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Interesting story below on efforts to develop universal access to health care in the US – it’s a pretty radical idea here in the US of A:
At a US Senate-hosted round table discussion Tuesday,
physician advocates for universal health insurance were arrested after
vocalizing the lack of a single-payer advocate at the table. The panel
consisted of insurance industry lobbyists, business representatives (large and
small), a Heritage Foundation representative, and two representatives from the
Kaiser Family Foundation. The witness list and their statements can be found
here: http://finance.senate.gov/sitepages/hearing050509.html.
What are interesting however are the parallels to our
on-going debate over what to do with the finance industry. There is first and
foremost, no representation (even from duly elected representatives) of diverse
public opinion. Second, any debate is over whether the insurance industry is
willing to accept more regulations (which are a masterstroke in perverse
incentives, both increasing industry motive to cut corners and narrow
deliverables as well as lowering public opinion of government) or introduce a
public option to compete with private insurance in the market (same comment).
Finally, a rational attempt to introduce a third perspective was both poorly
represented (in number as well as perception) as well as greeted with more
attempts at control and placation: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/05/05/senator-during-health-care-protest-we-need-more-police/.
While we do love our experts and our elected policy makers
helping us expedite our decision-making processes; at what cost does our
efficiency come? Even a free-market ideologue will tell you that a diversity
of possibilities in the market place is essential to progress. And a
resilience ecologist (or if RNA could talk, a H1N1 virus) will tell you that
diversity is essential to survival.
What in the world does this have to do with global health?
A discussion of aid efficacy aside, we will never have sufficient resources or
will to proportionately match the financial support given by other nations
(Sweden, for example) unless we come a broad understanding on how we manage our
own wealth. More specifically however, how do we expect to end “government
corruption” in the various other countries we try to serve, that is, one that
is responsive only to a few accumulators of private wealth and power rather
than the will of the constituency, if we continue to set such a miserable
example here in the US? Is government corruption not just the exercise of
non-responsive government, lacking popular power or will to displace it?
- SD
P.S. Please excuse the sourcing; the media did not see fit
to cover controversy over how our nation will take care of its people in the
years to come. I do look forward to criticism of this assessment, though!
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Doctors, Single Payer Activists Arrested, Make History at
Senate Finance Roundtable
May 5, 2009
By Donna Smith
It has finally happened right here in the United States.
Citizens who believe healthcare is a human right have been arrested and are
being processed like criminals through the Southeast District of Columbia
police station. Their crime? Asking for single payer healthcare reform –
publicly funded, privately delivered healthcare – to be discussed during the
Congressional hearings on reform.
Doctors and other single payer activists were handcuffed and
went to jail today speaking up for single payer to be at the table in the
Senate finance Committee’s roundtable discussion on healthcare access and
coverage. In stark contrast, Karen Ignagni, head of the industry lobby group
American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) was escorted into the room like royalty
by staff members of the Senate committee. Clearly, the position of the United
States Senate is not with the majority of Americans who support a national,
public insurance system.
It made me physically ill to see Maryland pediatrician
Margaret Flowers cuffed like a criminal and pushed out the door as the Senators
waited to begin their staged roundtable discussion. It made me want to scream.
It made me proud of them for being bold but ashamed that not one Senator spoke
up for their own citizen-protestors and asked that they at least be allowed to
speak. But the insistence that the citizens rising in protest be arrested
continued from the chair with each incident.
Simply asking to have single payer be included and fully
vetted is a crime. Profiting as the for-profit health insurance companies do at
the expense of 22,000 American lives every year, however, gets you a run of the
table in this healthcare reform discussion. Just ask the Senators who are
drafting what this nation’s health system will look like – and watch their
behavior today – if you want evidence of how your voice will be heard in the
process.
The protestors were stoic and respectful but direct. One by
one they stood. One by one they asked why single payer reform was not “at the
table” of 15 witnesses Senator Max Baucus and his finance Committee gathered to
map out what sort of coverage Americans might expect in the Senate reform bill
now being crafted.
Sen. Baucus eventually spoke and indicated that he was
respectful of those who believe in single payer – as he acknowledged many of
his constituents in Montana do – but he made no attempt to explain why no
single payer voice has been included in any Senate discussion to date. He urged
any others in the audience who might have any designs on speaking up like the
protestors did to not do so, and then he moved on to his roundtable discussion.
The press seated comfortably at the press table first looked
amused and then puzzled by the procession of protest in the chamber. The C-SPAN
cameras fixed on both the Committee’s table at the front of the room and the
witness table directly across from them could have easily picked up the
protests but the network chose to keep their cameras fixed only on Chairman
Baucus – though the protestors’ words could be heard in the audience. Only two
reporters of the 20 or so assembled were curious enough or industrious enough
to rise and exit the room to see the arrests being carried out in the hallway.
While neither the Finance Committee or the press allowed
their proceedings to be disrupted for very long, the air in the room and the
atmosphere had changed — the giddy and gleeful assembly of industry lobbyists who
had been chattering in rapt anticipation of the coming of their carefully
chosen witnesses could not deny that some brave and patriotic fellow citizens
had just been hauled out for arrest for nothing more than demanding that a
point of view held by a majority of patients, nurses, physicians and other
healthcare providers be included in the national discussion.
While this Congress may pass something very different than
single payer reform, it will not do so without hearing the cries of the people
left so openly exposed to personal health and financial ruin by the corrupt
system that celebrates only profit. The citizens who stood for the thousands
and thousands of dead today will not let this democracy give itself completely
over to the big money interests in healthcare. Not without a fight. Not on
their lives or yours or mine.
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