My good friend Jim Roosevelt — who also happens to be the CEO of Tufts Health Plan, one of the GIC’s larger plans — in his blog last Friday described a White House Press event on health reform that he had attended and pointed out that the much admired Massachusetts HealthCare reform program does not include a public option. He suggested that perhaps the country doesn’t need one either. Well, maybe. I’m not particularly interested in getting into a debate with Jim or any of his colleagues from the other five health plans we offer and I most definitely do not want to detract from the success of the Mass HealthCare Reform Act, but we don’t necessarily need to clone all of its features at the federal level. I understand that the private health insurance companies’ Trade Associations, the Massachusetts Association of Health Plans and at the national level, America’s Health Insurance Plans are officially opposed to the prospect of competing with a public plan. They say it will be an unfair competition, and they all assert that they can do the job better, especially if the government provides money to subsidize low income citizens who are currently priced out of their market — 47 million of them. I could concede the point that the playing field might not be level if AHIP acknowledged that even with the best of intentions, they have been unable to control the costs of health care. This is not to say that the challenge is an easy one — it isn’t. Between an aging population, new technology, wildly escalating pharmacy costs, and a culture that favors choice over price, especially when someone else is paying most of the price. Nevertheless, the sad truth is that even Massachusetts’ excellent and largely non-profit managed care companies have never recovered from the anti-HMO onslaught of the mid-90’s and have not succeeded in their efforts to keep costs under control while simultaneously keeping both providers and enrollees happy — thus proving, once more, that if you try to please everyone you may end up pleasing no one.
The current system has had 15 years or more since the early 90’s, when rates actually went down, to prove that a less managed system could provide quality care to all Americans at affordable costs. Perhaps it is time to try a different approach.
Dolores L. Mitchell, Executive Director of the Group Insurance Commission of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the agency that provides life, health, disability and dental and vision services to over 300,000 State employees, retirees and their dependents.
Yes, let’s try what the majority of Americans are saying they want: Improved Medicare-for-All (aka Single Payer).
Yes, let’s try what the majority of nurses and doctors say they want: Improved Medicare-for-All.
Yes, let’s try what the majority of serious health policy experts and economists say would work best: Improved Medicare-for-All.
If the political process requires us to get there in major steps rather than one big leap, then let’s begin with nothing less than a Medicare-like Public Insurance Option with no restrictions on participation in this year’s health reform bill. This is clearly and unequivocally what the public–the VOTERS–want, as evidenced below.
“72% support a government-administered public plan, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll.
Additionally, the Employee Benefits Research Institute – a group funded by the likes of JPMorganChase, Wal-Mart, General Dynamics, Morgan Stanley, Blue Cross Blue Shield, CIGNA, and United Health – found 83% in support of the public plan option.”
source: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009062730/no-compromise-public-plan-why-weakening-public-plan-option-would-imperil-not-j
P.S. Dolores, you might want to direct your good friend Jim Roosevelt, CEO of Tufts HMO, to the recent HHS Report that details the deep flaws and failures of our state’s market-based approach to health care reform. Seems like Jim is very selective in what he chooses to say about the “Mass. Plan”. Not surprising.
excerpts from recent report released by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebalius:
From MA State House News Service daily update Friday June 26, 2009:
“U.S.: MASS. FAMILIES AND BUSINESSES
‘DESERVE BETTER’ HEALTH CARE
*A federal government report on the quality of health care in the states concluded that “Massachusettsans can’t afford the status quo.”
Although state leaders have often described Massachusetts’s health care access laws as a potential model for a national health reform plan, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report found a number of flaws.
According to the report, a one-pager compiled from sources that range from CMS to the Center for American Progress to the CDC – in some cases from years-old studies – “Families and businesses in Massachusetts deserve better.”
*The report cites rising premiums – a 94 percent spike for families since 2000 – and a shortage of insurance options for Massachusetts residents.
*In addition, the report cites a shortage of preventive care. “Preventative measures that could keep Massachusettsans healthier and out of the hospital have improved with reform measures but remain underutilized,” according to the document.
“The need for reform in Massachusetts and across the country is clear. *Despite increased access to coverage and medical care, Massachusetts needs national reform *to help control costs and promote quality,” the report concludes.
“Massachusetts families simply can’t afford the status quo and deserve better.”
The reports, endorsed by U.S. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, were released Friday afternoon”
—
Now is the time to move boldly toward enacting what the majority of Americans are saying they want: Improved Medicare-for-All (aka Single Payer).
TAKE ACTION: We BayStaters have got to deluge Senators John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, and our Congressperson’s staff with calls (866-338-1015 Capitol Hill Switchboard) telling them that their constituents feel STRONGLY that a Medicare-like Public Insurance option is a non-negotiable “Line in the Sand” and that any bogus “trigger” is NOT ACCEPTABLE.
The concept of a national health care plan that covered all American citizens from cradle to grave was introduced by Frances Perkins to Jim Rosevelt’s grandfather F.D.R. in 1933. Perkins informed F.D.R. that she only would accept his offer to become Secretary of Labor if F.D.R. would support Perkins’ plans to enact a Medicare For All plan as a major plank in the new president’s domestic policy. F.D.R. agreed.
The proposal became an integral part of F.D.R.’s 1935 Social Security Act. But as it ground its way through Congress, F.D.R. waffled in the face of opposition from right wing Southern Democrats (antediluvian “Blue Dogs”) and the A.M.A. (it was around this time that the A.M.A.’s infamous president, Dr. Morris Fishbein, coined the stupifying label “Socialized medicine”). By the time these arch-reactionary forces were done whittling away at the legislation, and without the promised support of F.D.R., Perkins’ long-sought Medicare-For-All proposal had been stripped away.
Nearly 75 years have passed since F.D.R.’s original opportunity to enact a form of single payer, the only rational policy to protect the right of all Americans to first-quality, affordable health care, was lost. Meantime, every other industrialized nation in the world has enacted some form of single-payer health care for its citizens. No other nation’s citizenry remotely would consider trading their prevailing single-payer coverage for our chaotic, insane, profit-driven non-system, which astoundingly is the most expensive in the world while simultaneously leaving 50 million Americans uninsured (not to mention the tens of millions more who are underinsured). In fact, citizens of nations with single payer coverage think Americans are crazy, stupid, or both to allow the private health insurance industry — and thus, the unceasing demands for ever-increasing profits by the industry’s shareholders — to determine if we receive care. In their eyes, the status quo is criminal.
In 1935, F.D.R. thought the problem was solved. In 1993, the Clintons thought the problem would go away if they tinkered around the edges of the for-profit insurance system. Now, in 2009, the Baucuses and Jim Roosevelts act as if they can solve the crisis by issuing “off the table” edicts. They are wrong. No matter how much they dislike it, this issue is going to keep reappearing until our government finall does the correct thing.
So yes, by all means, let’s try the road not taken to a rational, not-for-profit, Medicare For All, everybody in–nobody out, SINGLE PAYER health care system.
——————————
<Health Care Reform By Medicare Expansion</strong
by Eric W. Fonkalsrud, M.D., and Michael D. Intriligator, Ph.D.