Opinion: National health care long overdue By FAYE ARMITAGE

Opinion: National health care long overdue



By FAYE ARMITAGE
Fruit Cove
Publication Date: 05/24/09

In America's unsafe, uncivilized health care system patients fall victim to neglectful corporate health insurance bureaucracies. Many can't get any health insurance at all. Our system's in "critical condition."

Yet we have false and deceptive TV advertising by a cynical front group Conservatives for Patient Rights (CPR) run by Rick Scott, founder and ex-CEO of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp., who left after FBI raids in 1997. CPR is running emotional ads warning of the dangers of "socialized medicine." What these lobbyists are against, most of us regard as really "civilized medicine."

Scott's Columbia/HCA chain that couldn't bill straight was infamous for defrauding Medicare. Sued by the Justice Department in 2001, it settled the case for $1.7 billion, becoming the largest health care fraud in history. Now Scott has put $1 million of his Columbia/HCA gains behind malicious ads intended to scare Americans about a public option. The scare ads show purported Canadian patients and the operator of a private Vancouver clinic claiming that patients are dying on waiting lists. Not true.

Canada has no waiting lists for emergency procedures. It's wrong to suggest that Canadians with serious, life-threatening illnesses are enrolled on a "waiting list" before they can receive life-saving therapies. "Waiting lists" are for elective procedures.

How frustrating to those whose lives are ruined by lack of medical attention to be insulted by Rick Scott's cruelly unfair and misleading TV commercials about Canadian health care.

So how does America compare on wait times? A 2009 survey reports average doctor appointment wait times for cardiology, dermatology, obstetrics/gynecology, orthopedic surgery and family practice: average wait for a doctor's appointment is over two (2) months in some cities (if you're lucky enough to have health insurance). Almost 50 million Americans have no health insurance; and another 50 million have inadequate, or junk insurance. Some 39 percent of men, and 52 percent of women delay needed care. Health crises are the number one reason for bankruptcies and foreclosures.

The Republican Massachusetts health care "reform" model pushed by U.S. Rep. John Mica, is the worst of all worlds for patients/taxpayers. It creates a mandate to purchase taxpayer-subsidized private insurance mostly high out-of-pocket cost, minimum benefit plans. Mandating private insurance is a windfall (not unlike a taxpayer-funded bailout) to for-profit health insurances, while people are left high and dry (and on waiting lists) at high financial and health risk.

We must reduce the number of home foreclosures in Florida; one of the best ways is to devise an effective universal medical healthcare system that includes a less costly "public option," so families don't go bankrupt paying for hospitalizations.

Nothing is more destructive to patient care than the $20 billion annual private health insurance bureaucracy which profits from frequently denying or delaying health care claims. Fully one-third of U.S. health insurance claims are initially denied; yet according to the PBS documentary "Sick Around the World," claims are paid within two weeks in countries that employ a non-profit private insurance system along-side a public option.

Patients must have the right to choose their own doctors, which is exactly what an expanded Medicare style public option will allow. Corporate (HMO) health care denies that right. That's wrong. Speaking of "waiting lists," hardworking, loyal Americans have been waiting almost 64 years for civilized health care, since President Harry S. Truman first proposed it, on Nov. 19, 1945. That's a long wait, even in Congress. Watching Congress "deliberate" health care 64 years later is like waiting for a herd of turtles to compose a symphony.

Today, we're all Trumanites: we want national health care before more people die from a broken healthcare system.

Faye Armitage is an economist and advocate for a better health care system for the United States.

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