’s a nurse, he’s healthy, he works in the healthcare industry.  When he changed jobs, the last thing he thought he would need to worry about was getting health coverage.

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But they denied it to him for a minor skin cancer on his nose.  More proof: the insurance companies are in the business of cherry-picking healthy customers and denying care to everyone.  This is not how we should organize our healthcare system.  A SinglePayer system would not penalize people for being sick, not would it push sick people out of the system.  It would average out the bills of sick people with the bills of healthy people, spreading health risk across our entire society; this is the only humane way to structure healthcare.

The USA Today reports that even those who can buy health insurance find it drives them to bankruptcy if they try to use it.  The risk factors are:

Along with deductibles and co-payments, The Access Project found other factors associated with medical debt were annual or lifetime "caps" on benefits; extra charges for "out of network" care, even when admitted to in-network hospitals; and complex billing systems by insurers and hospitals that left patients confused about what they owed….{meaning that} even people such as Fredrick who have health insurance can face devastating financial costs, says a report out today …

That’s why we can’t reform healthcare by mandating more customers for health insurance companies.  They are the bad guys and they exist to make the lives of sick people more difficult and painful.  Everyone will be better off when we stop paying for a gigantic bureaucracy designed to slow down the delivery of care.

Fortunately, Congress is moving to cut back on the role of insurance companies in healthcare.  With a program called “Medicare Advantage,” insurance companies have managed to get their claws into Medicare, and charge 11% more for services than traditional Medicare does.  That will change, thanks to the work of Congressman Pete Stark and others, who yesterday heard their first hearing on Medicare abuses by the insurance industry:

"When private plans formally asked to join Medicare in 1982, they said they could provide Medicare's benefits better and cheaper than the government," said Rep. Pete Stark, California Democrat and chairman of the health subcommittee. "Fast forward 25 years, and we are now losing money for every person who enrolls in a private plan."

…"I can tell you right now that something will happen with Medicare Advantage this year," said Jon Sheiner, an aide to Rep. Charles B. Rangel, New York Democrat, speaking to a group of business leaders in Washington this week. "There will be a Medicare bill this year that includes money for the State Children's Health Insurance Program, end-stage renal disease providers and physician payments. Medicare Advantage will pay for some of these things." </blockquote>

Finally, the President of the National Nurses Organizing Committee, Deborah Burger, RN, reminds us that political reform paves the way for genuine healthcare reform.

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