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“The new health care legislation is a step toward elimination, by slow strangulation, of private health insurance and establishment of government as the ‘single payer.’” - George Will, in his weekly newspaper column, Sunday July 11, 2010
Everyone loves to pick on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and well they should. This 2,000+ page contraption, this heap of handouts to the special interest lobbyists with a few shiny baubles thrown in to placate the common folk, was not only written by the for-profit health insurance industry but now will be implemented by former WellPoint/Anthem Vice President Liz Fowler who actually penned much of the law in her role as Max Baucus’ chief healthcare counsel for the Senate Finance Committee. You don’t have to make this stuff up, as emptywheel reported on FDL July 14, 2010, “Former WellPoint VP Liz Fowler to Implement Health Care Oversight”
But what about George Will’s fine whine that the insurance industry faces strangling regulation? Robert Pear wrote in the New York Times on August 2 that the new law will lead to more regulation of the industry, and “the transition is full of risks and uncertainty for all involved.” If the Obama administration is going to "regulate the industry for the benefit of consumers," he noted, then “they can’t help but destabilize or disrupt the existing market.”
Wall Street doesn’t like uncertainty. It detests being destabilized. Stock analysts are not missing out on this. The brokerage firm Edward Jones “downgraded the ratings on the stocks of the three health insurers it covers – UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint and Aetna — to ‘sell’ from ‘hold’ late on Friday [7/30]. Those companies are the three largest U.S. health insurers.” (Reuters 8/2/10)
This new blow comes after legendary investor Warren Buffett pulled the plug on WellPoint and United Health, selling all Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings in the insurance giants during the first quarter of 2010 (“Buffett’s Berkshire Disposes Stake in UnitedHealth, WellPoint"). . . .
Speaking in Virginia, former House Speaker and presumed presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said on May 14,
"The employer-based system will collapse because [the ACA] encourages businesses to drop health care coverage and incur the fine. When employees realize the high costs of the health care exchanges, they will demand a nationalized health care system."
It only gets worse, or better, depending on your perspective. According to Gingrich, the business community is going to lead the call for single payer Medicare for All.
And well they should. Gingrich wasn’t making this up. On May 6, CNN Money released documents showing that “many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government… AT&T revealed that it spends $2.4 billion a year on coverage for its almost 300,000 active employees, a number that would fall to $600 million if AT&T stopped providing health care coverage and paid the penalty option.”
Is the Affordable Care Act unaffordable? Isn’t it at least a step in the right direction?
Those questions can only be answered by considering whether the ACA ends up strengthening or weakening the health insurance corporations. Progressive critics of the bill point out that the new legislation hands over $350 billion in government subsidies to the private insurers while mandating consumers to buy the industry’s shoddy products. That, combined with a lack of price controls means the ACA could prove to be a bonanza for the corporate stakeholders in the medical-industrial complex.
On the other hand, the changing marketplace is full of perils, even if the conservative icons quoted above are exaggerating them to stir up fear of Socialized Medicine (and maybe scare up some donations).
If we stand back and rest on our laurels, believing that the ACA will save us, then we are doomed. The industry lobbyists are working overtime to take the best parts of the bill and weaken them, while destroying any good that is in the bill (see Wendell Potter in the Huffington Post on July 27, Health Insurers Leaning on State Insurance Commissioners to "Reform" Reform).
“We believe that Medicare for All is inevitable in the United States. It is up to all of us to determine when the inevitable becomes the reality.”
- Representatives Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), John Conyers (D-Mich.), and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), statement for Medicare’s birthday, July 29, 2010
If you’re not inclined to believe George and Newt, then how about Dennis, John, and Bernie: “It is up to all of us to determine when the inevitable becomes the reality.”
The reality is that single payer, Medicare for All, is not inevitable, nor is there any guarantee the ACA won’t bankrupt us while enriching the corporations that lobbied for it.
