The health insurance fiasco
28 02 08 - 12:05
Published: Thursday, Feb 28, 2008
By BETH GRIMES
Your money or your life. That's the choice we have. The insurance industry is made up of profit-making commercial enterprises, friends, and your medical insurance provider is one. These companies don't pay for your illness or injury unless you have already blessed their outstretched palms with a hefty chunk of your hard-earned cash.
They may not cover your ex-penses even then. Your insur-er loves to put limits on your benefits and their claims ad-justers are skilled at finding reasons to deny your claim.
Three-quarters of the two million Americans who went bankrupt in 2007 had health insurance, but still couldn't pay their medical bills. Health insurance premiums are headed ever skyward. Almost seven million California residents lack medical insurance at least part of each year. Seventy percent of them work but have no employer-provided health benefit.
In order to provide Californ-ians universal coverage, state Sen. Sheila Kuehl wrote SB 840, which was subsequently passed by both the Assembly and the State Senate. Given our governor's political ideology, no one was surprised when he vetoed it.
But Schwarzenegger had to do something, because the natives were getting restless as they watched insurance premiums go up while coverage dropped. He and Assembly Speaker Nunez crafted and offered us ABX11, a measure including such goodies as a legal requirement that presently uninsured residents of the Golden State buy insurance. Our governor's feet are stuck in concrete in his opposition to raising taxes, but he seems not to have noticed that a legal mandate for a Californian to buy insurance, whether s/he can afford to or not, is a tax masquerading as a benefit. How very Republican of him.
ABX11 is brimming with flaws. There is no funding mechanism in the bill, just the assurance that large but unspecified increases in the tax on cigarettes will cover the costs and that the federal government will come up with more money for children's insurance. (Good luck!) The rest of the money will come from premiums, co-pays and deductibles. If all these funding sources fall short, do we get to wave goodbye to this legislation? Who knows? We may still be saddled with the mandate to buy insurance. The insurance industry's gotta love these guys.
Luckily for us all, the Senate Health Committee voted to hold, not pass ABX11. In voting to oppose the bill, Senators Yee and Alquist stated that, as written, it did nothing to protect the less affluent among us from being stuck with the mandate, without giving them protection against unaffordable premiums and increasing co-pays and fees.
So we're back to square one, right? Our state has yet to make sure the health of everyone of us is protected. Sheesh. All of the rest of the industrialized world does this for its citizens. Sen. Kuehl's SB840 would have done it for California by setting up a single-payer system. Of course, the health insurance companies will object if that happens. Can you already hear the howls of "that's socialized medicine!" You know what? It isn't. Our Veterans Adminis-tration and military medical facilities are socialized medicine, a system in which hospitals are owned by and doctors work for the federal government. Spain and Great Britain have similar arrangements.
The rest of Europe, as well as Canada, Australia, and Japan, have single-payer systems. Health care is delivered in the private sector. People in those countries are free to choose their own physicians. The governments neither own hospitals nor manage the doctors. That's how Medicare works in this country. Let's hope California gives us this system or something like it soon.
Unless that happens, here's good medical advice for all of us: Don't get sick.
(Beth Grimes is a 39-year resident of Petaluma who spent her working years as an accountant. She is co-founder of Advocates for Equality and a member of Veterans for Peace.)