Good Heavens, Cuomo -- How Could You?!

A week ago, the advocacy group HCFANY (Health Care For All New York) published a blog post which I quote in its entirety:

The proposed executive budget is shockingly silent on health coverage:

-Health insurance for immigrants left behind by the ACA:  $0

-State premium assistance for people who can’t afford coverage:  $0

-Funding to stabilize the high costs of NY’s individual market: $0.

Instead, the people get a “commission” of so-called experts. What can a commission tell us about health coverage that we don’t already know?  Here’s what we already know:  coverage reduces mortality; coverage reduces morbidity; coverage brings people out of poverty; coverage provides economic security to people.

Coverage matters. There are plenty of giveaways in this budget for the health care industry. But no investment to provide the health coverage that would make such a difference to so many New Yorkers. State leaders in California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Washington have taken big steps on coverage.  But not here in New York, where over a million people are uninsured and millions more are struggling to afford their insurance.

New York’s advocates, including HCFANY, have developed agendas over the years that would move New York towards universal coverage. Our most progressive advocates have proposed a bold single-payer plan.  New York could take several smaller steps that would immediately ease the financial burden of accessing health care in New York: (1) state premium subsidies for people who buy their own plans and have trouble affording them; or (2) a public option for people who want a cheaper alternative to private plans.

The most heartbreaking oversight in the budget is that it does nothing to help the 400,000 New Yorkers who are uninsured because of their immigration status. Again, there are simple steps that New York could take to help. Governor Cuomo could have proposed an expansion of Child Health Plus to young adult immigrants, as Governor Newsom did. He could have been bolder and expanded the Essential Plan to all low-income adults, regardless of status. If health care is a human right, why are there so many New Yorkers whose birthplace leaves them without health coverage?

State premium assistance, a public option, immigrant coverage: all would have been progressive achievements to crow about – something that would let HCFANY agree wholeheartedly with Governor Cuomo that New York is the “most progressive big state in the nation.”

After this shocking report, there was an invitation to comment. So I posted: "This does seem to tell us where Gov. Cuomo stands on all these matters -- apparently centered smack-dab in the desires of the Health Care Industry, and discernibly not at all on the needs of his constituents, who have been pleading for help.  I wonder why does Cuomo's position seem so counter to the desires of the people?" 

Well, for me, the answer seems straight forward: Cuomo, who is sitting on an enormous war chest of dollars, remembers where a lot of that money must have come from -- corporate interests, of which a sizable portion probably came from the Healthcare Industry.  Note well: I am not accusing, I am guessing -- but it's a pretty good guess, wouldn't you think?  With notable exceptions, most of our Federal government has been for sale; why shouldn't our state -- which has been less than conspicuous for honesty and integrity -- be likewise offered to the highest bidder?

However that may be, it's obvious that Cuomo is trying a tactic designed not only to delay our progress but also to vitiate the considerable momentum our movement has developed. Just as runaway trucks can be slowed by artificial hills of gravel and sand, nothing will grind  us to a halt better than empty words -- a lot of them.

All these empty words can be countered by a few pungent ones, such as, GOVERNOR: CUT THE B.S. AND DEAL WITH THE PROBLEM! The problem, should he need reminding, is that people are dying, their families going bankrupt because of an out-of-control, extortionate, profit-driven healthcare system. And what he suggests is another commission?  

And it's not only Cuomo. Many of our nominally Democratic Assembly people,  who reliably voted for NYHA because they knew the Republican Senate would just as reliably bat it down -- these nominal Democrats, I say, will remember the source of the money that got them elected  -- UNLESS WE SPEAK UP!

And the general public, most of whom, I fear, have never even heard of the NYHA -- even fine Doctors and Nurses -- will be ignorant of what Cuomo is doing to us UNLESS WE SPEAK UP! 

