Monday, January 4, 2010

Pelosi, Reid, and Obama Take Notice...we have "The Right to Sovereignty Over Our Own Bodies"

Source: Op Ed News

Compulsory Private Health Insurance:

Just Another Bailout for the Financial Sector?

By Ellen Brown

Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is quoted as warning two centuries ago:

"Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship. . . . The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom."

That time seems to have come, but the dictatorship we are facing is not the sort that Dr. Rush was apparently envisioning. It is not a dictatorship by medical doctors, many of whom are as distressed by the proposed legislation as the squeezed middle class is. The new dictatorship is not by doctors but by Wall Street -- the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sector that now claims 40% of corporate profits.

Economist L. Randall Wray observes that ever since Congress threw out the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial banking from investment banking, insurance and Wall Street finance have been "two peas in a pod." He writes:

"[T] here is a huge untapped market of some 50 million people who are not paying insurance premiums--and the number grows every year because employers drop coverage and people can't afford premiums. Solution? Health insurance "reform' that requires everyone to turn over their pay to Wall Street. . . . This is just another bailout of the financial system, because the tens of trillions of dollars already committed are not nearly enough."

The health reform bills now coming through Congress are not focused on how to make health care cheaper or more effective, how to eliminate waste and fraud, or how to cut out expensive middlemen. As originally envisioned, the public option would have pursued those goals. But the public option has been dropped from the Senate bill and radically watered down in the House bill. Rather than focusing on making health care affordable, the bills focus on how to force people either to buy health insurance if they don't have it, or to pay more for it if they do. If you don't have insurance and don't purchase it, you will be subject to a hefty fine. And if you do purchase it, premiums, co-pays, co-insurance payments and deductibles are liable to keep health care cripplingly expensive. Most of the people who don't have health care can't afford to pay the deductibles, so they will never use the plans they are forced to buy.

To subsidize those who can't pay, the Senate bill would make families earning two to four times the poverty level who don't have employer-sponsored insurance surrender 8% to 12% of their income to insurance payments, or pay a fine. In another effort to make the insurance payments "affordable," the Senate bill calls for the lowest cost plan to cover only sixty percent of health care costs. "In other words," wrote Dr. Andrew Coates in a November 23 article, "a guarantee of insurance industry dominance and the continued privatization of health care in every arena."

An excellent analysis was posted on December 22 by a national organization of 17,000 physicians called Physicians for a National Health Program. The authors observed:

"Some paint the Senate bill as a flawed first step to reform that will be improved over time, citing historical examples such as Social Security. But where Social Security established the nidus of a public institution that grew over time, the Senate bill proscribes any such new public institution. Instead, it channels vast new resources including funds diverted from Medicare into the very private insurers who caused today's health care crisis. Social Security's first step was not a mandate that payroll taxes which fund pensions be turned over to Goldman Sachs! . . .

"The bill would drain $43 billion from Medicare payments to safety-net hospitals, threatening the care of the 23 million who will remain uninsured even if the bill works as planned. . . . The bill would leave hundreds of millions of Americans with inadequate insurance an "actuarial value' as low as 60 percent of actual health costs. . . . The bill would inflate the already crushing burden of insurance-related paperwork that currently siphons $400 billion from care annually. . . . [T]he bill will cause U.S. health costs to increase even more rapidly than presently, and budget neutrality is to be achieved by draining funds from Medicare and an accounting trick front-loading the new revenues while delaying most new coverage until 2014."

The Right to Sovereignty Over Our Own Bodies

Compulsory health insurance is like compulsory selective military service (the draft), except that all of our numbers have come up. The argument has been made that auto insurance is compulsory, so why not health insurance? But the obvious response is that you can choose to drive a car. The only way to escape the vehicle we call a body is to give up the ghost.

And that brings up another issue alluded to by Dr. Rush: the matter of freedom of choice in health care, which some people would equate with freedom of religion. Not everyone believes in Modern Medicine. If we the people have a right to choose what we believe about life after death, we should have the right to choose what we believe about life before death, by choosing how to maintain our own bodies.

The conventional treatment promoted by the medical/pharmaceutical complex is an aggressive approach that can wind up killing the patient as collateral damage in its war on the disease. Among other researchers questioning the wisdom of this approach is Gary Null, who reported the results of an exhaustive independent review by the Nutrition Institute of America in 2004. The reviewers concluded that the number one killer is not heart disease or cancer but conventional medicine itself. Conventional medicine was found to be responsible for an estimated 783,936 deaths annually, including 106,000 deaths from adverse drug reactions, 98,000 from medical errors, and 88,000 from infection; and those figures were conservative, since no more than 20 percent of iatrogenic (doctor- or drug-caused) mishaps are ever reported.

