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AND MORE... Rendell Blows Smoke
This represents the first of what we hope will be many appearances by Jerry Policoff in the pages of CommonSense2. Jerry is a founding member of Progressives4Pennsylvania http://www.progressives4pennsylvania.com/. He is also a board member of healthcareforallpa http://www.healthcare4allpa.org/home.php
There is a single-payer plan pending in both houses of the Pennsylvania legislature, and it stands a hell of a lot better chance of passing than Rendell’s bill which would be better called “No Health Insurance Company Left Behind.” (Capital Blue Cross’s CEO, Anita Smith, was standing at Rendell’s side when he introduced his bill, by the way). Rendell’s bill was originally introduced in the House in March with only eleven sponsors. It was recently re-introduced with only eight sponsors, so it is losing support rather than gaining support. He has not even found any one to introduce it in the Senate. The single-payer bill (SB 300 and HB 1660) has 33 sponsors in the Pa. House and 6 in the Senate.
Rendell’s bill does nothing to reign in the insurance companies, nor to lower the cost of prescription drugs. The part about capping insurance company profits is unconstitutional and was probably only put in there for effect. There are 1.4 million uninsured in PA and Rendell’s own numbers only claim that that his plan will extend coverage to less than 670,000 of them (Rendell has also used bogus numbers to suggest that less than 800,000 Pennsylvanians are uninsured. The 1.4 million number comes from the Census Bureau. Rendell does not bother to explain where his bogus numbers come from). Most, if not all of those will still have only catastrophic coverage and will remain woefully underinsured.
Moreover, Rendell’s plan does nothing to reduce the bloated and duplicated cost of administration and marketing in the health insurance industry and adds a whole new state-supervised bureaucracy to the current mix.
The proposed single-payer bill will cover every man, woman, and child in Pennsylvania and will save our state some $5 billion per year in medical costs. It limits administrative costs to 5% of revenues, and it will operate at a projected surplus. It will eliminate co-pays and deductibles and fully cover all legal medical procedures as well as psychiatric, dental, wellness, and preventative procedures. It also empowers a state agency to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs. In other words, it gets the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies out of our wallets and off our backs.
The fact that Governor Rendell touts his own plan as superior does not make it so, and his continued claim that a single-payer plan has no chance of passing is contradicted by the fact that almost five times as many Pennsylvania legislators have signed the single-payer bill than have signed Rendell’s CAP.
Single-payer health care can happen in Pennsylvania if we light a fire under Ed Rendell and the State Legislature and force them to make it happen. The Rendell bill is a sham, and it may make matters even worse than they already are if it passes.
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jbrusso comments:
I’m new to this discussion, so please be gentle.
Dennis Kucinich is someone I’ve admired for many years, watching him transform himself from a wild-eyed radical (and mostly ineffective) mayor to an increasingly effective practicing politician — without compromising his core beliefs.
Kucinich’s credentials as a progressive are not in question, yet his approach to universal health care — Medicare for all — is not really a single-payer approach. Dennis’s bill would retain Medicare’s reliance on so-called “intermediaries” to handle the paperwork. Who are these intermediaries? They will be insurance companies!
Don’t get me wrong. I’m so old I was actually working in Washington in 1964 when Medicare was only a gleam in LBJ’s eye. I wrote testimony endorsing Medicare. But even then, it was not politically possible to get a bill that did not give the insurors a “taste,” as Tony Soprano might have called it. That’s why the original bill, signed into law in 1965, gave insurance companies a role in paying Medicare bills.
Even though insurance companies have had a role in Medicare from day one, the program’s overhead costs over the last five decades have been admirably low.
How come? Simple. They are subject to effective oversight by Medicare professionals in HHS.
The upshot: insurance companies have had their noses under the tent for a good 50 years. There’s no need to spend a lot of time trying to get them out of the picture. Instead, we should retain the tough, effective capabilities already extant in HHS to manage the new program’s costs.
What I’m describing is of course the Obama plan. In an ideal world, we should go straight to a pure single-payer solution. But after 50 years of Medicare’s public-private approach, he understands that a kind of modified single payer approach is needed to reach our ultimate goal.
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