I feel that this last is most important. One commentator  -- seeing what he perceived to be a waffling even on the part of so-called progressive Democrats -- asked "what shall we do -- take to the streets?" He was being serious. We have in our Healthcare Industrial Complex a huge vested interest, which will expend all its resources -- and they are very many -- to keep single payer from becoming law. By insisting that in this particular instance -- healthcare -- the profit motive be set aside, we are getting uncomfortably close to the beating heart of the corporate monster that owns this country.

Dio

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THIS IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART

Read It If You Dare

A few days ago,  Bruce Woych, a good friend of mine and frequent supplier of comments to this blog, alerted me to a famous special edition of Time magazine, published in March 2013. It contained a ground-shaking article by Steven Brill. More than 24,000 words long, it reports in scarifying detail why and how medical bills get so astronomically high. I found it difficult to read -- not because it's poorly written -- on the contrary, unlike the jargon contained in hospital bills, Brill's writing couldn't be more painfully clear and easy to follow. But for me, to learn how you and I are being ripped off, taken for chumps, nay, victimized, reduced to grovelling beggars by a coterie of !@#%*! -- I have no words that can be printed here. When I was reading it, I found myself getting more and more angry, clenching my fists and gritting my teeth, and muttering "Oh my God ... oh my God!" Truly, if you have high blood pressure, you may want to skip Brill's article.  But his summation, though chilling, can and should be read by everyone:

When you follow the money, you see the choices we've made, knowingly or unknowingly.

Over the past few decades, we've enriched the labs, drug companies, medical device makers, hospital administrators and purveyors of CT scans, MRIs, canes and wheelchairs. Meanwhile, we've squeezed the doctors who don't own their own clinics, don't work as drug or device consultants or don't otherwise game a system that is so gameable. And of course, we've squeezed everyone outside the system who gets stuck with the bills.

We've created a secure, prosperous island in an economy that is suffering under the weight of the riches those on the island extract.

And we've allowed those on the island and their lobbyists and allies to control the debate, diverting us from what Gerard Anderson, a health care economist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says is the obvious and only issue:

"All the prices are too damn high."

A few highlights should be noted:

• Every hospital has what is termed a Chargemaster, an internal price list for every service performed and every item supplied. But  "there seems to be no process, no rationale, behind the core document that is the basis for hundreds of billions of dollars in health care bills." What  results is a price ten or more times higher than the actual cost of the item. And these prices rise, automatically every year.
• But the Chargemaster prices, hospital officials insist, are just starting points for negotiations. And indeed, folks who are not on medicare and who are not on medicaid and who have decent insurance will have their insurance negotiate some of those prices down a bit. But those with no insurance or poor insurance are forced to pay the full chargemaster prices. Thus the economically vulnerable are penalized for their poverty.
• Hospitals routinely do double -- sometimes triple -- dipping, Brill quotes a Billing Advocate:, "First they charge more than $2,000 a day for the ICU, because it's an ICU and it has all this special equipment and personnel ...  "then they charge $1,000 for some kit used in the ICU to give someone a transfusion or oxygen ... And then they charge $50 or $100 for each tool or bandage or whatever that there is in the kit. That's triple billing."
• Brill writes: "According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical and health-care-product industries, combined with organizations representing doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, health services and HMOs, have spent $5.36 billion since 1998 on lobbying in Washington. That dwarfs the $1.53 billion spent by the defense and aerospace industries and the $1.3 billion spent by oil and gas interests over the same period. That's right: the health-care-industrial complex spends more than three times what the military-industrial complex spends in Washington."

If you have the stomach for more, I salute you, and ask you to check out this link:

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us.

Now you know. But it'snot enough simply to know:  For your knowledge to do any good YOU MUST SPREAD THE WORD!  As I never tire of saying,  when I meet somebody new, there's a more than 50% chance they'll not have heard of the New York Health Act (NYHA). Next time I meet them, there's a zero percent chance they won't know.  But I'm only one person.  Please help!  If you would like to know how you can spread the word, or have an idea about it, please email me at  indivisible12401@gmail.com and let me know.  Thanks!

Dio

PS: If you would like to leave a comment (and I hope  you will), simply click on the number of comments area, and share your thoughts in the "comment box" that appears.  Thanks!