It reminds me of a slogan we have in Indiana, “Healthcare Reform: We’re Still For It, and We’re Not Done Yet!”
From California to Vermont, Medicare for All advocates are working for bills to create state single payer systems. The grassroots are pushing up thru the disappointment of the Affordable Care Act.
Nationally, with the growing recognition that the health insurance giants stand as the greatest barrier to affordable healthcare for all, investors are beginning to see that this is not an industry socially responsible stockholders should be in (Huffington Post May 12, Napalm, Big Health Insurance, and Divestment).
I went to medical school to take care of sick people. The insurance companies fulfill their fiduciary responsibility to their investors by finding ways not to pay for the care of the sick. All their innovation and creativity go to this goal of not paying for care. No other sector in our crazy healthcare system operates under this incentive.
It will take a mass movement, like those for women’s suffrage and civil rights. It will take a divestment campaign like the one against apartheid in South Africa. We must keep the pressure up, shine a light on their nefarious deeds, drive down their stock prices, and expose them for what they are: parasitic middlemen who add no value while sucking billions out of our economy.
“It is up to all of us to determine when the inevitable becomes the reality.”
28 Comments
Hi Rob, Let’s make this dream come true. Yesterday Gibbs accused the drug-crazed professional lefties of wanting “Canadian” health care. Well, I don’t know about about the drug-crazed professional part of this, but I’d certainly be glad to have Canadian health care and increase our life expectancy by three years, while at the same time decreasing our national health care expenditures by 1/3.
Seems like a “no-brainer” to me. Bring on HR 676. Everybody In, Nobody out!
Drug crazed just what does Obama and the GOP smoke when they read about healthcare? It sure isn’t Pot:)
Oh, btw, you may be interested in this one on Richard Kirsch and HCAN.
To paraphrase Gandhi, who allegedly, when asked about Western civilization, said he thought it would be a good idea. So would affordable medical care in the U.S. Just ain’t gonna happen in my lifetime (got 15-20 years left).
Move to Canada?
French alpes,Canadas too cold
Global Warming Baby! You know Obama won’t do a thing about it:)
If I move to another country, it will be to France, which gets ranked first on medical care, at about half the per capita cost, but has soooo much more to offer. I happen to love my house too much to move at the moment, so plans are on hold.
My Sister says instead of Hostess cupcakes they sell chocolate mousse the food is great and the EU has good food protection laws unlike us, plus the net and cell phones are cheaper.
Europe’s Promise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Canadian_and_American_economies
From Jane’s thread down below
Imagine what a 7.6 percent jump in GDP would do for our economy! I want a job on Obama’s economic team these guys are a joke. Wallstreet does not see what a 7.6% boost would do for the whole economy instead they worry about their healthcare stocks.
This is like worrying about the health of your tapeworm.
the US health care spending is a CBS news number and is incorrect.
We are around 17.5% of GDP for health and heading toward 21% (source: CBO)
HCR lowered the 21% by a fraction of 1 percent.
So the saving is up to 10% of GDP, but more likely 5% because we resist national health budgets.
But 5% is enough to restart our economy.
Not a chance. No one will be able to afford the mandate, no one will pay it except when the government subsidizes 100% of the cost, the insurance won’t cover anything, and only the rich will be covered.
The whole program is bullshit and it won’t jumpstart anything except yet another medical bankruptcy petition and a trip to debtors prison.
It is a throwback to a bygone era of slavery and sevitude? Understand, if you cannot own people just craft law which requires that one pays a premium on life! CORPORATE SODOMY? Sounds more like fugutive slave law, or as poll tax?
Single Payer is inevitable only if the economy collapses which ok thats a good bet and the Left not the Tea baggers take over the baggers have small numbers but they got the media and big corporations on their side we have not won this one yet.
Another thing that businesses are doing is making day labor out of many more as a way to avoid providing any benefits, much less fairness in all aspects of employee management.
