WHY WE ARE ALREADY WINNING ON THE
SINGLE PAYER SOLUTION
June 11, Bucks County
People ask me all the time: "How are we ever going to beat
these health insurance giants?"
One word: HUBRIS. The profit-first health insurers our our best ally in
defeating the profit-first health insurers. Let me explain.
The Ancient Greeks must've been thinking precisely about our modern-day,
entitlement-mentality, profit-first health insurers when they created this new
word -- HUBRIS -- to define people, organizations, and institutions
characterized by "extreme arrogance," "insolent pride," and "presumption."
America's profit-first health insurers' have a great gig. They make MORE money
by systematically DENYING service, not the other way around. This legalized
method of hijacking healthcare -- where insurers formulaically drain 31 cents of
every healthcare dollar before a single service is delivered -- is banned in
each of the world's other 87 advanced industrial economies. But not here, in
number 88.
Perhaps ironically, the answer to the presumptuous, profit-first healthcare
hijackers is located right here, in the United States. It's called Medicare.
Though expanded Medicare would be a far cry better than the broken system we now
have for those under the age of 65, we Pennsylvanians have even better ideas for
healthcare delivery: publicly-funded, privately-provided, quality,
comprehensive, healthcare for all. No gaps. No holes. No need for add-on
insurance (unless "Cadillac coverage" -- for non-essentials -- is what you want
to spend your extra millions on). Everybody in, nobody out. Call it "Expanded
and Improved Medicare," if you wish.
America's own Medicare Healthcare Delivery System -- where 3.1 (not 31)
cents-on-the-dollar is the overhead cost of healthcare delivery to those
65-and-older -- is a single payer model: publicly-funded, privately-provided
healthcare. Is it perfect? Of course not. Is there waste, fraud, and abuse.
Absolutely. Still, it is 10 times more efficient than the
profit-first-hijacked-healthcare system we all suffer under. (That's why we're
rallying in 5 cities on June 19; see http://www.healthcare4allpa.org/events.htm)
Okay, so where and how does HUBRIS lead to the demise of profit-first health
insurance companies? Like the great Greek tragedies about arrogant individuals
who late discover their damaging behavior to their neighbors, friends, and loved
ones, they fall on their own swords. The 'shame of the self-deluded game' --
where economic, moral, and democratic loss become so painfully obvious -- leads
to self-destruction, self-sacrifice, immolation.
The profit-first health insurers have already begun to fall on their swords.
First, they openly aspire to monopoly capitalism, as Philly-based Independence
Blue Cross and Pittsburgh-based Highmark brazenly seek a merger and combined
market share of 53%; then want to "privatize"; then want to cash-out the $12
billion-dollar-plus surplus of OUR money that they're sitting on! (Top
legislators among D's and R's have spelled out this nightmare scenario, time and
again. More on this in the coming days.)
Second, no longer are even their private "enablers" (i.e., politicians,
mainstream media, business and non-profit allies) publicly willing to
countenance the presumptuous actions of an industry that is undermining the
economy, denying healthcare services to maximize profit, and driving physicians
and other medical professionals into early retirement, out of Pennsylvania at an
alarming rate, or into other jobs.
Just last month the conservative Urban Institute released a study in which it
found some 27,000 Americans die every year because they cannot readily access
healthcare. And most of the 27,000 are not uninsured; they are "underinsured."
For Pennsylvanians, that works out to 1,080 unnecessary deaths every year -- in
other words, three of our neighbors lost to us each day of the year.
How could this be? An industry's HUBRIS -- enabled by its protectors. Perhaps
Capital Blue Cross of Central PA says it best with their advertising slogan:
"Then. Now. Always." Translation: they arrogantly state that their "services"
have always been, are, and forever will be indispensable to "healthcare
delivery." Really?
Now the question turns on us. Are we enablers too? Do we abide by this
profiteering industry's arrogant methods? Or are we prepared to take action to
end, once and for all, the greed, death, and suffering brought on by an
industry's entitlement mentality of "profit-first, healthcare last"?
The only thing that permits the profit-first insurers to continue standing are
its enablers: politicians, media, and allies. HUBRIS has begun the process of
collapse and self-destruction for an industry that promotes profit-first and
healthcare last. Now it's on us to finish the job.
Now is the time to fight for passage of Pennsylvania House Bill 1660 and Senate
Bill 300, the "Family and Business Healthcare Security Act." The Single Payer
Solution is the answer for that which ails us all.
Learn and educate; organize and donate. And lobby as if it's a guarantee
written into the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. It's time
for us to show pride -- but never HUBRIS -- in ourselves, in our society, and in
the democratic institutions for which we stand.
Yours in reason,
Chuck Pennacchio, Ph.D.