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UPCOMING EVENTS with PNHP President Dr. Oliver Fein

We are very happy to announce that the president of National PNHP, Dr. Oliver Fein, will be coming to the Twin Cities in June. He will be speaking at several grand rounds as well as our Gala Fundraiser. Below is our calendar of events. Hope to see you there!

Hazardous to Your Health: A Series Investigating Equality and Access to Health Care.Saint Catherine University, Jeanne d'Arc Auditorium. June 17 7pm.
First in the Series will be Dr. Oliver Fein and Dr. Elizabeth Frost presenting on the physician perspective.

Regions Hospital Internal Medicine/Emergency Medicine conference.
"National Health Insurance for the U.S.: Has Its Time Come?"
June 18 at 10 am in the 3rd floor auditorium.

University of Minnesota Internal Medicine Grand Rounds.
"National Health Insurance for the U.S.: Has Its Time Come?"
June 18 at noon in the Phillip-Wangensteen Building Rm 2-470

Minnesota Universal Health Care Coalition and
Physicians for a National Health Plan -- Fundraiser GALA!
"The White House Health Care Summit and Its Aftermath"
June 18. University Club. 6:30 PM.
Please purchase tickets at http://www.muhcc.org/
Tickets $50.

HCMC Internal Medicine Grand Rounds.
"National Health Insurance for the U.S.: Has Its Time Come?"
June 19 at noon - Red Lower Level Conference Room (RL 110), HCMC

Amy Goodman: Put Single-Payer on the Table

Put Single-Payer on the Table

3/10/09 by Amy Goodman

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President Barack Obama promises health-care reform, but he has taken single-payer health care off the table. Single-payer is the system that removes private insurance companies from the picture; the government pays all the bills, but health-care delivery remains private. People still get their choice of what doctor to go to and what hospital to use. Single-payer reduces the administrative costs and removes the profit that insurance companies add to health-care delivery. Single-payer solutions, however, get almost no space in the debate.

A study just released by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a media watchdog group, found that in the week before Obama’s health-care summit, of the hundreds of stories that appeared in major newspapers and on the networks, “only five included the views of advocates of single-payer—none of which appeared on television.” Most opinion columns that mentioned single-payer were written by opponents.

Congress is considering H.R. 676, “Expanded and Improved Medicare for All,” sponsored by John Conyers, D-Mich., with 64 co-sponsors. Yet even when Rep. Conyers directly asked Obama at a Congressional Black Caucus meeting if he could attend the White House health-care summit, he was not immediately invited. Nor was any other advocate for single-payer health care.

Conyers had asked to bring Dr. Marcia Angell, the first woman editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious medical journal in the country, and Dr. Quentin Young. Young is perhaps the most well-known single-payer advocate in America. He was Martin Luther King Jr.’s doctor when King lived in Chicago. “My 15-minute house calls would stretch into three hours,” he told me.

But he came to know Barack Obama even better. Though his medical partner was Obama’s doctor, Young was his neighbor, friend and ally for decades. “Obama supported single-payer, gave speeches for it,” he said.

This past weekend, hundreds turned out to honor the 85-year-old Young, including the Illinois governor and three members of Congress, but the White House’s response to Conyers’ request that Young be included in the summit? A resounding no. Perhaps because Obama personally knows how persuasive and committed Young is.

After much outcry, Conyers was invited. Activist groups like Physicians for a National Health Program (pnhp.org) expressed outrage that no other single-payer advocate was to be among the 120 people at the summit. Finally, the White House relented and invited Dr. Oliver Fein, president of PNHP. Two people out of 120.

