From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

If Americans hope to discuss health care, climate change, green economics or public infrastructure with any degree of realism, then the time has come to acknowledge that hearing someone say “a trillion dollars” is no reason to panic. Politicians and pundits cite that figure to argue that we cannot afford health care reform, following recent cost estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, but the plain truth is that we spend (and squander) more than that on purposes not nearly so wise and humane as universal quality health care.

As a matter of fact, America’s current health care system wastes considerably more than a trillion dollars every year. We know that because countries such as France, Germany, Japan, and Finland, with comparable standards of living to ours, spend roughly half what the United States spends annually on health care per citizen, while covering everyone and achieving better results. So if the total cost of American health care over the coming decade reaches $40 trillion, as economists expect, then we will be “wasting” approximately $20 trillion, or $2 trillion a year.

Compared with figures such as those, the CBO scoring estimate of $1.6 trillion over 10 years to reform the U.S. health care system is so small as to be almost negligible. Constantly hearing numbers that sound so large makes perspective even more important. When Princeton health economist Uwe Reinhardt actually did the simple calculations, he found that the price of reform amounted to only 4 percent of the country’s cumulative health care budget between next year and 2020. He noted that this amount is much less than the annual increase in health care spending over the past 10 years. And he also pointed out that on the broader economic horizon, that $1.6 trillion represents only about 1 percent of the $170 trillion in gross domestic product that Americans will produce over the same period.

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From uExpress
By Ted Rall

Half measures are boring.

That political reality derailed Bill Clinton’s 1993 healthcare reform plan. And it will likely unravel that of Barack Obama.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office finds that Obama’s plan, sponsored by Senators Chris Dodd and Ted Kennedy, “would reduce the number of uninsured only by a net 16 million people. Even if the bill became law, the budget office said, 36 million people would remain uninsured in 2017,” reported The New York Times. Yet it would cost at least $1 trillion over ten years.

Americans like Obama’s basic idea: “Seventy-two percent of those questioned [in the latest Times/CBS News poll] supported a government-administered insurance plan–something like Medicare for those under 65–that would compete for customers with private insurers. Twenty percent said they were opposed.” The support is broad. But it isn’t deep.

“Pay higher taxes for a healthcare plan that probably won’t help you personally, even if you’re uninsured” isn’t much of a sales pitch. No one is going to call their Congressman, much less march in the streets, to demand action for a half-measure–or, in this case, a quarter-measure. Without public pressure to push back against drug and insurance company lobbyists, nothing will change.

Like every mainstream Democrat since Jimmy Carter, Obama is a militant moderate, elevating triangulation and compromise-for-its-own-sake to the status of Holy Writ. But radical problems–and the state of healthcare in America surely qualifies–require radical solutions.

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From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

If Congress fails to enact health care reform this year – or if it enacts a sham reform designed to bail out corporate medicine while excluding the “public option” – then the public will rightly blame Democrats, who have no excuse for failure except their own cowardice and corruption. The punishment inflicted by angry voters is likely to be reduced majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives — or even the restoration of Republican rule on Capitol Hill.

Many of those now talking down President Obama’s health care initiative were in Washington back in 1994, when Bill Clinton’s proposals to achieve universal coverage were killed by members of the president’s own party. The Democrats lost control of Congress that November in a historic repudiation, largely because of public disillusionment with their policy failures.

Nearly every poll now shows the American people demanding change in the health care system, with majorities favoring universal coverage and, in many surveys, a government plan that competes with private insurance. But powerful Democratic politicians, especially in the Senate, are pretending not to hear. They adopt all sorts of positions, from bluntly opposing any substantive change this year to promoting bogus alternatives. They claim to be trying to help Mr. Obama gather the votes he will need, or to assist him in attracting Republican votes. They insist that the country can’t afford universal care, or that the public option won’t pass (before debate has even begun).

Indeed, many of the most intransigent Democrats don’t bother to make actual arguments to support their position. Nor do they seem to worry that Democratic voters and the party’s main constituencies overwhelmingly support the public option and universal coverage.

Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) has simply stated, through her flack, that she refuses to support a public option. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has tried to fashion a plan that will entice Republicans, warns that the public option is a step toward single-payer health care – not much of an objection to a model that serves people in every other industrialized country with lower costs and superior outcomes.

