How Has Competition in Healthcare Worked Out?

The Milwaukee newspaper, no doubt, gets way more letters from readers than it can possibly publish. That probably explains why the letter below, which I sent on Monday, Oct. 8, wasn't published. Surely, it couldn't be because I criticized the newspaper. Here, for anyone who follows this blog is what I wrote. 

The Journal Sentinel's top Page 1 news story today is that Mitt Romney "supports competition in healthcare". Given that the cost of healthcare has skyrocketed and access to healthcare has shrunk for a vast number of Americans ever since Richard Nixon opened the door to for-profit HMOs and hospitals back in 1971, I have to ask, "How did that 'competition in healthcare' thingy work out for us?" Medicare is the only healthcare program/plan that isn't a disaster. The people who have benefited financially are healthcare industry, including insurance, CEOs and shareholders. The only competition in healthcare for insurance companies is to get more of our money, not in providing better or more affordable coverage. Obamacare is showing real benefits, financially and otherwise, for many Americans, including those on Medicare for whom much less costly annual physicals are now covered before potentially catastrophic illnesses take hold that need highly expensive--and often--ineffective or inadequate treatment. The vast majority of Americans can't afford Romney's idea of returning to the good old days of "competition in healthcare" that has left so many in this country in financial ruin and some even dead.

Why Are GOP Women in Elected Office, Professional Careers

We see them everywhere -- women in Congress and state legislatures, with law firms, on Fox TV, writing for so-called conservative publications -- women who are cheerleaders for the current crusade against females' access to effective pregnancy prevention measures and other critical healthcare.

I'm amazed every time I hear or read an attack by these women on their sisters.

First, because they are fighting so hard against their own interests and have such a low opinion of themselves as women.

Second, and even more astounding, is why we are seeing and hearing them at all. If they really do believe that women should be subservient to men -- especially to their husbands (and being good Christian or whatever women, they should have husbands, right?) -- without access to affordable reproductive healthcare and self-determination, what in the world are they doing in public office or having professional careers, such as TV personality, university professor or serving in any other public/professional position. Shouldn't they be home cleaning the house, doing laundry, having babies and fixing dinner?

Seems completely hypocritical to me -- and certainly not truly conservative.

Don't Confuse Hate With Fear

It's all over the news. Women-hating, war on women, assault on women, misogyny.
It's in anti-female laws that are being introduced and enacted right and far right.

• Laws that would restrict women's legal right to determine their own reproductive destiny.
• Laws that denyequal pay for women who perform the same work as their male counterparts.
• Laws that permit rape by transvaginal ultrasound as blackmail for a medically unnecessary procedure in exchange for a constitutionally permitted and otherwise legal abortion.

It's from radio shout hosts who slander and demean females who speak publically about the need for certain types of female-related healthcare coverage, or food accessibility based on socio-economic segments of society.

It's everywhere these days, or so it seems.

But I believe what's going on isn't hatred, despite what it looks like or sounds like.

I believe it's fear.

I truly believe that the men engaging in such behavior and proposing these laws do not hate women. I believe they are scared of women.

Scared? How so?

Based on the one thing women do that men cannot do. Procreate.

Given that only women can get pregnant and give birth, these men who are engaging in repression and degradation of women, in their infinite sense of insecurity and inadequacy, must control the when, how and under what circumstances women get pregnant and give birth. Otherwise, they fear the inevitability of becoming irrelevant.

This fear is certainly nothing new. It's centuries old.

Consider the current contention that requiring employer-provided heath insurance to cover women's contraception might violate employers' moral or religious beliefs. And consider that those moral/religious beliefs are defined in terms of women's reproductive lives.

Just who, pray-tell, dreamed up those religious beliefs in the first place and who continues to dictate them and enforce them on threat of excommunication from their religious institution?

Men.

Not women.

Men.

I'm far too conservative to believe that anybody should be able to use their ideology or religious dicta to deny anybody else her personal freedom or individual liberty. 

The Choice is NOT Ours

A friend of mine publishes an e-newsletter that is chock full of all things political with a focus on money and healthcare reform -- and a lot of his own opinion. Although he's a self-identified Republican, I agree with a lot of what he says.