Locked out of the debate, silenced by the media, single-payer advocates are taking action. Russell Mokhiber, who writes and edits the Corporate Crime Reporter, has decided that the time has come to directly confront the problem of our broken health-care system. He’s going to the national meeting of the American Health Insurance Plans and is joining others in burning their health-insurance bills outside in protest. Mokhiber told me, “The insurance companies have no place in the health care of American people. How are we going to beat these people? We have to start the direct confrontation.” Launching a new organization, Single Payer Action (singlepayeraction.org), Mokhiber and others promise to take the issue to the insurance industry executives, the lobbyists and the members of Congress directly, in Washington, D.C., and their home district offices.

Critical mass is building behind a single-payer system. From Nobel Laureate in Economics Joseph Stiglitz, who told me, “I’ve reluctantly come to the view that it’s the only alternative,” to health-care providers themselves, who witness and endure the system’s failure firsthand. Geri Jenkins of the newly formed, 150,000-nurses-strong United American Nurses-National Nurses Organizing Committee (nnoc.net) said: “It is the only health-care-reform proposal that can work. ... We are currently pushing to have a genuine, honest policy debate, because we’ll win ... the health insurers will collapse under the weight of their own irrelevance.”

Dr. Young has now been invited to a Senate meeting along with the “usual suspects”: health-insurance providers, Big Pharma and health-care-reform advocates. I asked Young what he thought of the refrain coming from the White House, as well as from the leading senator on the issue, Max Baucus, that “single-payer is off the table.” “It’s repulsive,” sighed Young. “We are very angry.” But not discouraged. I asked him what he thought about Burn Your Health Insurance Bill Day. “Things are heating up.” he chuckled. “When things are happening that you have nothing to do with, you know it’s a movement.”

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. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

Media Black Out on Single Payer?

Study: Media Blackout on Single-Payer Healthcare

New Study on Media & Healthcare Reform

Proponents of popular policy shut out of debate

NEW YORK CITY - March 6 - A timely new study documents a significant gap in recent media coverage of healthcare reform.

Major newspaper, broadcast and cable stories mentioning healthcare reform in the week leading up to President Barack Obama's March 5 healthcare summit rarely mentioned the idea of a single-payer national health insurance program, according to a study by the media watch group FAIR. And advocates of such a system--two of whom participated in yesterday's summit--were almost entirely shut out, FAIR found. This despite the fact that single-payer polls well with the public, who preferred it 59-to-32 over a privatized system in a recent survey (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09).

Of the hundreds of major newspaper, broadcast and cable stories mentioning healthcare reform on NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, the study found that:

-All but 18 stories made no mention of "single-payer" (or synonyms commonly used by its proponents, such as "Medicare for all," or the proposed single-payer bill, H.R. 676)

-Only five stories included the views of advocates of single-payer--none of which appeared on television.

-A media consumer in the week leading up to the summit was more likely to read about single-payer from the hostile perspective of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer than see an op-ed by a single-payer advocate in a major U.S. newspaper. Of a total of 10 newspaper columns FAIR found that mentioned single-payer, Krauthammer's syndicated column critical of the concept, accounted for five instances, while only three columns in the study period advocated for a single-payer system.

-The FAIR study turned up only three mentions of single-payer on the TV outlets surveyed, and two of those references were by TV guests who expressed strong disapproval of it.

A full summary of the study's findings is available at: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3733

PNHP in the Wall Street Journal

Invited to Summit, Single-Payer Group Cancels Protest

Barack Obama isn’t likely enact a Medicare-for-all, single-payer health plan. The White House Web site promises that, under the president’s proposed health plan, “if you like your current health insurance, nothing changes…”

US President Barack Obama speaks in the East Room of The White House in Washington, DC, on March 4, 2009. Obama warned Thursday that the United States would not rebuild its economy unless political leaders joined him immediately on a perilous political drive for healthcare reform. Originally excluded from the summit, single payer advocates declared a 'small victory' as two important members of the single payer leadership received invitations to the event. (AFP/File/Chris Kleponis)

Still, a gesture can go a long way.

Physicians for a National Health Program, a group of docs that claims 15,000 members and supports a single-payer system, had planned to demonstrate outside the White House today over what they said was the exclusion of single-payer advocates from the White House’s health-reform summit.

