Last month in this column, in an article titled “Imagine”, we explained why our privatized, corporate-run health care system, which has had 70 years to perfect itself, has instead created an unsustainable burden for a country that likes to proclaim itself #1 in every category imaginable. In fact, we find ourselves #37 in health care rankings by the World Health Organization. Intuitively, most Americans know that our non-system of care is a failure and is in crisis.

We described that the fix was to de-privatize, telling the middleman insurance companies to hit the pike. Replace them with a single-payer public insurer which, by definition, is not driven by profits and 25% overhead. Thus we eliminate the hundreds of overlapping private insurance bureaucracies that routinely deny claims and cost America one-sixth of its Gross Domestic Product.

Sadly, we now learn that the heretofore largely single-payer public insurer for those age 65 and over, Medicare, is being infiltrated by the very same privatized insurers that have wreaked havoc on the American health care system. Paul Krugman in “The Plot Against Medicare” (New York Times, 4/20/07) said, “The plot against Social Security failed: President Bush’s attempt to privatize the system crashed and burned when the public realized what he was up to. But the plot against Medicare is faring better: the stealth privatization embedded in the Medicare Modernization Act, which Congress literally passed in the dead of the night back in 2003, is proceeding apace.” The legislation created the Medicare Part D drug benefit for senior citizens, a privatized prescription plan that is an expensive, complicated nightmare of choices and holes in coverage. The Act also increased payments to private Medicare Advantage plans. A murderous gang of thugs in the U.S. House and Senate, abetted by the White House, is slowly sucking the breath out of Medicare, replacing our government insurer with costly private insurers. Corporate welfare, anyone?

Trudy Lieberman writes in “The Medicare Privatization Scam” (The Nation, July 16/23, 2007 www.thenation.com ), “Nearly 20% of the 43 million Medicare beneficiaries have enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans.” Lieberman and others report that these private plans cost the government an average of 12% more than care provided through traditional Medicare. Paul Krugman states, “In the next five years that subsidy will cost more than $50 billion– about what it would cost to provide all children in America with health insurance.”

Trudy Lieberman has a warning for seniors who get enticed by insurance company sales pitches: “Beneficiaries who flock to Medicare Advantage plans because of the low premiums and the promise of extra benefits may be hurt long before full privatization becomes a reality. Marketing abuses and hidden traps in policies, reminiscent of the Medicare supplement market two decades ago, are starting to pinch.”

At a time when we need to de-privatize our health care system and maintain Medicare as a public system, we see sinister forces, who stand to gain financially, working with Congress to aid and abet the corporate takeover of all health care. And the takeover is global.

“Just as capitalism is now global, the attack on public health care by pharmaceutical and insurance firms is also global,” states John Buell in “Reflections On Our Sicko System” (The Progressive Populist, 9/1/07, www.populist.com ). He notes, “Attacks on universal health care in Canada and Europe are part of broader assaults on social democracy.”

Finally, an item in the New York Times (4/17/07) by Robert Pear informs us that AARP declared its intention of becoming a major Medicare insurer. AARP will apparently use profit-driven insurance companies to market the AARP brand name. Again, this creates more middlemen and more private, overlapping bureaucracies, just what we don’t need.

As more private insurers move into Medicare, look for costs to rise, benefits to decline, and Medicare as we knew it to be destroyed. Send your thank you cards to this Congress!

It’s not too late to breathe life back into Medicare. Demand that Congress fund it appropriately and throw the privateers out. Wake up, America.

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