Healthcare: April 2007 Archives

Politics is always full of irony-whether it's a political party claiming to have "family values" while its leaders are chasing youngsters of their own sex, cheating on their spouses, or selling their public trust to the highest bidder. We see so much of it in this right-wing Republican era that it's simply hard to know where to start.

The irony of the anti- gun control mantra that guns don't kill people... (of course it's the bullets that do it), to the so-called "sanctity of life" while we're allowing mentally unstable college students to buy semi-automatic weapons and shoot up their colleagues , while at the same time sending our young men and women to a war zone to kill and be killed in another country's thousand year old war.

And then there is Roe v. Wade---the most important civil rights legislation of the past three decades finally going down in a slow but apparently inexorable death dance with the appointments of anti-choice male justices to the
highest court in the land. But you may ask: "Where is the irony in this?"

As the legislative season starts to get into full gear and the healthcare debate takes front-and-center, it's time to gear up for a huge public outcry against the Governor's unabashed pro-insurance industry bias. While he cavorts around the country as the Pretender- in- Chief in the battle against global warming, the battle to provide affordable, quality healthcare in California is warming up as well.

Several attempts to address the healthcare crisis have been offered up by both parties over the past few legislative sessions. While modest healthcare reform has long been on the agenda , we've really just attacked its inefficiencies and inequities on the fringes. Now is the time to truly reform and revamp the system. The real question is how are we going to do it?

Senator Sheila Kuehl has been fighting to create the single-payor Medicare-type system for several years. And all the data seems to support this concept---take the insurance industry out of the game because they offer little or nothing to the process. The basic principle is fairly simple: The cost of the insurance industry administering the system is totally out-of-line and unnecessary. If we replace their greedy profit and excessive overhead with a single administrator, health care providers will be able to thrive without the burden of insurance companies demanding anywhere from 25-50% of each insurance premium dollar being paid ,ostensibly, for health care.

But this governor is beholden to the insurance industry for millions of dollars in contributions and simply refuses to recognize we can do better for less if we remove this parasitic industry from the equation. In order to make some of the changes that must be made now, we've seen several compromise proposals come into play. One of these important and necessary fixes comes in the form of AB 1554 by Assemblymember Dave Jones of Sacramento. While this measure doesn't solve the problem, it does force the insurance industry to justify its profits and costs before being able to raise its rates, a process that has gone uncontrolled for far too long, thus allowing this industry to increase costs---and its enormous profits to the point that many Californians simply cannot afford insurance, period.

Prior to Jones introducting this measure, other legislators had tried to bring up similar measures, without success. AB 1554 starts up its hill on Tuesday, April 17th with its first policy hearing in the Assembly Health Committee. We urge you to go to our
TAKE ACTION section on our site and send a letter to the members of that committee urging that they support this bill. If the Governor is going to insist on keeping the insurance industry in the game, let's at least make sure that their rates can't be raised just because they can...... For an example of the kind of fiasco lack of oversight can cause, look at the cost of gasoline and the profits these scoundrels are reaping because we refuse to place any kind of ceiling on unjustifiable greed.

When so many of our people go uninsured, the system itself becomes overloaded with non-paying patients. As a society we appropriately refuse to turn the neediest of these away and thus our hospitals become burdened, inefficient and overworked. Then society suffers---but not the insurance industry. As a community, this is just unacceptable.

It's clear the Governor thinks business is more important than people, so he's willing to sacrifice Californians on the altar of profit. And yet his popularity soars. So we have to start somewhere, incrementally, to put people first. There is no better place to start reasserting our values than when it comes to healthcare. The time is now.

Now that the mystery of who fathered Anna Nicole Smith's child has been resolved, perhaps we can go on to more important, albeit far less interesting matters, like health care, ending the war and addressing global warming. Of course, focusing on these matters is far less interesting, but with all the intrigue and suspense gone, we just might have to bite-the-bullet and consider that there are other pressing matters to deal with.

Fortunately, the California legislature has made that call and after a week's vacation for Easter, Passover and other celebrations, they're back dealing with issues that actually will impact our daily lives. Although hundreds of bills are back in play-from the sublime to the ridiculous, there are a number of interesting and significant health-care related bills that continue to move forward.