Read more Blowing It

From True Blue Liberal
By Joel S. Hirschhorn

In the national debate about health care reform absolutely nothing makes less sense than the positive views of much of the public about private health insurers. There is no good reason to have positive views of private health insurers, the companies that have relentlessly increased the costs for very limited health insurance. Copays, deductibles and premiums have raped those lucky enough to have health insurance while also making it very difficult much of the time to get coverage for all kinds of health problems. The US health care system is unbelievably inefficient, providing far less effective health care for what is incredibly high costs, compared to all other industrialized countries. The main reason is the private health insurance industry.

If you need solid information to believe this view, then consider these facts.

On the cost side, what is the problem? The current private health insurance system is the most costly, wasteful, complicated, and bureaucratic in the world. Its main function is not to provide quality health care for all people but to make huge profits for companies. Private health insurance companies spend an incredible 30 percent of each health care dollar on administration and billing. Thirty cents of every dollar is not going to doctors, nurses, medicine, medical personnel; it is going to bureaucracy and administration plus exorbitant CEO compensation packages, advertising, lobbying, and campaign contributions. More efficient public programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA are administered for far less money, less than 10 percent.

From 2003 to 2007, the combined profits of the nation’s major health insurance companies increased by 170 percent. William McGuire, the former head of United Health, several years ago, accumulated stock options worth an estimated $1.6 billion; CIGNA CEO Edward Hanway made more than $120 million in the last 5 years. CEO compensation for the top seven health insurance companies now averages $14.2 million. Over the last three decades, the number of insurance administrative personnel has grown by 25 times the number of physicians. Read the rest of this entry »

From TruthDig
By Amy Goodman

As the Obama administration pushes for a vote on health care reform before Congress recesses in August, has health industry money too thoroughly polluted the process for anything good to come of it?

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairs the Senate Finance Committee, key to any health care reform. Baucus has held several high-profile Senate committee hearings on health care, with no single-payer advocates. They were present, though, until Baucus had them arrested—for standing up one by one in the audience, protesting the exclusion of a single-payer representative on the panel. Baucus is only parroting President Barack Obama’s pledge that “single-payer is off the table.” Yet single-payer health care has significant support among the U.S. public, and increasingly among health care providers. With single-payer, the government pays the bills, but people still choose what doctors to see. Private health insurance companies and HMOs—the profiteers—go out of business.

Mike Dennison, a reporter for The Montana Standard, found that Baucus has received more campaign money from health and insurance industry interests than any other member of Congress. Dennison told me, “We’re talking about the health insurance industry and … HMOs, hospitals, physicians, pharmaceutical companies—that’s probably where the bulk of his money has come from … out of about almost $15 million he’s raised in the last six years, both for his campaign and his leadership PAC, 23 percent of that came from insurance and health interests … which we believe is probably more than any other member has received.”

At a public forum in New Mexico, Linda Allison asked Obama about Baucus’ finances: “[S]o many people go bankrupt using their credit cards to pay for health care. Why have they taken single-payer off the plate? And why is Baucus on the Finance Committee discussing health care when he has received so much money from the pharmaceutical companies? Isn’t it a conflict of interest?”

Obama dodged the issue of Baucus, but did admit: “If I were starting a system from scratch, then I think that the idea of moving towards a single-payer system could very well make sense. That’s the kind of system that you have in most industrialized countries around the world.”

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From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

Campaigning to build the widest possible consensus for reform of the nation’s health care system, Barack Obama told the delegates of the American Medical Association that he wants their support, too. Persuasive and always polite, the president did not mention the embarrassing truth about his hosts—namely, that the A.M.A. has undermined universal care with mindless zeal for more than 70 years.

The real question is not what the A.M.A. will support or whether the attitudes of the A.M.A. have changed, but why anyone would still heed its policy prescriptions. Very few national organizations have been so wrong for so long about the matters most salient to its own members.

The A.M.A.’s sad history dates back to the Depression of the 1930s, when progressive doctors sought to organize themselves into the first health cooperatives, or health maintenance organizations, so that they could provide care to working families under a group plan. Seeing a threat to its own power, the A.M.A., in a blatant antitrust violation, prohibited members from working for those early health maintenance organizations.

During the decades that followed, the A.M.A. dedicated millions of dollars to stopping universal health care in the United States, even as other developed nations were establishing a variety of successful systems that covered every citizen while holding down costs. This was an obsession that the organization shared with political forces on the far right. When President Harry Truman proposed a national health plan in 1948, the A.M.A. unleashed a red-baiting fury.

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From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

Within the coming weeks, Americans will begin to consider critical issues concerning the future of health care for themselves and their children, including universal coverage, taxation of benefits, computerized records and the controlling of costs. But before the debate commences in Congress and the media, big insurance and pharmaceutical companies are lobbying frantically (and spending millions of dollars) to foreclose the possibility of the most promising aspect of health care reform: a public insurance option.

