Fighting For Healthcare!

On Saturday, I had the privilege of representing NOW at the Healthcare Rally in uptown Charlotte. This is an excerpt of that speech.

"Senate Republican leaders unveiled their health-care bill Thursday morning, after weeks of crafting it behind closed doors. The bill, like the House’s, makes steep spending cuts to Medicaid and insurance subsidies, and uses the savings to fund substantial tax cuts for the health-care industry and wealthier Americans. The subsidy cuts fall disproportionately on lower-income and older Americans. Those who live in rural areas, where health-care costs tend to be higher, also stand to pay higher premiums according to analyses by the Kaiser Family Foundation.”  Women and especially women who are not wealthy will be the hardest hit. That should not be surprising since the bill was crafted behind closed doors by 13 wealthy white men. 

The Senate’s new healthcare bill makes it more expensive to be a woman.  If enacted, this legislation will turn back the clock on women’s health care. The bill introduced Thursday defunds many women’s vital health care needs and increases the cost astronomically on others. It defunds Planned Parenthood which provides family planning, birth control and health care for millions of low income women. That means fewer women will have any access to any kind of birth control.   

The bill allows states to redefine what counts as an Essential Health Benefit for Medicaid plans.  Currently, all plans must cover 10 categories of care. These include many women-focused services like maternity care, newborn care, contraception, mammograms, cervical cancer screenings, well woman visits, domestic violence screening and counseling, prescription drug coverage and mental health. The bill allows states to require that new mothers, starting October 2017, return to work within 60 days after giving birth or lose their coverage. This will affect young mothers who need to be home with their newborn and Medicaid will certainly give them no help with childcare to enable them to return to work. Medicaid cuts will affect women in other ways. Seventy five million Americans depend on Medicaid and 70% of these are adult women. 70% of people in nursing homes are women and 80% of these women in nursing homes are on Medicaid.

If that’s not enough, it’s possible that ALL women in the individual market as well as women who have employee provided insurance could also lose those protections, not just women on Medicaid. Again, the bill allows states broad waiver authority in what services are covered by insurance plans and again allows them to redefine the Essential Health Benefits for women. If states are able to redefine these, it is most likely maternity and newborn coverage that’s on the line. The Congressional Budget Office says women could end up paying as much as $1,000 a month for an additional rider that covers maternity care and pregnancy on top of their premiums and other health care costs. It prohibits tax subsidies from paying for any individual market plan that covers abortion. In other words, it is going to make it much harder to avoid a pregnancy and it’s going to make it harder to take care of that baby when the baby arrives. The United States already has the highest maternal mortality rate and the highest infant mortality rate of any industrialized nation in the world and reducing coverage will only make the problem worse.

In addition, although the plan bans insurance companies from refusing care based on pre-existing conditions, the rates for people with pre-existing conditions may be astronomically unaffordable and there can be life time caps of what the insurance company will pay.  Less expensive bare bones plans may not cover all of the medical services the person needs requiring more out of pocket expenses.

Now is the time to get behind a single payer Medicare for All healthcare plan. Healthcare is not a privilege only for the wealthy and women deserve the full range of healthcare services that women need.  Denying people affordable health care is immoral. A single payer plan is the morally right thing to do and the fiscally responsible thing to do.  We must defeat the Republican healthcare plans now and support Medicare for ALL.

(Research for this article is based on readings from Avalere Health, Kaiser Family Foundation, National Information Center on Health Services, Research and Technology NICHSR and Physicians for a National Health Program PNHP)

Rough Road for Healthcare

     Trump/RyanCare failed and Republicans want to blame the Democrats when it was their own party that shot it down. Republicans had seven years to come up with a plan. They claimed to have a secret plan and refused to allow legislators the right to read it until the very last minute.  When revealed, the plan was disastrous for millions of Americans which pretty well proves Republicans never really wanted a plan for everybody! We are  now at a perilous time.  If they really had our interests at heart, they would take a break, reflect on lessons learned and get back to work. But we probably won’t see that happening. Congress and insurance companies are going to try to destroy Obama-Care at the peril of our most vulnerable citizens. Republicans will refuse to do anything to repair Obamacare and then blame the Democrats for what Republicans refused to do. They will sabotage every aspect of Obamacare and then play the "blame game" as they watch it implode.   Don’t be surprised and don’t be fooled by what lies ahead for healthcare. It is going to be a rough road. These are people that thrive on revenge and vindictiveness.  This is the time to get behind a single payer plan. Now is the time to call our representatives and demand healthcare for all! We have a fight ahead!

