Who kills 18,000 Americans every year?
AND gets away with it? Take a wild guess.
(HINT: it ain't Al Qaeda!)
The Victims
According to recent CBS/New York Times opinion poll, nine out of 10 people believe the health care system needs "to be completely rebuilt.”
Half said they would pay up to $500 more a year in taxes if it meant all Americans would have health insurance.
At least 46.6 million Americans have no insurance at all, and will face financial ruin if he, she, or a family member gets sick or injured.
This will only get worse. Health Affairs, a policy journal, estimates that by 2013, uninsured Americans will grow to 56 million.
Half of all personal bankruptcies and one-third of all credit card debt are caused by illness or medical bills.
Many Americans take only half of a prescribed drug dose to make their medicine last longer. They share prescriptions with friends and relatives. They skip doses. They do anything to control costs. This is potentially lethal.
The Killer
Lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year--six times the number of people who died in the September 11 attacks.
It’s all a product of employers’ war on workers. Even among workers with insurance, the burden is increasingly being shifted onto them. Employee "co-payments" for health care are now the rule. HMOs are designed to "ration" health care, with insurance bureaucracies force patients to jump through hoops, even for emergency treatment.
Even those who have insurance often find their illness is not covered when they file a claim. Three-quarters of people driven into bankruptcy by illness had insurance.
Health care costs continue to increase at a rate far surpassing inflation. From 2000 to 2006, health insurance premiums rose by 87 percent, while workers' income rose only 15 percent.
The Culprits
Who gets rich? Corporate giants and their executives.
Johnson and Johnson made $10 billion in profits in 2005 (profits, not sales). Pfizer made $8 billion in profits. The drug companies Proctor and Gamble, Merck, Amgen, and Abbot are among the 50 most profitable of U.S. Fortune 500 companies. So are insurers like UnitedHealth Group
Johnson and Johnson's CEO received salary and bonuses worth $28 million last year. Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell got benefits worth $180 million.
Bush is doing everything possible to accelerate this nightmare. He has a plan that would use tax incentives to force people to buy their own insurance, while eliminating employer-based health insurance altogether.
Workers who buy health insurance would get a fixed deduction from their taxable income--$7,500 for an individual plan and $15,000 for a family plan.
This will force people to buy cheaper plans with ever-higher deductibles amid ever-higher health care costs.
The plan will siphon off the younger, healthier people into the individual market, while destabilizing employer risk pools.
The Solution
Both houses of the California legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill that would have brought California one step closer to a single-payer system modeled on Canada's.
Schwarzenegger vetoed it saying, "Socialized medicine is not the solution to our state's health care problems."
In a single-payer system, everyone belongs to a one publicly administered pool that pays all medical bills. This would eliminate the vast administrative waste that insurance companies create.
Corporate thieves claim that a single-payer system would force patients to get in line and take whichever doctor or medical facility is available next.
Nonsense. Under most single-payer proposals, health care providers would remain mostly private as they are now. It is insurance companies and corporate thieves that force people to take whatever the insurance companies choose.
In a single-payer system, hospitals would receive a global budget to cover their annual costs. Medical care providers would be paid according to a fee schedule. They would not bill patients. Employers and employees would pay a payroll fee--like the one already taken from paychecks for Medicare.
Because government expenditures cover 60 percent of U.S. health care costs, U.S. taxpayers are already paying more than half the cost of national health insurance--and aren't receiving it.
95 percent of people would pay substantially less for health care than they currently do. Many people stay in awful jobs because they can’t afford to lose their insurance. A single-payer system would make coverage portable.
The single-payer system is in use throughout the world, including Canada, , Argentina, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Australia, and all of Europe. Now Mexico and South Africa are attempting to implement such a system.
In 2004, the U.S. spent $6,100 per capita on healthcare compared to $2,250 per capita in countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that had national health insurance programs.
When Taiwan shifted from a U.S. health care model to a single-payer system in 1995, it boosted coverage from 57 percent to 97 percent, with little if any increase in overall health care spending.
Some 239 union organizations in 40 states have endorsed a proposal for a single payer system sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and John Conyers (D-Mich.). In California, the CNA/NNOC is continuing to push for statewide single-payer legislation.
It will take a powerful effort to overcome the insurance and health care monsters, but a single-payer system is the only way to bring the U.S. closer to making health care a human right.
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SOURCE: CounterPunch - Sick and Getting Sicker
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