In the wake of the Tucson, Ariz., shooting rampage, Republicans who have been lambasting the health care reform act have momentarily toned down their rhetoric. But they still plan next week to pursue repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which is virtually certain to pass in the House and then wither in the Democratic-controlled Senate. The title of their bill, “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Reform Act”, still irrefutably suggests the depth of their propagandist anti-reform bias.
The title is a wicked deceit. It suggests far more harm to Americans from reform than the benefits they are and will receive under the health care reform act. That, of course, is precisely the false message that Republicans want Americans to swallow.
Patients skip needed care
The facts faced daily by most Americans plainly refute that smear. Chattanooga’s experience over the past two years, according to local health care professionals, confirms that many area residents now avoid seeking needed medical care because they increasingly find it unaffordable, or because so many family breadwinners have lost both their jobs and the health care benefits that went with them.
A visiting health insurance industry whistle-blower who spoke in Chattanooga last night gave unique insights into the insurance industry’s and the Republican Party’s fight against health care reform, which he admitted reflected the selfish animosity of the for-profit health insurance industry and its lobbying power.
The former executive, Wendell Potter, once was Cigna Insurance Co.’s top public relations official. In that capacity, he crafted much of the rhetoric that was ultimately used by many health care opponents and their Republican parrots.
Parroting insurers’ cant
He recalled hearing former Rep. Zach Wamp, speaking on MSNBC, characterize health care reform as “a major step toward socialism.” He recognized Wamp’s deceitful hyperbole as one of the political talking points he had written and circulated to the insurance industry’s political friends to slam reform and suppress public support for it.
Among some other terms that he and other insurance industry executives and lobbyists used to turn the public against reform was the law’s so-called “death panels.” That deceit was created to undermine support for a Medicare provision allowing payments to doctors who senior patients seek for personal counseling on how they might deal with a terminal illness.
How the industry gains
Another dishonest phrase, he said, was used to blast health care reform as “a government takeover of health care” when, in fact, the reform act left health care insurance in the hands of the for-profit insurance industry, as it wanted. In turn, the industry’s lobbying blocked creation of a government organized public plan along the lines of an expansion of Medicare to all Americans, subject to payroll deductions of corresponding fees.
“A lot of people are being told things are just not true,” Potter asserted.
Many accept the propaganda, he says, because “there is a desire among people to want to believe in our health care system, and they want to believe that an unregulated health care system is the best in the world. But it’s just not true.”
He noted, for example, the exclusion of more than 50 million uninsured Americans versus the quality, universal care offered by every other industrialized country in the world for nearly half the pre-capita cost of health care in America, adjusted for the national cost of living.
Indeed, the lack of regulation before reform long allowed the insurance industry to go off the track. It excluded people with so-called pre-existing conditions, often canceled policies of people who become sick, limited payments for covered illnesses through annual and lifetime limits, charged exorbitant rates and, in most states, retained excessive earnings by limiting their so-called “medical-loss ratio” — the percentage of revenues they pay for patients’ medical expenses — to 70 percent to 80 percent of their premium dollars.
Good nonprofits, by contrast, compete to operate Medicare programs in various states have cost-and-profit margins of well under 10 percent of premium dollars.
Why revive abuses?
Given these staggering insurance abuses, and the nation’s broad support for the reforms already implemented to stop the industry’s abuses, Americans must now wonder why Republicans would want to repeal reform, when most Americans, polls show, want to keep it. Do Republicans really want to return to the bad old days of the greedy insurance industry’s abuse, price gouging and denials of claims?
Certainly Chattanooga residents need a more humane system. Dr. Joe Cofer, head of the county’s volunteer Project Access, a program which provides free specialty care to the uninsured, and Craig Becker, head of the Tennessee Hospital Association, say they have seen a significant drop in residents here and across the state seeking medical care since the economic meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent loss of jobs and health insurance.
Figures of a sick system
The annual increase in health care spending in 2009 nevertheless rose 4 percent, though that was the lowest annual increase in 50 years, a report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shows.
At the same time, however, the national per-person total medical costs for insurance and care surpassed $8,000, and total health care spending reached $2.5 trillion. In the same period, Tennessee hospitals acute-care admissions in fiscal 2009 were down, to 805,000 from 827,000 the previous year.
The disparities in these figures – doctor visits and hospital usage down, care costs rising still higher than inflation, total medical spending still beyond many Americans’ means, and the number of uninsured still climbing – are all irrefutable signs of a sick health care system. They surely signal a need for reform and affordable health care. And they stand as a rebuke to Republicans who want to dismantle reform.