RALLY AND LOBBY DAY FOR THE MINNESOTA HEALTH PLAN
Plan to join us at the Capitol on Monday, January 5, when we will welcome in a new year with a rally in the rotunda and visits with legislators. More details are forthcoming and here is preliminary information. Contact Tim Burkhardt at tsb[at]7countyseniors.com for details. The rally and lobby day is planned by the Greater Minnesota Health Care Coalition.
"GIFT BAN" NEEDED TO END MEDICAL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST by Senator John Marty
Drug marketing to U.S. doctors amounts to $7 Billion per year, much of that spent on meals, gifts, honoraria for speaking, and generous compensation for consulting. Manufacturers of medical devices such as stents or pacemakers also spend lavishly on gifts and favors for doctors. Read the essay!
MOBILIZE FOR THE MINNESOTA HEALTH PLAN Conference
Our conference on November 8 in Saint Cloud was a great success! Between 60 and 70 participants from all over the state learned about the Minnesota Health Plan and tools to advocate it back home.
Check out a photo album of the conference to see your colleagues at work!
Joan and Steve Janusz's summary of the day.
Ric Studer's essay on health care messaging.
Here is a program outline.
The next step: tell your legislator that they should vote for the Minnesota Health Plan!
Single Payer Advocate Wins Nobel Prize!
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman on single payer
(courtesy of Don McCanne's Quote-of-the-Day service)
"One Nation, Uninsured" by Paul Krugman
(The New York Times June 13, 2005)
Harry Truman tried to create a national health insurance system. Public opinion was initially on his side: Jill Quadagno's book "One Nation, Uninsured" tells us that in 1945, 75 percent of Americans favored national health insurance. If Truman had succeeded, universal coverage for everyone, not just the elderly, would today be an accepted part of the social contract. But Truman failed. Special interests, especially the American Medical Association and Southern politicians who feared that national insurance would lead to racially integrated hospitals, triumphed.
Sixty years later, the patchwork system that evolved in the absence of national health insurance is unraveling. The cost of health care is exploding, the number of uninsured is growing, and corporations that still provide employee coverage are groaning under the strain. So the time will soon be ripe for another try at universal coverage. Public opinion is already favorable: a 2003 Pew poll found that 72 percent of Americans favored government-guaranteed health insurance for all. But special interests will, once again, stand in the way. And the big debate among would-be reformers is how to deal with those interests, especially the insurance companies. These companies played a secondary role in Truman's failure but have since become a seemingly invincible lobby.
Let's ignore those who believe that private medical accounts - basically tax shelters for the healthy and wealthy - can solve our health care problems through the magic of the marketplace. The intellectually serious debate is between those who believe that the government should simply provide basic health insurance for everyone and those proposing a more complex, indirect approach that preserves a central role for private health insurance companies.
A system in which the government provides universal health insurance is often referred to as "single payer," but I like Ted Kennedy's slogan "Medicare for all." It reminds voters that America already has a highly successful, popular single-payer program, albeit only for the elderly. It shows that we're talking about government insurance, not government-provided health care. And it makes it clear that like Medicare (but unlike Canada's system), a U.S. national health insurance system would allow individuals with the means and inclination to buy their own medical care.
The great advantage of universal, government-provided health insurance is lower costs. Canada's government-run insurance system has much less bureaucracy and much lower administrative costs than our largely private system. Medicare has much lower administrative costs than private insurance. The reason is that single-payer systems don't devote large resources to screening out high-risk clients or charging them higher fees. The savings from a single-payer system would probably exceed $200 billion a year, far more than the cost of covering all of those now uninsured.
Nonetheless, most reform proposals out there - even proposals from liberal groups like the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress - reject a simple single-payer approach. Instead, they call for some combination of mandates and subsidies to help everyone buy insurance from private insurers. Some people, not all of them right-wingers, fear that a single-payer system would hurt innovation. But the main reason these proposals give private insurers a big role is the belief that the insurers must be appeased. That belief is rooted in recent history. Bill Clinton's health care plan failed in large part because of a dishonest but devastating lobbying and advertising campaign financed by the health insurance industry - remember Harry and Louise? And the lesson many people took from that defeat is that any future health care proposal must buy off the insurance lobby.
But I think that's the wrong lesson. The Clinton plan actually preserved a big role for private insurers; the industry attacked it all the same. And the plan's complexity, which was largely a result of attempts to placate interest groups, made it hard to sell to the public. So I would argue that good economics is also good politics: reformers will do best with a straightforward single-payer plan, which offers maximum savings and, unlike the Clinton plan, can easily be explained. We need to do this one right. If reform fails again, we'll be on the way to a radically unequal society, in which all but the most affluent Americans face the constant risk of financial ruin and even premature death because they can't pay their medical bills.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/opinion/13krugman.html?hp
Minnesota Legislators Examine Canadian Health Care
Senators Sharon Erickson-Ropes and Mary Olson just completed a fact-finding trip across the border to see for themselves how the Canadian health care system is working. They will write up their experience soon and, in the meantime, here is a report from Thunder Bay Television. Says Erickson-Ropes, "The most impressive thing to us has been the success of the Canadian health-care system."