There are more natural, less invasive alternatives, but most are not covered by insurance; and even such simple remedies as healthy organic food may be too expensive for people forced to use a major portion of their incomes for medical insurance. A true public option of the Medicare-for-all variety could have solved the problem by keeping health care affordable. If other industrialized countries can find the money for a national health service, we could too. For a model, we could follow the lead of Canada, which originally obtained the funds for its national health service from its own publicly-owned central bank. But that will be the subject of another article. Stay tuned.






Author's Bio: Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust." She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from "the money trust." Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature's Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are http://www.webofdebt.com and http://www.ellenbrown.com.

6 comments:

  1. Hi Norm, I'm confused by this. Ms. Brown mentions the "originally envisioned public option as one that would have pursued those goals, but has now dropped or watered down.

    Who envisioned a public option that would be cheaper, more effective, eliminating waste and fraud? I saw none of this out of Congress. Perhaps this is what physicians envisioned.

    A true public option of the Medicare-for-all variety could have solved the problem by keeping health care affordable. If other industrialized countries can find the money for a national health service, we could too. For a model, we could follow the lead of Canada, which originally obtained the funds for its national health service from its own publicly-owned central bank.

    Canada's health care may not be as bad as the UK's but it is not desirable, in my opinion.

    Her comments about Wall Street are insightful. Everything is about banking!

    Happy New Year Norm.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Maggie,

    Those words caught my eye as well when I scanned Ellen's post the first time. But if my memory serves me right, didn't Obama mention that he wanted the so-called Public Option?


    Meanwhile, I forwarded you question to Ellen and maybe she'll give us some insight from her point of view.

    I'm currently still in Massachusetts waiting for a weather break to head back south...was suppose to be on the road today but we postponed travel until the roads are clear.

    Happy New Year to you and yours...
    2010, yes we kin !!!

    Norm

    ReplyDelete
  3. Maggie...

    Second thoughts...

    Sorry I did not review this post as I should have. Ellen is an excellent source for inforamtion regarding the banking industry however, I would hesitate to say the same over the health care debate (sorry Ellen if you are reading this). Her last paragraph is very disturbing,
    "There are more natural, less invasive alternatives, but most are not covered by insurance; and even such simple remedies as healthy organic food may be too expensive for people forced to use a major portion of their incomes for medical insurance. A true public option of the Medicare-for-all variety could have solved the problem by keeping health care affordable. If other industrialized countries can find the money for a national health service, we could too. For a model, we could follow the lead of Canada, which originally obtained the funds for its national health service from its own publicly-owned central bank..."

    To even suggest that we follow Canadian Model displays a lack of knowledge about the reality of the Canadian system. I get my information from the Canadians who wanted to move here because of our current system and now have a change of heart because we may soon duplicate what they don't want.

    Lets' see if Ellen responds to any of this...

    later, Norm

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Norm, hope you are still safely off the roads. I really enjoyed her article. Yes, Obama said over and over he wanted a public-option, but he and Congress never had a plan to make it cheaper, more effective and eliminating waste and fraud. That was campaign rhetoric. When it all came to light, the plan was nothing more than cutting Medicare to take care of those who did not want to provide for themselves - and of course, it offered him and "them" unlimited powers.

    I was confused about Ms. Brown's comment that the public option was "originally envisioned" to be all that mentioned above.

    Keep in mind that I am very suspicious about any plan coming out of this White House, because I can tell you there will be nothing good in it for you or me. I may have well, through my squinted and suspicious eyes, misintepreted what she was trying to say.

    Be safe on that road trip now!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm in south Jersey at this writing...Exit 4 New Jersey Turnpike! Wish I'd left yesterday but the forcast didn't look good so when I woke up this morning I said, "So much for ACCU-WEATHER!"
    In fact I expected more snow here than we had on Cape Cod but the reverse was true.

    As for Ellen's article, I wish she would clarify that comment "For a model, we could follow the lead of Canada..." There is no way that I can support the Canadian program...I know too many Canadians who would disagree with her...including a close (life-long) friend who became a resident of Nova Scotia about forty years ago.

    Norm

    ReplyDelete
  6. Maggie...check out Ellen's latest here: http://normanhooben.blogspot.com/2010/02/public-bank-public-health-carewhat-do.html

    ReplyDelete