But yesterday, PNHP canceled the protest — after the group’s president was invited to today’s meeting. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), who backs a Medicare-for-All bill in Congress, was also invited.

A PNHP spokesman told the Health Blog the invitations are a “small but important victory.”

Of course, those are only two people out of the more than 100 on hand for the meeting. As this list of participants shows, the White House halls should be thick with members of Congress.

Also in attendance are leaders from the AMA and other medical specialty societies; trade groups for drug makers, insurance companies and hospitals; CEOs of companies including Pfizer and General Mills; advocacy groups such as the American Heart Association and American Diabetes Association; and unions such as SEIU and the Teamsters.

We just watched Obama’s opening remarks, which sounded a lot like what he’s been saying recently about health reform. Namely, it’s essential to the country’s economic recovery and it won’t happen unless government leaders get support from a broad base of the public. “Health-care reform is no longer just a moral imperative — it’s a fiscal imperative,” he said.

We’ll have more from the meeting later. You can also watch it yourself at the newly launched healthreform.gov.

© 2009 Wall Street Journal

Rep. Keith Ellison and Sen. John Marty speak at health care reform forum

South Side Pride March 2009

Rep. Keith Ellison and Sen. John Marty speak at health care reform forum

BY KIP SULLIVAN

On Saturday, Feb. 21, 50 to 60 people drove through four inches of freshly fallen snow to hear Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Sen. John Marty (DFL-Roseville) explain single-payer legislation pending in Congress and the Minnesota Legislature. The forum took place at the Communication Workers of America headquarters on Lake Street.

Sen. Marty began his presentation saying, “The easiest way to explain single-payer is to compare it to other public services like police and fire protection. If you go home after this forum and find your house is being burglarized, you’re going to call the police. Are the police going to ask you if you have burglary insurance? Of course not.”

He briefly explained the Minnesota Health Plan (MHP), a program that his
bill (SF 118/HF 135) would create. It would include all Minnesota residents, cover all necessary medical services, and maximize our choice of doctor. “There would be no preexisting condition exclusions,” he said. “For some insurance companies, being a woman is a preexisting condition.” He said one of the ways the MHP would lower administrative costs would be to give budgets to the state’s 134 hospitals. To illustrate how this saves money, he asked the audience to imagine what our schools would be like if we asked teachers to keep track of every expenditure on a per-student basis the way we ask hospitals to keep track of every little expenditure on a per-patient basis. “Do we ask teachers to keep track of every crayon students use so we can bill their insurance company? Do we ask them to report how much time they spent with this student and how much with that one? If we did that our teachers would be spending half their time on administration.”

Sen. Marty observed that SF 118 has now passed two committees in the Senate and currently has 28 co-authors in the Senate (nearly half the 67 members of the Senate) while nearly one-third of the House of Representatives has co-authored the companion bill (HF 135).

Rep. Ellison began his talk making the same point Sen. Marty had just made—that HR 676, the national single-payer bill, has 94 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives (it had 93 when the last session of Congress ended in December). “But the House leadership has not yet seen fit to give it a hearing,” he said. “We need maximum pressure on Congress if we’re going to get this bill heard,” he said. “We need to look outside our box of friends for support,” he observed. To illustrate why business needs single-payer, Rep. Ellison said, “The best thing we could do for General Motors is give them a single-payer system.” The audience laughed and applauded. Rep. Ellison noted that when he is knocking on doors, he finds the health care crisis is constantly on people’s minds. “Other issues, like the Iraq war and now the economy, might be the issue you hear about the most, but you always hear about the cost of health care,” he said. “It’s the political issue that never goes away.”