News Conference on the Minnesota Health Plan
from KARE 11 TV archives
We just found this great footage of the February, 2008 press conference at the Capitol on on the Minnesota Health Plan. Check it out!
Harry and Louise are back -- but this time they're ready for change
CASEY SELIX in MINNPOST August 20, 2008
Remember Harry and Louise, the couple whose ads are often credited with unraveling the Clinton administration's universal health-care proposal 15 years ago?
They're baaack.
And we're going to see a lot of them. Only this time around, the fictional Harry and Louise don't entirely dismiss the idea of government interference. In fact, Louise says at the end of one 30-second spot: "Whoever the next president is, health care should be at the top of his agenda." ...
"Everybody remembers who Harry and Louise were and that they hated the ( Clinton ) plan," said state Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville, who has proposed universal health coverage called the Minnesota Health Plan . "It's very amusing. At first, when I read that it (the new ad) was by the same ad agency, I assumed the insurance industry was behind it." ...
The DNC's 'Guaranteed Healthcare' Reality Check
By Donna Smith, American SiCKO, national co-chair PDA's Healthcare Not Warfare campaign
from Open Ed News
PITTSBURGH -- So, healthcare voting friends, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) platform committee added the language "guaranteed healthcare for every man, woman and child in America" to its Party platform yesterday in Pittsburgh. Was it simply to placate Hillary Clinton delegates? Was the DNC squelching activists' voices for single payer reform? Or was something else at work here? Perhaps an actual democratic process that played out with a wide variety of motivations but also a wider variety of potential outcomes and wide open possibility?
Because I was there -- and I mean there as one of the people who negotiated the changes in language with Rep. John Conyers and DNC platform committee member Bob Remer of Chicago -- I can tell you that there probably was a little nodding to the Clinton camp and some hope to quiet the single payer rumblings, but the much more significant outcomes are yet to be from that language shift from universal health "coverage" to guaranteed health "care." That is if we who are in this for the long haul grab this moment and this victory and make it our own.
And believe it or not, I actually witnessed some truly noble behavior by our Party. Was it a hearkening back to our roots? Or an effort to quiet a seemingly meaningless rebellion and move a united front to Denver? Or a reaching boldly toward the future? Maybe a little of "all of the above..."
U.S. Spends More Than Twice as Much on Health Care Per Person Than Most Other Industrialized Nations, Ranks Last in Preventable Mortality, Study Finds
(This courtesy of KAISER DAILY HEALTH POLICY REPORT for Thursday, July 17, 2008)
The U.S. spends twice as much on health care per capita than most other industrialized nations but ranks lower than those nations on a number of criteria, according to a report released on Thursday by the Commonwealth Fund, the New York Times reports (Abelson, New York Times, 7/17). For the report, Cathy Schoen, senior vice president of the Commonwealth Fund, and colleagues ranked the health care systems of the U.S. and several other industrialized nations based on 37 criteria. The U.S. health care system received an overall score of 65 out of 100, a decrease of two points from 2006. In addition, the U.S. received a score of 58 out of 100 for access to care, a decrease of nine points from 2006. The U.S. received a score of 53 out of 100 for health care efficiency, in part because of lack of adoption of electronic health records among physicians. According to the report, 28% of U.S. physicians had adopted EHRs in 2006, compared with 98% in the Netherlands and 42% in Germany (Cooley, CQ HealthBeat, 7/17).
The report also found that, although the rate of preventable deaths among U.S. residents younger than age 75 decreased from 115 per 100,000 in 2001 to 110 deaths in 2006, the U.S. ranked last among all industrialized nations because other nations had larger improvements (New York Times, 7/17). The report cited "wide opportunities to improve care" in the U.S. that could save 100,000 lives and $100 billion.
Comments
Schoen said, "Whenever you look outside the U.S., one of the core differences you see is everyone is in the health care system." In a statement, Schoen said, "We now have 75 million Americans who are uninsured or underinsured. Poor access pulls down quality and drives up costs of care," adding, "The U.S. leads the world on health care spending -- we should expect a far better return on our investment." She said that efforts to improve quality and access to care will require a "top-down" approach by the federal government (CQ HealthBeat, 7/17). Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, said, "It's harder to keep deluding yourself or be complacent that we don't have areas that need improvement" in health care. The "central finding" of the report is that access to care has "deteriorated" in the U.S., she said (New York Times, 7/17).
