The Loophole Health Plan
I was looking point by point yesterday at the broad proposals of the new "Health Care for America" network, and wondering why they seem so empty, more loophole than plan. What the group says will matter, because its members include major unions (the ones that have allied with employers on health care issues) as well as some top Democrats. Its funding, much of it from a wealthy charity called Atlantic Philanthropies, is big. What HCFA says will influence national health reform. All of my doubts crystallized today, reading a piece on Huffington Post by California Nurses Association leader Rose Ann De Moro. She nails Health Care for America for saying it opposes profiteering insurance companies, then offering a plan that lets insurers control our health future.
Here's the part of De Moro's article that made me say "Yesss."
You can watch someone rob your bank, but unless you stop them, the vaults are still going to be stripped bare. If you're looking for the hammer or any enforcement mechanism in the HCFAN proposal, don't bother, it's not there.
The insurers don't care if we know they are thieves, they will continue to deny and delay care because it's in their DNA. It's how they are set up to operate, it's how they make money for their shareholders, it's how they generate plush pay packages for their executives, and it's how they compete with the other insurance giants.
Nor does the HCFAN proposal contain any effective cost controls on the insurers. Their commitment to basing pricing on "ability to pay" is a recipe for merely getting the healthcare you can afford, not what you need. It also fails to assure real choice of providers beyond the limited network established by all private insurance plans.
The bone the coalition sponsors throw to single payer advocates is the false promise of a public plan side by side with private insurance. The public plan, they contend, will be so much more attractive that the private plans will just wither away. Don't count on it.
The insurance companies will always be able to lower their prices with cut rate plans with lower standards that they can aggressively market through massive advertising, tele-marketing, even door to door salesmen (as some do now) with a marketing campaign that the public plans will not have the funding to be able to match.
The private plans can then continue to cherry pick the younger and healthier patients while the sicker and older patients are dumped in the public plan, wrecking the whole idea of a risk pool and driving up the costs for the public plan to operate. The competition won't starve the private plans and cause them to wither away, they'll starve the public plan.
There's only one way to stop the insurance industry abuses -- it's to actually stop them. The rest of the world has figured this one out -- see the study in Britain earlier this year that found that the U.S. ranks last in preventable deaths among 19 industrialized nations even though we spend twice as much on health care as anyone else. Isn't it time we figured it out here as well?