Occasionally, though, I really disagree with him. That's true with his most recent issue, which is at http://www.throwtherascalsout.org/eNewsletter157.htm, in which he took on the current debate over employers and their healthcare benefits including coverage for contraceptives. Here's what he wrote:

-- Sorry, I just don't agree. Though I am pro-choice, health plans and taxpayers should NOT be required to cover birth control or contraceptives or Viagra or abortions or morning-after pills or vasectomies or Vialis or whatever. When I say "keep the government out of my bedroom," I mean here too. Buy an extra-coverage policy if these things are important to you.

Here is my reply to him:

Really, Jack? Why stop with personal issues such as pregnancy prevention, especially when "the pill" is also prescribed to alieviate for all kinds of medical conditions such as ovarian cysts, endometriosis, severe acne, abnormal facial hair growth, etc?

How about all kinds of other morally or religiously offensive procedures/medications/etc.? Anyone who's Christian Scientist could object to providing healthcare benefits for all medical treatments entirely and just tell his or her employees to pray.

I personally find it repugnant that insurance plans and Medicare cover erectle dysfunction prescriptions, particularly when so many women's conditions and preventative programs/procedures aren't covered. 

Should insurance plans not provide coverage for alcohol-related conditions because some people find alcoholism a moral weakness, or coverage for obesity-induced diabetes because an employer might blame obesity on personal choice and thus, the person is responsible for her/his diabetes?

But why stop with healthcare? How about my tax dollars supporting behaviors and practices that I find morally offensive, such as certain church sects' subjugation of women and denying them equal opportunity, or that is even criminal, such privately tolerating pedophilia and sheltering/excusing/playing shell games with pedophiles in their ranks?

Despite the Constitutional guarantee of "separation of church and state," that has been reduced to little more than a fig leaf. All taxpaying Americans fund all kinds of government services that are provided to those churches/religious organizations for nothing. Examples include police and fire protection, use of tax-funded infrastructure, access to safe food and water suppies, benefit of non-polluted air and waterways, federally funded grants and academic scholarships for students attending religiously affiliated colleges and universities. The list is endless.

Trying to wall off one aspect of Americans' life choices and situations because some people find them morally objectionable on ideological or other grounds is like trying to remove salt from soup.

And telling people who want or need such services as you list in your newsletter to "Buy an extra-coverage policy if these things are important to you" is great advice for people who can afford or even find such coverage in this world of private insurance companies that have expanded denial of coverage because of "pre-existing conditions" so broadly that it can even include pregnancy.

And for schmucks like some of the GOP legislators to say that people who work for religiously-affiliated employers, such as Catholic hospitals, and want employer-provided healthcare coverage to just go work somewhere else is unbelievably specious when most if not all hospitals in many areas, including major metropolitan regions, have religious affiliations.

There is no sanity or refuge for the average person seeking healthcare coverage in the private insurance industry. And it's way too easy for people with guaranteed health coverage like members of Congress, rich people who can afford and find loopholes around anything, and oldsters like you and me who are fortunate enough to have access to Medicare to tell other people to just buy your own.

The only recourse in a society like the United States that is becoming increasingly backwards, i.e. its steadfast rejection of universal, single-payer healthcare coverage, is for the government to prohibit institutions and profiteers of human suffering from discriminating on ideological grounds, trumped up or otherwise.

In summary, Jack's opinion on this issue reflects the current American society-destroying affliction of "I've got mine, screw you."

Get in the Front of the Line!

A long-ago school classmate with whom I remain in touch is almost religiously sanctimonious about self reliance, individual responsibility, the virtues of capitalism, and the evils of big government, government spending and social programs.

This person personifies the current polarization in which I see tea partiers serving as rocket launchers that have just about blasted the Republican Party off the cliff to the right. And they epitomize hyprocisy. Here's why:

This man and his siblings were raised by a single mother who supported her family by working as a public school teacher, which, of course, means she was paid by the government.

After his graduation from high school, he received a taxpayer-funded U.S. military academy, then had 20-plus year military career, which included not only his tax-funded pay, but benefits, including healthcare that was essentially free to him.

