Obama supported public health insurance

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-01-2008
Obama supported public health insurance
10
Thu, 01-15-2009 - 10:21am

I came across this article in Topix (news website) which in my opinion is a good option for Americans.

A new public health insurance plan that competes directly with private insurers is essential to controlling health care costs and improving the quality of care, according to a new report released today by the Institute for America’s Future and the UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center on Health, Economic & Family Security. The report, by health care expert and UC Berkeley professor Jacob Hacker, says a public health insurance plan like Medicare offered together with private health plans could result in $1 trillion in national savings over ten years by driving down costs, improving efficiencies and fostering innovation.

President-elect Obama, his health care point person Tom Daschle, Senate Finance Committee chairman Sen. Max Baucus and House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee chairman Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., have all embraced the idea of adding a public plan to help fix the ailing health care system, but the insurance industry opposes a public option. New data in today’s report provides fresh ammunition to this debate by showing how a public plan can maintain lower costs over time while providing broad, guaranteed and quality coverage.

Dr. Hacker released the report on a conference call with reporters today noting that the clearest evidence of the savings produced by a public plan is its premiums.

“Premiums with a public plan cost about three-quarters the amount private insurers charge for the same set of benefits,” said Hacker. “It’s an essential element to any national health care reform proposal.”

Hacker said that private plans operating without public insurance competition have been unable to contain spiraling health care costs and unwilling to cover at-risk patients. However, a public-private hybrid can provide an important check on both public and private sectors, ensuring flexibility, accountability and inclusiveness.

Rep. Stark agreed with Hacker on today’s call, declaring that it’s time we had an alternative plan that’s driven by cost-controls and quality care, not private profit.

“A public plan is an important component of any health care reform,” said Rep. Stark. “A public plan like Medicare would be more efficient and would provide greater choice. Without a public plan, insurance companies will have little incentive to control costs, reaping profits at the expense of beneficiaries.”

Institute for America’s Future co-director Roger Hickey joined Rep. Stark and Hacker on the call, noting that the national health care debate will center on the public insurance option.

“Public insurance as part of a comprehensive solution was fully debated in the 2008 elections,” said Hickey. “People across the country believe public insurance is a common-sense choice that will help control health inflation and assure quality.”

Hacker’s report, “The Case for Public Plan Choice,” clearly shows that public insurance has a better track record than private insurance at reining in costs while preserving access to quality services. A public plan is essential to set a standard against which private plans must compete. The report outlines how public insurance has pioneered new payment and quality-improvement methods that have often set the standard for private plans and how it has the potential to carry out these vital tasks even more effectively in the future, using information technology, large databases of practices and outcomes, and new payment approaches and care-coordination strategies.

iVillage Member
Registered: 02-19-2008
Thu, 01-15-2009 - 12:13pm
If it's what the public wants, we shall have it.
mccain image

Obama image
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Thu, 01-15-2009 - 2:38pm
Can Our New Leaders Fix the Health Care System?

http://bulletin.aarp.org/yourhealth/

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-01-2008
Fri, 01-16-2009 - 10:53am
libraone,
There is a major problem in a country when health insurance coverage is as much as a MORTGAGE PAYMENT. Not only is it too expensive, but if American's or Companies wouldn't have to pay such large health insurance costs, more money would go toward consumer purchasing of products and companies would be able to hire more employees, etc. The economy would benefit if more money flows into other industries besides health and drugs! Health insurance coverage is actually hindering our entire economy not just our personal pockets.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Fri, 01-16-2009 - 11:33am
Well said.

Photobucket

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-30-2002
Fri, 01-16-2009 - 12:06pm

It is Amy Goodman, but it is interesting food for thought.


Consider that most people are diagnosed with mental health issues such as bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia in their early twenties. Once diagnosed it is nearly impossible to get health insurance. These diseases untreated render a person nearly incapable of functioning as a productive member of our society. Our prison system, drug treatment programs and homeless shelters are full of people with mental illnesses. (My bandwagon is mental illnesses because my partner has bi-polar) Medications for his illness are minimally $7,000 a year. Hospitalization would be much higher. Institutionalization would be much higher. Medication and treatment make the difference between him running a business and being a tax paying member of society, property owner (also paying property tax, a consumer (also paying sales tax). You get the point. Untreated he was walking down the center of the highway, babbling to himself, involving the cost of law enforcement to try and insure public safety, time in a county facilty to be evaluated, transport to another county to a mental health facility, time in the court system, public defenders, probation officers, a year in mental health court with paid liasons, regular drug testing, etc. Can anyone SEE which would be more cost effective? Allowing TREATMENT vs. untreated mental health issues requiring the involvement of say a minimum of 20 public servants, facilities, laboraties for drug testing (he never did do drugs). To deny treatment for these illnesses is being penneywise and pound foolish. One could even go a step further. It's not only untreated mental health issues that cause people to act out in public. Untreated or mismanaged diabetes, hypoglycemia, thyroid disorders,adrenal, hormonal, brain tumors can all lead to a person acting out of character and acting out.


http://www.theunion.com/article/20090115/OPINION_NATIONAL/901159967/1024/NONE&parentprofile=1056&title=Amy%20Goodman%3A%20Nothing%20to%20fear%20but%20no%20health%20care


Fifty million Americans are without health insurance, and 25 million are “underinsured.” Millions being laid off will soon be added to those rolls.

