Call Congress for Single-Payer Amendment

PNHP has learned that as early as this Friday or Monday (July 17 or 20), Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) will introduce, in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, an amendment to the so-called Tri-Committee health care bill. The amendment would replace the private health insurance industry with a single-payer national health insurance program.

In effect, the Weiner amendment would substitute Rep. John Conyers' (D-Mich.) single-payer bill, H.R. 676, for the proposed Tri-Committee legislation.

The vote on the amendment will take place the same day it is offered - again, most likely this Friday or Monday.

If your representative is a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, please call your congressperson today and ask that he or she support Rep. Weiner's single-payer amendment. A list of Committee members can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/dhxq65

The Congressional Switchboard can be reached toll-free at 800-473-6711.

If your representative is not a member of the Committee, please call Committee Chair Henry Waxman at 202-225-3976 and ask him to support Weiner's single-payer amendment.

This important legislative initiative was inspired in part by Rep. Weiner's meeting with Dr. Quentin Young of PNHP at the time of Dr. Young's testimony in support of single payer before the House Ways and Means Committee in June. It is also a reflection of the grassroots demand that single payer be on the table in Congress.

Please call today.

Cordially,

Ida Hellander, M.D.
Executive Director

Mark Almberg
Communications Director

P.S. Below you'll find two excellent opinion pieces written by PNHP members that were published in recent weeks. Please continue to submit your op-eds and letters to the editor!

P.P.S. Hold the date for PNHP's Annual Meeting, Oct. 24, in Cambridge, Mass. More details to follow soon.

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*The hijacking of health reform*

