National Nurses United

NewsBriefs:March alt 2 4/22/09 3:52 PM Page 7 White House, Lawmakers Debate Sham Health Reform While RNs Highlight Real Cure NATIONAL A s registered nurses well know, not all patients are cooperative. Some just refuse to do what's needed to get healthy, maybe because it requires a complete life change or for them to give up a destructive habit. In the same way, the Obama administration and the nation's lawmakers are failing to implement the cure for the United States' desperately sick healthcare system: guaranteeing healthcare by improving Medicare and expanding it to cover everyone. Rep. John Conyers in the U.S. House of Representatives has already introduced a bill, HR 676, that would establish this kind of single-payer system, and similar legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Senate. A number of states are also proposing their own single-payer systems. Instead of adopting this straightforward reform, the Obama administration and Congress are making the country sicker by proposing solutions—mainly forcing people to buy insurance and taxing employer-provided health benefits— that amount to an enormous bailout for the insurance industry. "We've already tried private insurance, and it's been a total failure," said Malinda Markowitz, RN and a member of the CNA/NNOC Council of Presidents. "Why would we stick to a treatment that doesn't work?" APRIL 2009 A big part of the answer is that our lawmakers can't kick the bad habit of relying on the insurance industry for campaign dollars, even though doing so would help nurse our country back to health. The Obama administration and federal legislators such as Sens. Edward Kennedy and Max Baucus refuse to consider single-payer reform. The White House has been holding "forums" around the country over the past couple of months which have included major insurers, but has notably chosen to exclude single-payer proponents from the meetings until activists such as CNA/NNOC raised such public outcry through protests that it grudgingly invited a few to attend. "The reality is they're not discussing single-payer in there," said Geri Jenkins, RN and also a member of the CNA/NNOC Council of Presidents, at a massive Los Angeles rally outside a White House healthcare reform forum on April 6 that included hundreds of healthcare activists, teachers, nurses, seniors, and students. "We want to make sure that the White House understands that 60 percent of Americans want single-payer, and not only that, 60 percent of physicians want it, and nurses support it. We want them to put it on the table and have an honest and open discussion about it." Contrary to the example set by every other modern industrialized nation in the world of W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G providing some form of guaranteed national healthcare that eliminates or severely limits the role of private insurance companies (systems which the World Health Organization documents has consistently yielded better health outcomes), lawmakers claiming to seek fundamental healthcare reform in 2009 are still letting insurers stay in charge. The understanding among Beltway insiders is that the reform legislation, which observers expect will debut in spring or early summer, will include several key components. The first concession is a supposed agreement by insurers to issue policies despite preexisting conditions in exchange for legislation requiring a Massachusetts-style plan to force every American to buy health insurance—a provision often called "individual mandate." CNA/NNOC and other singlepayer advocates oppose individual mandates because they essentially provide a captive customer base for private insurers without cost controls, guarantees of affordability, or assurances that the insurer will actually pay for needed healthcare when called upon to do so. Newspaper headlines for at least the last five years have been dominated by stories of health insurance companies' practices of canceling policies after patients use them, of delaying payments, of refusing to pay for certain physician-ordered treatments, and of jacking up premiums, copays, and other outof-pocket costs on healthy people for no reason other than to increase profits. And these are the experiences of the insured. In short, individual mandate is an enormous bailout for health insurance corporations on a scale far larger than the hundreds of millions already given to the banking industry. The second component is a public plan option for people who may not be able to afford or do not want to buy private health insurance—essentially letting people buy into Medicare. The insurance companies object to the public plan idea by cleverly claiming that the public system will put them out of business, when in reality single-payer advocates point out that the public plan will go bankrupt covering the sickest of the sick. With the insurance industry in such fierce opposition, it's even questionable whether a public plan option will survive long enough to make it to the final bill. The third part of the deal the Obama administration and lawmakers are striking with insurance companies is to tax existing healthcare benefits provided by employers as REGISTERED NURSE 7

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