Medical bills cause more than half of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. Desperate for care, the under- and uninsured flock to emergency rooms, often dealing with problems that could have been prevented.

The U.S. auto giants are collapsing in part due to extraordinary health-care expenses, while they are competing with companies in countries that provide universal health care. Economist Dean Baker calculated how General Motors would fare if its health-care costs were the same as costs in Canada: “GM would have had higher profits, making no other changes ... that would equal $22 billion over the course of the last decade. They wouldn’t have to be running to the government for help.”

GM is sometimes referred to as a health-care company that makes cars. Former Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca said in 2005, “It is a well-known fact that the U.S. automobile industry spends more per car on health care than on steel.” He supports national health care.

Barack Obama said in 2007 that “affordable, universal health care for every single American must not be a question of whether, it must be a question of how. ... Every four years, health-care plans are offered up in campaigns with great fanfare and promise. But once those campaigns end, the plans collapse under the weight of Washington politics.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his March 1933 inaugural address, famously declared: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself. ... This nation asks for action, and action now.” Deep in the Great Depression, a flurry of ambitious policies followed, detailed by New York Times editorial writer Adam Cohen in his new book, “Nothing to Fear.”

He writes that FDR developed the New Deal with key, visionary advisers and Cabinet members who enacted bold policies, among them Frances Perkins, the United States’ first woman Cabinet member. Perkins, FDR’s secretary of labor, pushed for a rapid, national relief program that formed the basis of the welfare system, and for regulations on minimum wage, maximum hours and a ban on child labor.

But she failed to achieve universal health care. Cohen told me: “She really was the conscience of the New Deal in many ways ... she chaired the Social Security committee. And she wanted it to go further ... to include national health insurance, but the AMA (American Medical Association), even back then, was very strong and opposed it. And she and a couple other progressives on the committee said, you know, ‘We better just settle for what we can get.’ They didn’t want to lose the whole Social Security program.”

Obama appointed former Sen. Tom Daschle as secretary of health and human services, and director of the new White House Office of Health Reform. Daschle’s health-care book, “Critical,” recalls historical failures to achieve universal care:

“Like Clinton, Truman had reason to be confident. His fellow Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, and polls showed that Americans were anxious about the high cost of health care and eager for change. But both presidents underestimated the strength of the forces arrayed against them ... pecial-interest lobbyists — led by doctors in Truman’s time, and insurance companies in Clinton’s.”

Obama knows well the issue — while his mother lay dying of cancer, she still had to battle the insurance industry. He said in that 2007 speech, “Plans that tinker and halfway measures now belong to yesterday ... we can’t afford another disappointing charade ... we need to look at ... how much of our health-care spending is going toward the record-breaking profits earned by the drug and health-care industry.”

Yet Daschle proposes not much more than tinkering — improving Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Health Administration, all examples of “single-payer health care” — in which the government is the single payer for the health care — while preserving the inefficient, multipayer, for-profit insurance model.

In December 2007, the American College of Physicians compared U.S. health care with other countries’, writing, “Single-payer systems generally have the advantage of being more equitable, with lower administrative costs than systems using private health insurance, lower per capita health care expenditures, high levels of consumer and patient satisfaction.”

Michael Moore, in his film “SiCKO,” includes a recording of John Ehrlichman speaking to Richard Nixon, discussing medical-insurance profits: “The less care they give ‘em, the more money they (the insurance companies) make.”

Obama is in charge now. Who will he emulate — Nixon or FDR? People across the political and economic spectrum, from big business to the little guy, are dying to know.

Amy Goodman is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears in The Union. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.




iVillage Member
Registered: 01-07-2009
Fri, 01-16-2009 - 12:08pm
My son pays 142.00 a month for himself through the company he works for. It is decent ins with resonable co-pays. He said if he had a wife and family on his policy he would be paying over 900.00 a month! that is incredibly ridiculously expensive! My older son pays 80.00 a month for himself, if my grandson was on his policy, it would be 280.00 a month.
iVillage Member
Registered: 01-07-2009
Fri, 01-16-2009 - 12:18pm
I agree with you 100% Ins. companies shouldn't be allowed to not insure people who have Mental Illnesses. I know I've been taking Wellbutrin for YEARS, but my DH's ins pays for that, well, after my co-pay. My last blood pressure prescription
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-30-2002
Fri, 01-16-2009 - 12:48pm

****My Dh's nephew's wife is also bi-polar, she is on smome med,



iVillage Member
Registered: 01-07-2009
Fri, 01-16-2009 - 1:04pm
Exactly! I'm not sure if my DH'a nephew is covering his wife on his ins or not, I'd say not. He pays 400.00 a month so he said for the children from his policy from work.
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-01-2008
Fri, 01-16-2009 - 1:37pm
Mental disorders or any other disorders that make a person act irrationally is a HUGE problem, that preventive care in a universal health care system would be able to control. I'm glad you pointed this out as another reason to change our health system. I would go on to add other issues such as people who want to quite smoking but can't afford to see a doctor to help them do it. People who are obese and need the supervision of a doctor to help them loose weight and monitor their progress. Women who don't get their annual GYN exam because they can't afford the doctor's visit. The list goes on and on. Preventive care which is part of a universal health care system, would make this country so much better off, it's mind boggling!