By Susanne L. King, M.D.
The Berkshire Eagle
Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Headlines in the Berkshire Eagle recently proclaimed that Berkshire Health Systems (BHS) is cutting the equivalent of 65 full-time jobs, and will lose $3 million this year. This is neither good for employment nor for the health of our population in the Berkshires. The culprits are the cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, the programs that cover 70 percent of the BHS population.
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> BHS president David Phelps reports that financial problems at Berkshire Medical Center have been aggravated by Massachusetts health care reform. While more patients have enrolled in insurance plans, the reimbursements for these plans are similar to Medicaid rates, which don't actually cover the cost of care.
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> As the major non-profit provider of health care for the Berkshire community suffers financially, the for-profit insurance industry, (which only administers the funds, and provides no actual health care services), is raking in the money. In the current economic and health care crisis, United Health Group, America's largest health insurance company, enjoyed an increase of 8 percent in revenues for the first quarter of 2009, with a net profit of $984 million. There is something wrong when the administrators of the health care funds are making exorbitant profits, while the providers of the health care services are struggling to remain solvent.
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> The private for-profit insurance industry diverts roughly $400 billion/year from medical services. In addition, the Senate Commerce Committee recently released a staff report about how health insurers have forced consumers to pay billions of dollars in medical bills that the insurers should have paid themselves.
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> Will the current health care reform being formulated in Washington address these issues? Not a chance, even if President Obama gets a public plan option into the reform legislation. Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a founder of the 16,000-member Physicians for a National Health Program, stated in her testimony to Congress: "Insurers compete by not paying for care: by denying payment and shifting costs onto patients or other payers. These bad behaviors confer a decisive competitive advantage. A public plan option would either emulate them - becoming a clone of private insurance - or go under. A kinder, gentler public plan option would quickly fail in the marketplace, saddled with the sickest, most expensive patients, whose high costs would drive premiums to uncompetitive levels."
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> In addition, the overhead for a public plan option would be higher than for Medicare, which automatically enrolls seniors at 65, deducts premiums from Social Security checks, and does no marketing. The administrative costs for the whole health care system would remain astronomical, as health care providers would continue to struggle with mountains of paperwork and denials of payment from multiple insurance companies. A public plan option would not curb the escalating costs of new technology, and would not address variability in the quality of care.
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> The only way to attain universal health care coverage, while containing escalating health care costs and standardizing quality of care, is to eliminate the insurance companies, and establish a single-payer "Improved Medicare for All" program. Hospitals, doctors and other providers must be adequately reimbursed for their medical services. This would be possible if the profiteering and waste of the health insurance industry were eliminated, and those health care dollars went to the actual provision of medical care. And hospitals could be paid like fire departments, with a single monthly check and little billing. There is federal legislation for a national health program in both houses of Congress, John Conyers bill, HR 676, and Bernie Sanders bill in the Senate, S.703.
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> Last year a survey of doctors showed that 59 percent support a national health plan, up from 49 percent in 2002. (Only one in five doctors are in the American Medical Association, which opposes a national health plan). So why is single-payer health care reform "off the table"' as Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee, said, before he threw eight single-payer advocates, including several doctors, out of a "public roundtable discussion" and had them arrested. Could it be related to the more than $1 million in donations Baucus received from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries in the 2008 election year cycle?
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> Wendell Potter, a former health insurance industry insider has this to say, ". . . big for-profit insurers have high-jacked our health care system and turned it into a giant ATM for Wall Street investors, and . . . the industry is using its massive wealth and influence to determine what is (and is not) included in the health reform legislation members of Congress are now writing."
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> What is going on in Washington right now is not in the best interests of patients, or the doctors and hospitals that serve them. Patients have no lobbyists speaking for their interests in Congress. Most doctors do not want the AMA to speak for them. Contact your congressmen and ask them to sponsor HR 676 and Bernie Sander's bill. (On his Web site, Sanders also has an online petition you can sign and pass along to your friends).
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> Susanne L. King, M.D., is a Lenox-based practitioner.
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> *Single-payer reduces waste dramatically*
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> By Jeremy B. Stern
> SouthCoastToday.com
> July 07, 2009
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> I am an orthopedic surgeon who has been practicing in this community over the past 16 years and may be familiar to many of your readers. As our Congress debates the future of our health-care system, I am writing to urge my fellow citizens to get involved in the process. The debate in Congress is being framed largely by the insurance companies. This is problematic because of the large sums of money donated by the insurance lobby to the same senators who are crafting the reform.
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> What is not being considered fairly is H.R. 676, a single-payer health-care system.
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> In the U.S. today we spend approximately two times as much as other industrialized nations, over $7,000 per person per year, yet have nearly 50 million uninsured residents. What causes this waste of health-care dollars? We are the only industrialized nation that does not have a single-payer system. Instead our system is based on privately owned for-profit insurance companies.
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> In the average private health insurance company, one-third of the money paid in premiums is used for "administrative costs." That means that one-third of all the money you and I now pay for our insurance is used to pay for things like salaries, marketing, overhead and, of course, profits and bonuses. Not to provide health care.
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> In addition, hospitals, nursing homes and physicians need to employ large staffs just to negotiate the maze of rules and regulations from multiple insurance companies. By eliminating these multiple insurance companies, the cost savings to the system would be more than a staggering $350 billion each year.
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> Many people are scared to have a single-payer system run by the federal government for two main reasons. First, there is a general impression that the government is inefficient and will be unable to manage the system well, and second, people fear that the government would limit their choice of providers. Most people don't realize that the government plan we all know best, Medicare, runs at about 3 percent overhead while most HMOs run 15 to 20 percent overhead, and the Canadian system has 1 percent overhead. The government, then, is more efficient than the private sector.
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> As to the second fear, lack of choice, in the single-payer plan being talked about for the United States, the majority of the health-care system would run just as it does today. That means that most people would have greater choice of providers because they would no longer have an HMO telling them who they could see. Unlike the VA or Army system where the doctors and hospitals are run directly by the government, in a single-payer system here in the United States there would be no change in the providers; only the payers would change.
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> What would happen is that we and our employers would all pay taxes instead of premiums. These taxes would amount to a fraction of what we used to pay in insurance premiums. For those taxes we would have insurance that would pay for literally all of our health needs, from glasses to dental care to medical and surgical care.
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> The large cost savings of a single-payer system would come in various ways. By buying in bulk and demanding volume discounts, the single-payer plan would greatly decrease the cost of medication. The VA system in the United States gets a 40 percent reduction in medicine costs over what we all pay. A single-payer system would also greatly increase the country's access to preventative care. This in turn would reduce the inappropriate overuse of highly costly emergency rooms. Having diseases diagnosed earlier and treated appropriately vastly decreases the overall cost of treatment of that disease. For example, by treating high cholesterol early with medicine, you may well eliminate the need for a very costly coronary artery bypass later in life.
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> While doctors and hospitals would be paid somewhat less, their costs of doing business would be drastically reduced since there would be a very low cost to billing and administration, and providers would get paid more quickly and reliably.
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> Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, there would be improvements to our actual patient care with a single-payer system. Having only one payer would allow us to use a unified computer system. With this single computer system, whenever you went for health care of any kind, the health-care provider would have all the information needed to treat you safely, such as the medications you take and the allergies you have. There would be fewer medical errors and a greater awareness of interrelated medical problems.
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> I strongly encourage you all to call, write, text or otherwise contact your congressmen and senators, and encourage them to strongly consider H.R. 676, the single-payer system that will fundamentally eliminate a huge waste of health-care dollars and restore our health-care system.
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> Dr. Jeremy B. Stern is an orthopedic surgeon. He lives in Marion, Mass.