James Mongan, chair of Commonwealth's Commission on a High Performance Health System and CEO of Partners HealthCare, said, "While there are pockets of improvement and excellence, it is clear that we need strong leadership and concerted public and private efforts to achieve and raise standards of performance nationwide and ensure that significant progress occurs in the future" (CQ HealthBeat, 7/17).
The report is available online.
NYT Editorial: The Plight of the Underinsured
New York Times Editorial, June 12, 2008
It is well known, by now, that almost 50 million Americans lacked health insurance for all or part of last year. What is less well known is that 25 million Americans who did have health insurance often found it pitifully inadequate when a medical crisis hit. They were only marginally better off than those who had no coverage at all.
That is the disturbing finding of a survey by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation specializing in health policy research, that was published by the journal Health Affairs. The survey found that some 22 million adults with health coverage all year still spent a large chunk of their incomes — at least 10 percent for middle-class families — for out-of-pocket medical expenses. Another 3.4 million were saddled with high deductibles that would cause financial problems if they became ill.
Conservative health theorists and insurance industry leaders have long argued that the best way to slow soaring health care costs is to force people to pay a significant share of the bill so that they will buy medical services more judiciously, and sparingly. But as out-of-pocket expenses and deductibles have risen, many families are instead postponing or forgoing treatment. (Emphasis added.)
(See other coverage of the Comonwealth Fund study on our Readings page)
The Minnesota Health Plan Made Great Progress In This Session!
by Senator John MartyApril 23 , 2008 |
It is exciting to see the progress that has been made on the MN Health Plan during the last few months. Thanks to the strong support of single payer advocates and organizations, including MUHCC, GMHCC, UHCAN, PNHP, Great Northern and others, SF 2324 passed out of the Senate Health Committee on February 18, with a strong vote that showed bipartisan support. We are currently pushing a proposal at the capitol to fund an economic analysis of several different health reform plans, including the MN Health Plan. The study would be conducted by the University of Minnesota . If the state funds the economic analysis, this will have been an excellent first year in the effort to pass the MN Health Plan. We have a solid proposal and a united effort to promote that proposal among the public and among elected officials. During the coming months, we will need to work together to raise awareness and build public support for the bill. We plan to reintroduce the MN Health Plan in January for the 2009 legislative session and pass it through the next several legislative committees. In order to continue making progress at the capitol, the grassroots organizing, education, and conversations on the MN Health Plan at the community level around the state will be critical. We look forward to working with you on this effort. Our push for the MN Health Plan comes in the context of many other health “reform” proposals under consideration in Minnesota and other states. As our health care system continues to deteriorate, there is strong political pressure “to do something.” Both the legislative Health Care Access Commission and the governor's Health Transformation Task Force brought together many health care consultants and insiders seeking to address health care cost containment and access. Unfortunately, although the groups came up with a good public health initiative and small steps to expand access, they failed to work on a common sense system for delivering affordable health care. In sum, it is wonderful to see the many efforts that have been undertaken by advocates and supporters of the MN Health Plan. Despite the difficult road ahead, it is clear that we are making good progress. |
The Minnesota Health System Explained For You
-- Cartoon by Lisa Krahn, Seven County Senior Federation
A MAJOR VICTORY !
THE SENATE HEALTH COMMITTEE PASSES THE MINNESOTA HEALTH ACT BY A LANDSLIDE VOTE!
ADVOCATES PACK THE ROOM, OVERFLOW TO NEIGHBORING CORRIDORS AND SENATORS TAKE NOTE!
Hundreds of advocates turned out for the hearing of the Minnesota Health Act on Monday. We packed the hearing room and many of us had to view the proceedings from monitors outside the room. While we regret the inconvenience to those of you who gave of your time and travelled long distances, we heard three references during committee deliberations to the number of advocates present -- the implication being that the spotlight of public attention was on the Senators. Our presence made a difference!
See pictures from the afternoon hearing.
An audio recording of the hearing is available here.
Video of the afternoon meeting is available here.
Media coverage is available here (thanks to Amy Johnston) and here.
The continuation of the hearings at 6 pm featured testimony from opposition witnesses (was that the best they've got? Yikes!) and the final voice vote.
Perhaps the highlight before the vote was Senator Paul Koering's honest, sincere expression of concern about our health care system and the need to consider alternatives. As a Republican, he acknowledged the risk he was taking but, in the end, he voted his conscience. Paul's e-mail is sen.paul.koering@senate.mn.
"Yea" voice votes were Marty, Torres Ray, Higgins, Doll, Erickson-Ropes, Lourey, Koering, Prettner-Solon. Senator Berglin participated in the discussion but left just before the vote. There were three vocal "nay" votes.
Senator Marty's fact sheets on the Colorado cost study and comparison with the Health Care Access Commission and Governor's Transformation Task Force reports are still available.