Bill Moyers Journal Puts Single-Payer on the Table

Don't miss Fact-Packed May 22 Bill Moyer's Journal! Moyers Exposes Who's Behind the Lobbying Campaign to Kill Healthcare Reform.

Watch Online.

By Sandra Spangler

Bill Moyers put the discussion of single-payer on the table as national advocates laid out reasoned arguments backed by surveys and statistics about why single-payer is the only financially and politically feasible option that makes sense to control costs that have nothing to do with delivering quality health care.

Single-payer is the only option that removes the insurance companies as middlemen and returns health care decisions to doctors and patients. Retaining private insurance companies, even in competition with a public plan, would fail to rein in costs of maintaining a huge profit-driven bureaucracy that still complicates health care delivery and burdens doctors.

Moyers said the mainstream media has not covered the single-payer option. To illustrate that Congress has already decided to please the powerful insurance lobby, Moyers aired a film clip of Sen. Max Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee telling a questioner that single-payer is off the table because it can't pass.

Donna Smith, who herself experienced a medical bankruptcy and who appeared in Michael Moore's film SICKO told Moyers that single payer takes a great idea from the left, public financing, and combines it with a great idea from the right, private delivery. Smith, now works as an organizer for the California Nurses Association. She vows that fighting for single-payer is difficult and will require more doctors in white coats and nurses taking to the streets to get a message out that will overcome the financial power of the insurance lobby. But she predicts that advocates of single-payer will win in the end because the system is broken.

Sidney Wolfe, MD, acting President of Public Citizen and director of it's Health Research Group, told Moyers that single payer would easily pass Congress with muscular leadership from House and Senate Democratic leaders in partnership with the President.

Wolfe and Dr.David Himmelstein, Associate professor of Medicine at Harvard, who founded the Physicians for National Health Care, say the health care system in the United States only serves the interest of a bloated health insurance industry. Health insurers drain 400 billion dollars a year from taxpayers and policy holders to fund company profit and executive "perks" and maintain a wasteful bureaucracy. Himmelstein said that the $400 billion the insurance companies waste would fund all the uninsured and underinsured in this country. Both doctors agree that 20,000 people a year in the U.S. die needlessly because they don't have adequate insurance or are uninsured.

Dr. Himmelstein also described insurance company schemes designed to make money by cherry picking healthier people and denying coverage to sicker people.

One of Himmelstein's fears is that if Congress adopts a public option without reining in insurance companies, the sickest patients will wind up in the public plan and the healthy will remain in private plans that will unhesitatingly drop or deny coverage the minute a patient gets sick. He arrived at this opinion from observing what has happened with Medicare HMO's that have cherry-picked healthier people and left the rest in the public plan. The government pays 15% more to insure enrollees in Medicare HMO's and subsidize insurance companies. Himmelstein said that half of the people forced into medical bankruptcy had insurance initially but could not afford to pay high co-pays and coinsurance. He also added that there are more doctors in Canada in private practice than there are in the U.S. More and more U.S. doctors are salaried employees of corporate health care organizations.

Himmelstein and Wolfe complain that doctors spend hours every day arguing on the phone with insurance gatekeepers trying to get them to cover medically necessary treatments. Himmelstein said that most doctors support a national single-payer healthcare system so they can get back to practicing medicine.

According to Wolfe, insurance administrators outnumber doctors 30 to one.

Click on the picture to view Moyers interview with Donna Smith, who represents the 85,000 strong California Nurses Association.







Click on this picture
to view Moyers interview with Drs. Himmelstein and Wolfe.