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Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Private Health Insurance Companies Increase Healthcare Costs and Reduce Care: End Them

STAND WITH DR. DEAN

From the New York Times (4/1/09):
"Lobbyists and Congressional aides have discussed a possible compromise: Congress would authorize a new government-run insurance program, but it would come into existence only if certain conditions were met - if, for example, private insurers failed to rein in health costs by a certain amount after several years."

"We need to fight back before the opposition's message becomes the policy. "
Arshad Hasaan, Democracy for America

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04/07/2009

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

In the coming months, we will see the development of a new healthcare system in Washington. Concessions will be made on all sides and everyone is nervous about what those concessions might be.

While many of us hope for single-payer, universal healthcare, the fact is that the political will might not exist for it. However, no matter what the Obama Administration decides to call the final product, private health insurance companies need to disappear from the equation.

It seems the Obama Administration, and most congressional Democrats, are afraid of single-payer's association with socialized medicine. But doctors don't have to work for the government for this healthcare reform initiative to be successful. According to Washington Post correspondent T.R. Reid, private health insurance companies -- not private doctors -- need to go.

Reid's book, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care, will be published this summer. Reid has been traveling the world learning about other countries' healthcare systems, while keeping in mind the idiosyncrasies of American patients and doctors, to try and figure out what will work best here.

Reid found
that, while advances in healthcare are driving up costs all over the world, the astronomically high prices in this country originate with insurance companies.

Not only do insurance companies allow the pharmaceutical industry to charge Americans many times the prices others pay for the same medicine, but also internal costs take a big chunk of change as well. Administrative costs for public insurance systems hover around 3 percent, while private insurance companies spent 25-31 percent on such costs. Overhead among private insurers in the U.S. is nine times that of Canada's single-payer system.

U.S. health insurance companies have also institutionalized a reduction in quality of care. A lot of those extra administrative costs are spent on hiring people to try and deny coverage and claims.

But even these relatively moderate views on healthcare reform are being pushed aside by the health insurance industry and the media. Reid, who has done one documentary for PBS' "Frontline" accompanying his international reporting on five foreign healthcare regimes called Sick Around the World, was again commissioned by PBS to do a similar documentary called Sick Around America. But Frontline so skewed Reid's reporting that he refused to appear in the final product and says he won't work with Frontline in the future.

The Sick Around America producers invited the president of the leading health insurance lobbyist group onto the program and essentially agreed with her statements on the need to keep the insurance companies in charge and force every American to sign up with them as a reform measure. (An interesting look at how this proposal works for and is being pushed by the health insurance lobby, check out this recent L.A. Times business column.)

Reid spoke with Corporate Crime Reporter about the disagreement:

"I said to them -- mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world," Reid said. "I said I'm not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book. They said I had to be in the film because I was under contract. I insisted that I couldn't be. And we parted ways."

"Doctors, hospitals, nurses, labs can all be for-profit," Reid said. "But the payment system has to be non-profit. All the other countries have agreed on that. We are the only one that allows health insurance companies to make a profit. You can't allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance."

As insurance companies do everything they can to stay top dog in the healthcare profit pile, you'll hear plenty from their surrogates in Congress. Republicans have already begun trotting out the same fear tactics that worked to defeat healthcare reform back in the 90s: the loss of patient choice and privacy.

Hopefully the American people will be able to see this red herring. The only thing they need consider is whether they actually have that supposed "choice" being trumpeted as the American way. Does Blue Cross Blue Shield allow you to see any doctor in the country, such as patients can do in, say, France?

The problem is that single-payer is inextricably tied to socialism in the minds of Americans. If the administration is going to give up the single-payer idea anyway, perhaps we should throw it to the wolves: Tell Republicans screaming about socialized medicine that our doctors and clinics will stay private. Then the GOP might have to actually admit that it's the health insurance companies they want to protect, not doctors and patients.