Nothing to fear but no health insurance

By Weekly Archive On Jan 21, 2009

Fifty
million Americans are without health insurance, and 25 million are
“underinsured.” Millions being laid off will soon be added to
those rolls. Medical bills cause more than half of personal
bankruptcies in the U.S. Desperate for care, the under- and uninsured
flock to emergency rooms, often dealing with problems that could have
been prevented.

The
U.S. auto giants are collapsing in part due to extraordinary
health-care expenses, while they are competing with companies in
countries that provide universal health care. Economist Dean Baker
calculated how General Motors would fare if its health-care costs
were the same as costs in Canada: “GM would have had higher
profits, making no other changes … that would equal $22 billion
over the course of the last decade. They wouldn’t have to be running
to the government for help.” GM is sometimes referred to as a
health-care company that makes cars. Former Chrysler Chairman Lee
Iacocca said in 2005, “It is a well-known fact that the U.S.
automobile industry spends more per car on health care than on
steel.” He supports national health care.

Barack Obama said
in 2007 that “affordable, universal health care for every single
American must not be a question of whether, it must be a question of
how. … Every four years, health-care plans are offered up in
campaigns with great fanfare and promise. But once those campaigns
end, the plans collapse under the weight of Washington
politics.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his March 1933
inaugural address, famously declared: “We have nothing to fear but
fear itself. … This nation asks for action, and action now.” Deep
in the Great Depression, a flurry of ambitious policies followed,
detailed by New York Times editorial writer Adam Cohen in his new
book, “Nothing to Fear.” He writes that FDR developed the New
Deal with key, visionary advisers and Cabinet members who enacted
bold policies, among them Frances Perkins, the United States’ first
woman Cabinet member. Perkins, FDR’s secretary of labor, pushed for a
rapid, national relief program that formed the basis of the welfare
system, and for regulations on minimum wage, maximum hours and a ban
on child labor.

But she failed to achieve universal health
care. Cohen told me: “She really was the conscience of the New Deal
in many ways … she chaired the Social Security committee. And she
and a couple other progressives on the committee said, you know, ‘We
better just settle for what we can get.’ They didn’t want to lose the
whole Social Security program.”

Obama appointed former Sen.
Tom Daschle as secretary of health and human services, and director
of the new White House Office of Health Reform. Daschle’s health-care
book, “Critical,” recalls historical failures to achieve
universal care: “Like Clinton, Truman had reason to be confident.
His fellow Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, and polls
showed that Americans were anxious about the high cost of health care
and eager for change. But both presidents underestimated the strength
of the forces arrayed against them … (s)pecial-interest lobbyists
— led by doctors in Truman’s time, and insurance companies in
Clinton’s.”

Obama knows well the issue — while his mother
lay dying of cancer, she still had to battle the insurance industry.
He said in that 2007 speech, “Plans that tinker and halfway
measures now belong to yesterday … we can’t afford another
disappointing charade … we need to look at … how much of our
health-care spending is going toward the record-breaking profits
earned by the drug and health-care industry.”

Yet Daschle
proposes not much more than tinkering — improving Medicare, Medicaid
and the Veterans Health Administration, all examples of “single-payer
health care” — in which the government is the single payer for the
health care — while preserving the inefficient, multipayer,
for-profit insurance model. In December 2007, the American College of
Physicians compared U.S. health care with other countries’, writing,
“Single-payer systems generally have the advantage of being more
equitable, with lower administrative costs than systems using private
health insurance, lower per capita health care expenditures, high
levels of consumer and patient satisfaction.”

Obama is in
charge now. Who will he emulate — Nixon or FDR?

Denis
Moynihan contributed research to this column. Amy Goodman is the host
of “Democracy Now!” a daily international TV/radio news hour
airing on more than 700 stations in North America

http://www.auburnpub.com/articles/2009/01/18/opinion/amy_goodman.txt