Oct 4, 2007 3:35 PM
The number of uninsured Americans is fast approaching 50 million, the average cost of coverage for families grew by 78 percent in six years and more and more employers say they can’t afford to provide health care and compete in the global marketplace.
Retirees aged 50 to 64 are the second-fastest-growing group of uninsured Americans as increasing numbers of companies cut retirement benefits and, nationally, 30 percent of 60-to-64-year-olds who apply for new health insurance policies are rejected.
The head of the American Cancer Society is concerned that unless the system is fixed, lack of access — delay in detection or treatment of cancer — will be a bigger cancer killer than tobacco. So they are devoting their entire advertising budget to air the growing problem of inadequate health coverage.
Even in the face of the shameful and growing numbers of uninsured children — up to 8.7 million in 2006 or 11.7 percent of all children — the president threatens to veto a bipartisan bill that would provide health insurance — checkups, vaccinations, preventive care — to 4.1 million uninsured children through the very successful State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
The Census Bureau reports the percentage of large corporations that offer health insurance to their workers has slid below 60 percent with millions more underinsured. Middle-class working families are feeling the brunt of this catastrophe as they face lost coverage or shrinking coverage and higher premiums and co-pays that escalate year after year without a comparable increase in wages.
The bottom line is that the U.S. health-care system is the most expensive in the world but yields worse results compared to Britain, Canada, Germany and Australia.
What more do we need to know to realize just how seriously broken our health-care system really is? And, as the system continues to deteriorate, to realize that nobody is safe? Mayors across the country, ours included, are trying to cut health-care costs, and labor — our union, too — knows just how vulnerable benefits are at the negotiating table. Health-care costs were at the heart of the GM negotiations just settled after a two-day strike. [See page 11.]
While a strong majority of Americans indicate in polls that they support guaranteed health care for all and even as more business, labor and hospital interest groups are beginning to call for reform, this administration is still pushing the myth that only the private sector can do the job, suggesting that the uninsured — children included — use hospital emergency rooms if they need care.
President Bush and the conservatives have been relentless in trying to undermine any government program that has successfully protected middle-class, working Americans. First it was their attempts to privatize Social Security, which we nipped in the bud, but we’re now paying for their more successful scheme to privatize Medicare by creating Medicare Advantage plans. Social Security and Medicare are unquestionably two outstanding and successful government programs offering protection to millions of Americans.
Medicare, created in 1965, is the federal government’s health insurance program that today covers 44 million elderly and disabled people and is partially paid for by our tax dollars. Under this traditional Medicare or Medicare Fee-For-Service program, as it is also known, health-care bills are paid directly to the provider. Despite its success in providing quality care and in containing adminstrative costs at considerably less than private health plans, the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act (MMA) shifted Medicare from a reliable federal program to a vast array of local and regional private health plans driven by the marketplace with financial risk falling on plan participants.
Today the government pays an average of 12 percent, or $1,000, more a year to cover each beneficiary in a private Medicare Advantage plan than it would cost to cover that same beneficiary in traditional Medicare, according to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare (NCPSSM) which calls these subsidies “a windfall for corporate America.”
A recent New York Times editorial noted, “The main losers are the beneficiaries in the standard Medicare program whose premiums are roughly $2 higher each month to help pay for the subsidies and the taxpayers who pick up part of the tab.” The Times calls for congress to eliminate the subsidies which “also erode the long-term solvency of Medicare which needs to rein in costs not increase them with handouts to insurance companies.”
The Congressional Budget Office projects that Medicare will pay $75 billion to private plans in 2007 and $1.31 trillion over the next 10 years. Eliminating these overpayments and paying private plans at the same rate as traditonal Medicare would save $54 billion over five years and $149 trillion over 10 years, adding two years of solvency to Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund, according to the CBO.
While 81 percent of Medicare beneficiaries choose to remain in the traditonal program, continuing to dole out excessive and unwarranted payments to private plans which can cherry pick who comes into their plan threatens to reduce Medicare to a plan for only the sickest and neediest of our citizens. These subsidies are particularly unwarranted, according to NCPSSM, because there is no evidence that private health plans deliver any better health-care outcomes than traditional Medicare.
And that’s not the end of the story. The 2006 Medicare Part D prescription plan that Bush handed over to the insurance industry is getting failing grades all around. For seniors, the plan costs $300 more out-of-pocket a month for medicines than other plans. For Comptroller General David Walker, the plan is “probably the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s.”
In an ironic twist, while the insurance companies are reaping huge profits from the Bush handover, he continues to make deep cuts in Medicare in his budgets when he could save a lot of government/taxpayer dollars by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices as Veterans Affairs does and by allowing importation of cheaper drugs.
Access to affordable health care is essential to every American family and especially to the security of retirees. For those of us who are seniors, privatizing Medicare transforms the original concept of this treasured social program and can only lead to reduced benefits or coverage and increased out-of-pocket costs.
We’ll take a look at some proposed solutions to this very complex health-care problem and some pending legislation in the next column.