To Insure or not to Insure

 As many who have read my past columns know, I have questioned several times how it is that we who live in the richest country in the industrialized world have 47 million of our citizens without health insurance? Actually it is about the P word in our healthcare system and it isn’t P for Patient… it is P for Profits!  Growing up in the 50’s, 60’s and into the 70’s many Americans were covered under an employer supplied health insurance plan. Now most small companies can’t afford insurance for their employees and those that are self employed can’t afford annual premiums of $6,000 or more. And if you have a preexisting condition you might not be able to find any insurance at all.

What has changed is that the insurance and drug companies have considered it more important to maximize profits even if their decision to deny benefits will result in the death of that individual.  Why can the actions by an insurance company, who deny a procedure for a gravely ill person which would give that person a chance of surviving their illness and with full knowledge that their decision will result in the death of that patient not be criminally charged? What is the difference between putting a bullet in somebody’s head or denying them critical care, dead is dead. It is estimated that 18,000 people each year die in the U.S. because they lacked proper healthcare. I guess many who run our medical centers, HMOs and health insurance companies conveniently leave the part of the Hippocratic Oath out that says, “and never do harm to anyone,” It has to be truly frustrating for many of our wonderful doctors that the treatment that they know their patient needs must first be pre-approved by someone in a cubicle a thousand miles away who have no idea who this patient is or really cares or fight with the faceless cubicle person to get paid for their services. Or a patient hears, sorry but your bill is $100,000 since you don’t have insurance.

How many times have we walked into the local store and see a can to raise money for a poor family, for example, whose child has leukemia and who needs a bone marrow transplant?  Why should we as the richest nation have any of our citizens beg for money to save the life of a loved one? But while that person begs, the CEO’s of some of our largest health insurance companies are earning millions and in some cases billions? I believe that our doctors should earn excellent salaries after spending ten or more years in college to give them the knowledge and skills to perform the miracles that they do. What is wrong is that when I heard about 10 years ago a CEO of an HMO in California say he answers to the shareholders not the patients, the system is upside down. How did we get here?

Simple, the drug companies and health insurance companies have bought our politicians. Former Senate Leader Dr. Bill Frist’s family founded HCA, Inc which is one of the largest hospital chains. Do you think he would vote for universal healthcare, heck no that could hurt his family’s profits. What about Congressman Billy Tozan who fought for the current Medicare Senior Prescription that doesn’t allow for the Federal (People’s) Government to negotiate for cheaper prices or to import cheaper drugs from Canada for our Seniors? Once the bill was passed he left congress and got paid $2 million dollars to be a lobbyist for the drug industry. And by the way many of the drugs are already manufactured overseas in such countries as Ireland which means they are imported. And why until around 1998 prescription drugs were not allowed to be advertised on TV or other media? Now drug companies are spending billions of dollars to tell me I might have Restless Leg Syndrome? If I do, it is up to my personal doctor to determine what should be prescribed for my condition, not me.

Drug companies say Americans need to pay the highest prices in the world for our prescriptions because of the costs of Research and Development (R&D) of new drugs. Well cut our drug prices and by cutting your CEO’s salaries in half and stop advertising and plow those billions back into R&D. I believe that not one American should ever be afraid to have an accident or illness and worry that they should have to file for bankruptcy because they didn’t have health insurance or were denied by their insurance company. What most people don’t realize is that more than 50% of the individuals that do file for bankruptcy do so because of health reasons. We need a single payer healthcare system where we aren’t paying for millionaires to make more millions. People say, ” Well our taxes will go up.” and that is true. But if we spread the cost out over the entire country from individuals and businesses, guess what? we can cover everyone.

 For some reason as businesses see their health costs going up we don’t call that a tax but a premium. When an individual sees their co-pays going up and their deductibles going up we don’t call it a tax, we call it a premium. When seniors see their drug costs going up we don’t call that a tax, but it is still money coming out of their pockets. This is an issue where I believe we can still have the best healthcare but we need to provide for our doctors and patients not the duplicating of paper shuffling from each insurance company whose primary goal is to make a profit. Making profits off of manufacturing a computer or car is related to a personal choice that an individual makes when deciding to purchase it or not.   An individual should not have to decide whether or not they can afford treatment when they get cancer, have a heart attach or face their own child with severe fever.