Washington Talks About Health Care, But Doesn't Offer a Cure

By John Nichols, The Nation. Posted March 9, 2009.

"That's the reason the majority of the nation's nurses and doctors -- the very people who have the most daily interaction with our healthcare system and see its failures and tragedies up front, favor a single-payer approach, or expanding Medicare to all."

"To achieve the lasting and cost-effective reform the president seeks and most Americans desire, we must confront the source of the present crisis -- an insurance industry that has been steadily pricing people out of access to care, or bankrupting them if they attempt to use it," Jenkins said. "Insurance company practices drive skyrocketing costs, a problem that won't be solved by more technology, electronic medical records, or any other stopgap measures some propose."

Jenkins welcomed the principles outlined by the administration for reform, and the call for progressive tax changes to help finance them, but warned that any reform "premised on expanding an insurance-based system will likely fail, frustrate the public desire for a real solution to our healthcare crisis, and undermine the political capital the administration has earned for reform."

"Private insurance plans aren't universal because they exclude people based on pre-existing conditions or age or anyone else they think will be expensive to cover. They don't guarantee choice of physician or hospital, but limit you to their network of providers.

"The insurers won't assure affordability because they are constantly raising premiums, deductibles, co-pays, and other fees to generate high revenues and profits. They can't guarantee safety and quality because they actively discourage the delivery of care or deny treatments, diagnoses, or referrals they don't want to pay for. And, they will never be fiscally responsible because there is no independent oversight, decisions are made in secret in closed boardrooms or CEO offices, and, their priority is profits, not care," Jenkins said.

"Medicare for all, however, does succeed in all eight areas. It removes the incentive for price gouging, and it takes control of our health away from the insurance companies, and puts it where it belongs, in the hands of patients, families, and their doctors and nurses," said Jenkins.

This reform, she added also promotes national recovery by creating 2.6 million new jobs, infusing $317 billion in new business and public revenues, and injecting $100 billion more in wages into the U.S. economy, according to a recent CNA/NNOC study.

HR 676, the U.S. National Health Care Act by Rep. John Conyers, is the plan that best meets the grand vision painted by our president. "We call on Congress and the administration to work with us to enact it," Jenkins said.

The point here is not to give up on the Obama administration as a vehicle for real reform.

White House forums of the sort that was held Thursday are "for the cameras" events that set the tone -- not the policy -- of an administration.

The president knows that single-payer is the right fix for what ails the American health care system.

He was once a reasonably consistent advocate for a single-payer system, appearing at events in Chicago organized by Dr. Young and Physicians for a National Health Care Plan.

As recently as last August, Obama told a health care forum in New Mexico that, "If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system."

The insurance industry and its allies don't want to start from scratch and make a system that works.

They want to keep patching up a system that doesn't work -- that fails to provide care to roughly 50 million Americans, that leaves another 50 million under-insured and that is defined more by its cost overruns than its quality -- so that they can keep profiteering.

Thursday's White House sessions provided a great forum for advocates of "patching up" and "tinkering" with a broken system.

But that's not the treatment that is needed. That's a prescription for failure.

Obama is better positioned that any president in decades -- perhaps ever -- to design a system from scratch.

The special interests, corporate insiders and congressional compromisers who made the mess and fear the change won't remind him of that fact – as Thursday's forum so amply illustrated.

Real reformers should keep banging on the doors and demanding a place at the table.

Single payer is not "an alternative."

It is not one of "various treatment options."

It is the cure.

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John Nichols is The Nation's Washington correspondent.

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