After retiring from the military and receiving a military pension and, again, almost free to him, healthcare, he went to work for a major defense contractor which receives a vast amount of its revenue from government (tax-funded) contracts.

In other words, during the nearly 70 years of his life, he has benefitted almost entirely from government funding.

My eternal question about him and so many of his like-minded ideologues, is why government spending and enjoying a comfortable lifestyle, which this man does, is fine for them, but not for their fellow Americans?

Even Alan Simpson, a 22-year U.S. senator, thus recipient of a federal pension and healthcare benefits, and who recently served as co-chair President Obama's commission on reducing the federal deficits, is one the "310 million" Americans sucking on his "milk cow" analogy of Social Security. Only he's been suckling for a lifetime.

Being truly conservative, I say people like my childhood acquaintance and Mr. Simpson, who are so liberal with their rhetoric that government should cut spending, shred the social safety net and eliminate benefits for others, need to step--or be shoved--to the front of the line of those they say should not be on the government payroll or dole.

America, Land of Little Red Riding Hoods

Wisconsin (R) Congressman Paul Ryan has revealed his utopian fix to American economic woes,which includes replacing Medicare with a subsidy scheme for older Americans that gives them a fixed amount to buy medical coverage from private providers.

This is nothing but a Wizard of Oz act. Ryan promotes this ploy as a way to reduce the cost of healthcare because it will force healthcare providers to compete for millions of Americans' healthcare dollars, thus will drive prices down.

There are three glaring fallacies (and probably many more) with this claim:

(1) If millions of Americans having to buy private insurance will force healthcare costs down, which is a premise of his plan, then why hasn't that happened already? Most Americans, either individually, via cooperatives or, most commonly, via their employers have been buying private medical insurance for decades and healthcare costs have skyrocketed.

(2) This sounds like the Wal-Mart approach to healthcare shopping. You know, buying healthcare on the cheap. Is that how we will all decide which doctor to see, which hospital to go to, which radiology unit to get xrays for a broken bone, an MRI or bone scan done? The cheapest doctor? Really? The cheapest hospital? The cheapest xray unit? And what kinds of corners will those facilities cut so they can be the cheapest? What kinds of qualifications and how much experience will the technicians have? What will the infection rates be? And who, in Ryan's universe of deregulation, will be watchdogging these doctors, technicians, profiteers and holding them accountable?

‎(3) The competition Ryan is fantasizing about will be among insurers who will be competing for healthcare insurance buyers' dollars, not among healthcare providers. ...and we've all seen just how that has worked so far, right? It won't do a thing to affect healthcare costs, except that it won't even begin to put the brakes on the astronomical skyrocketing of the past few decades (think: since Richard Nixon changed the rules that enabled healthcare providers to becom for-profit entities) that have sent them into outer space.

This is just another version of another Wisconsinite's idea of "open for business" except the reality is it will be "open season" on vulnerable, unsophisticated people who will once again be duped by the scam of so-called capitalism-American style, which is gouge people til it hurts or kills, 'cause the rich can never, ever be rich enough, and to buy enough politicans to make sure laws are enacted to keep it legal.

This begs the question that's been hanging out there ever since the (R)s started pandering to the tpers and winning elections by disguising themselves as fiscal 'conservatives' and sanctimonious stewards of "the people's" money, when they and baby Bush are the very ones who ran wild with the country's credit card and enabled/encouraged Wall Street and the banking industry to rob middle America of its jobs, homes, pensions and safety nets. And we, as a country, are such gullible little Red Riding Hoods, that we believe them all the way down their gullets.

The only real beneficiaries of Ryan's plan will be private insurers and their shareholders and medical providers who will be able to continue their high-cost ways.

I'm truly conservative about not privatizing government services that will result in continuing the gush of middle- and low-income Americans' money into the luxury boxes of the uber-rich.

Rather than eliminate the only single-payer healthcare system this country has, and which people love and want to keep in place, we need to be making a single-payer system available for all Americans. It is possible to make Medicare more cost-effective and affordable for the country and to extend that system to everyone who wants it. It starts with finding ways to collar and lower the spiraling out-of-control actual cost of providing healthcare. That's where Ryan and all of this country's leaders need to focus their attention.