After decades of denigrating government—and worshiping corporations—the idea that a public program might work as well or better than a corporate provider may well sound counterintuitive to many Americans. How can government, which is so widely believed to do nothing well while wasting enormous sums, possibly be expected to outperform the highly efficient, supremely managed and profitably motivated corporate sector? Wouldn’t we be better off if we simply entrust the provision of health care to the insurance industry? How can we trust those Washington bureaucrats with our health?

Actually, many consumers have learned by now that those questions are misleading at best. They know, for instance, that trusting a health insurance company is likely to be an expensive mistake. They know, too, that corporate bureaucrats can be even more ruthless in denying help to a beleaguered individual or family than those who work in government.

Studies have repeatedly shown that patient satisfaction with Medicare, the quintessential public insurance plan, is considerably higher than with private insurers among comparable age groups. And consumers understand that the drive for profits often conflicts with patient care, leading them to the conclusion that insurance and pharmaceutical corporations are excessively powerful and socially irresponsible.

Read more Public Insurance

From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

As the health insurance industry and its defenders in Congress lay out their case against permitting a public option in a reform bill, perhaps their most curious argument is that some 119 million Americans are ready to dump their private plans and jump to something more like Medicare – and that’s why the choice can’t be permitted.

In other words, the industry and its backers are acknowledging that more than one-third of the American people are so dissatisfied with their private health insurance that they trust the U.S. government to give them a fairer shake on health care. The industry says its allies in Congress must prevent that.

The peculiar argument that 119 million Americans must be denied the public option that they prefer has been made most notably by Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which is one of two panels that has jurisdiction over the health insurance bill.

“As many as 119 million Americans would shift from private coverage to the government plan,” Grassley wrote in a column for Politico.com. That migration, Grassley said, would “put America on the path toward a completely government-run health care system. … Eventually, the government plan would overtake the entire market.”

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From Salon
By Robert Reich

I poked around Washington Friday, talking with friends on the Hill who confirmed the worst: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging healthcare bill.

You know why, of course. They don’t want a public option that would compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to negotiate better rates with drug companies. They argue that would be unfair. Unfair? Unfair to give more people better healthcare at lower cost? To Pharma and Insurance, “unfair” is anything that undermines their profits.

So they’re pulling out all the stops — pushing Democrats and a handful of so-called moderate Republicans who say they’re in favor of a public option to support legislation that would include it in name only. One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they’ve been doing for years. A third is to bind the public plan to the same rules that private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers.

Max Baucus, chair of Senate Finance (now exactly why does the Senate Finance Committee have so much say over healthcare?) hasn’t shown his cards, but staffers tell me he’s more than happy to sign on to any one of those. But Baucus is waiting for more support from his colleagues, and none of the three proposals has emerged as the leading candidate for those who want to kill the public option without showing they’re killing it.

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From TruthDig
By Chris Hedges

In the musical “Urinetown,” a severe drought leaves the dwindling supplies of clean water in the hands of a corporation called Urine Good Company. Urine Good Company makes a fortune selling the precious commodity and running public toilets. It pays off politicians to ward off regulation and inspection. It uses the mechanisms of state control to repress an increasingly desperate and impoverished population.

The musical satire may turn out to be a prescient vision of the future. Corporations in Colorado, Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and upstate New York have launched a massive program to extract natural gas through a process that could, if it goes wrong, degrade the Delaware River watershed and the fresh water supplies that feed upstate communities, the metropolitan cities of New York, Philadelphia, Camden and Trenton, and many others on its way to the Chesapeake Bay.

“The potential environmental consequences are extreme,” says Fritz Mayer, editor of The River Reporter in Narrowsburg, N.Y. His paper has been following the drilling in the Upper Delaware River Valley and he told me, “It could ruin the drinking supply for 8 million people in New York City.”

Trillions of cubic feet of natural gas are locked under the Marcellus Shale that runs from West Virginia, through Ohio, across most of Pennsylvania and into the Southern Tier of New York state. There are other, small plates of shale, in the south and west of the United States. It takes an estimated 3 million to 5 million gallons of water per well to drill down to the natural gas in a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The water is mixed with resin-coated sand and a cocktail of hazardous chemicals, including hydrochloric acid, nitrogen, biocides, surfactants, friction reducers and benzene to facilitate the fracturing of the shale to extract the gas.

Read more Poisoned Water