Kip Sullivan sits on the steering committee of the Minnesota chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program. Kip Sullivan, health systems analyst for the Greater Minnesota Health Care Coalition and author of “The Health Care Mess,” will speak on the American health care reform debate at Valley Community Presbyterian Church, 3100 Lilac Drive North, Golden Valley, at 6:45 p.m., Thursday, March 26. Sponsored by NW Neighbors for Peace. Free and open to the public. For more information email NWN4P@yahoo.com.

Article in TC Daily Planet -- Is Universal Coverage Enough?

Is Universal Coverage enough?

by Ann Settgast, MD

The upcoming change in administration has brought optimism and hope to the American public. Now is the time to demand meaningful healthcare reform rather than a replay of past failures. As a physician, I know that offering a placebo in place of known effective treatment is unethical. Hence, while I applaud the good intentions of Senator Tom Daschle, the Healthcare for America Now (HCAN) coalition, and others, I advise against their proposals to extend a system that is fundamentally flawed. In these times of economic uncertainty and crisis, single payer is the only fiscally responsible option for reform…and it is the only solution that will actually work. Many physicians agree that the largest limitation to providing quality care to our patients rests in the structure of our current system. In an April 2008 survey in Annals of Internal Medicine, 59 percent of U.S. physicians said they would support government action to establish national health insurance.

Most Americans believe lack of health insurance is a “serious problem” (NPR/KFF survey, Feb 2008). Current reform proposals claim to be the way forward. However, expanding our flawed system will not solve the serious problems we face – rising costs and lack of coverage (for uninsured and underinsured). Unfortunately, having coverage in our system does not guarantee care. One-fourth of the insured go without needed care due to cost; three-fourths of individuals bankrupted by medical bills had insurance when they became ill. Is this a system worth perpetuating?

Reform efforts such as those proposed by HCAN and outlined by Senator Daschle maintain a central role for private insurance companies, and are thus doomed to fail because they cannot control costs. They increase coverage only by increasing cost. These proposals duplicate key elements of reform efforts that have consistently failed: Massachusetts in 1988; Oregon in 1989; Tennessee, Minnesota and Vermont in 1992; Washington State in 1993; and Maine in 2003. In each case, rising costs foiled the reform effort, and none durably decreased the number of uninsured. Similarly, the 2006 Massachusetts law, which represents a mandate model of reform, is threatened by rising costs. While the number of uninsured MA residents has fallen modestly, 14% of residents in 2007 remained uninsured at some point in the year. Many MA residents cannot afford the “required coverage”. A 56-year-old making $30,000 annually must spend $7,164 in premium and deductible alone. Today, hundreds of thousands of MA residents remain uninsured. Relying on government subsidies that cannot be sustained, and requiring people to buy insurance they cannot afford, is no solution. Such “reform” expands the role of wasteful private insurers, does nothing for the tens of millions underinsured, and relinquishes the colossal savings that would be achieved under single-payer.

Administrative costs in the U.S. health-care industry are a whopping 31% – more than double that of most industrialized nations. The administrative costs of our private insurers are drastically higher than those of our current single payer (Medicare administrative overhead is less than 2%). This excess is squandered in medically unnecessary activities such as marketing, underwriting, and profit-making. Providers also have unnecessarily high overhead as they struggle to deal with hundreds of different plans. By eliminating this waste, a single-payer system will save our country an estimated $350 billion a year – enough to provide comprehensive health care for all at no additional cost.

In conclusion, I urge the reader to be wary of doomed efforts that focus on lack of insurance and ignore the broader problems of access, affordability, and skyrocketing costs. Single-payer insurance is not socialized or government-run medicine. Care will be provided by private physicians and hospitals, just as it is now, but patients will have increased choice of providers because there will be no insurance meddling. They will also have comprehensive coverage coupled with freedom from the fear of financial ruin due to illness. H.R. 676, the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, has more than 90 co-sponsors in Congress – more than any other health reform proposal. Successful implementation will effectively fix our broken system.

Ann Settgast, MD, is the co-chair of Physicians for a National Healthcare Program – Minnesota Chapter. Originally published on 1/19/09