Good analysis Bob. I agree that single payer is the only thing that will work. In fact I think it was here I made the prediction that full implementation will never see the light of day.
What a shame. It really was obvious enough that we had a chance for orderly transition. Now it will be chaotic.
One would think major employers would be on board for single payer. Trying to compete with other nations who have government funded healthcare is like fighting with both hands tied behind its back. Perhaps off-shoring jobs is their solution to America’s failure to move in this area. It’s like we’re in a slow-motion death spiral, screaming words through muted lips, falling on deaf ears.
Naah. Western European countries often pay for medical care via mandated tax payments by employers & employees (systems differ from country to country, but that’s a common one). Better for employers to not pay for medical care at all.
I agree – it affects international competitive position. US cars had a 3 to 4 thousand hit for health care.
The sad thing for Americans is that we’re giving billions in “foreign aid” to some countries that provide their citizens with much better health care than we have.
HCR is going to be a disaster — and it didn’t have to be. Come 2014, individual and small group insurance policies will be utterly unaffordable, no matter the Federal subsidy. Coverage will decline even more. Insurance companies will simply opt not to offer any policies on the exchanges and continue to find ways to decline coverage, cancel policies for the most trivial of reasons, and just flat out refuse to issue policies for large groups of people they term at-risk. Like, say, children.
A comprehensive public option is the only way to stop this. And single-payer really is the only way left to rein in these insurance, BigMed, and Pharma company parasites.
Single payer is the only answer. All these unemployed people we have now are mostly without health resource. Young people that haven’t obtained career jobs …without health care. Single women and divorced women traditionally struggle without health care. And millions more. ENOUGH.
Great article Doc. I would suggest that the single payer movement look at ways to cut the deficit and hijack them. :o)
First and foremost, eliminating or greatly reducing federal debt service costs. The least disruptive way to Wall Street, as Warren Mosler has suggested, would for Congress to stop selling bonds longer than 3 months and then cap short-term interest rates with the Fed, as it did during WWII, buying up any unsold Treasuries at auction (the current 0.025% federal funds rate is 95% lower than the average interest rate used in CBO projections). That would cut $5 trillion over 10 years from the CBO’s projected deficits. Len Burman’s tax expenditure freeze, another $3.5 trillion over 10 years. You could raise roughly the same amount by either a carbon tax or Dean Baker’s financial transaction tax. Substantial amounts could be raised by uncapping income above Social Security’s $106k cap and applying it to Medicare, ditto with expanding the new “unearned income Medicare contribution” rate for income above $200k/$250k from 3.8% to FICA’s standard 15.3% rate.
Even without counting the $400 billion in efficiency savings from a single payer system, Medicare for All’s estimated $1 trillion in new federal spending, really $800 billion once you zero out the insurance premium deduction, could easily be funded on a revenue-neutral basis (since the CBO looks at the 10 year cycle as a whole) without raising income or payroll tax rates. On the other side of the ledger, corporations and employees would suddenly have $800 billion a year in money to spend that won’t need to go out as insurance premiums.
A premium to be paid on “life?” Property!
Yes, but AT&T will then turn around and spend the 1.8 billion savings on higher wages.
Isn’t that the theory on how HCR is going to be paid for.
(taxes on the 1.8 billion in new wages.)
12 to 15 million of the anticipated newly insured will be added to the roles of Medicaid. Most of them will be unable to find doctors that will accept Medicaid and they will end up in emergency rooms, much as the uninsured do now.
If you have been paying attention, you know that states are already having trouble keeping up with Medicaid and have been begging for Federal assistance to keep the program afloat.
If the economy does not improve dramatically and quickly, that 12 to 15 million newly eligible could easily turn into 20 to 25 million.
Does anybody else remember what happened when Congress passed the Brady Bill and tried to make local police departments run background checks for new weapon purchases without compensation?
Best thing to stimulate the economy – HR 676.