Everybody In! Nobody Out!

My friend, Dr. Charles Van Der Horst, and fellow doctors

and medical students during a mass rally in Raleigh, NC

in support of Medicare for All!

     I received two letters in the mail recently from my health insurance company.  One letter informed me that insurance will not pay for testing that was ordered by my primary care doctor and done by a Pulmonary specialist. The second letter was informing me that insurance would no longer pay for a medication that I have taken for years. My doctors and I are battling the insurance company for payment of the $2,000 testing. On Saturday, I talked to my pharmacist about the cost of paying for the medication myself. The cost will be in access of $150 a month. I also told the pharmacist that my doctor had suggested that if the cost is too high, he will assist me in ordering the medication from Canada.The pharmacist informed me that he is from Canada, thus a conversation regarding health care ensued. He said that he has many customers who order medications from Canada to avoid the high costs here in the US. He made it very clear that the majority of the bad things we hear about the Canadian healthcare are untrue. In Canada, pharmaceutical companies are told how much they will be paid for a drug and the pharmaceutical companies have no control over the cost. On the other hand, here in the US, the pharmaceutical companies set their own prices for the drug and we pay it or do without the medication. He ended the conversation by saying that he just wished every American had the kind of health care that Canadians have and he doesn’t understand why we would keep rejecting single payer health care that has been proven successful.

We have been attending the Health Care Justice group meetings and have heard some of the most knowledgeable physicians in the country speak about health care. Practically every developed nation in the world has some form of government-managed universal health care.None of these nations have gone to single payer, decided it didn’t work and switched back. According to the latest report of the O.E.C.D.(Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), an organization of mostly wealthy nations, the United States does not have a higher quality of healthcare than other countries. In reality, the US has a shorter life expectancy, a higher infant mortality rate and fewer doctors than most other developed countries.  Doctors in the US are frustrated because they spend more than 50% of their time with paperwork and battling insurance companies partly due to situations like mine. And sadly, Americans spend more money on their health care by a huge margin than any other country, yet we do not get better results. Stephanie Woolhandler, M.D. Harvard Medical School, has concluded that 62.1% of all bankruptcies are medical bankruptcies and over 75% of Americans who file medical bankruptcy have health insurance.

Many Americans choose to go to other countries for healthcare. I have a friend who moved to Costa Rica and one factor that drew him there was their excellent healthcare. Costa Rica provides universal healthcare to all of its citizens and permanent residents. The Costa Rican health care system is  highly rated internationally and the life expectancy is higher in Costa Rica than in the US. My friend, who is a US citizen, is able to buy into universal health care for $60 a month. That covers all medical needs including dental and medications. Costa Rica has seven internationally accredited private hospitals and ten world class public hospitals including a children’s hospital that is also rated as one of the best in the world. In every community there are small clinics called EBAIS for non-emergencies.  EBAIS is short for Equipos Basicos de Atencion Integral en Salad and in English means Basic Terms of Global Health Care. In Costa Rica, healthcare starts at the EBAIS, the local clinic that is accessible to all. On one trip to Costa Rica, I stepped on coral and developed an infection. I was able to see a doctor immediately at one of the EBAIS. I received excellent care for a minimum cost and to my delight, the doctor had attended Bowman Gray Medical School at Wake Forest University right here in NC. On another trip to Costa Rica, my daughter became ill with what we thought was a stomach virus and we had the exact same great experience at an EBAIS.

I just wish that as Americans, we could have the freedom of knowing that our health care needs will always be met with a high quality of care. I wish we knew we could count on good healthcare being there for us regardless of our employment status or other life circumstances. I wish we did not have to put jars in restaurants, sponsor bake sales or have GoFundMe pages to pay our medical bills. I wish our doctors could spend their time taking care of our health needs instead of doing paperwork. I wish we had the freedom of knowing that we will not have to battle insurance companies or order medications from another country. I wish we did not have to worry about being one illness away from bankruptcy. I agree with my pharmacist. I don’t understand why we would reject quality universal healthcare that is a proven success around the world.  We deserve better!

Useful websites:
www.healthoverprofit.org
www.pnhp.org

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/18/opinion/the-fake-freedom-of-american-health-care.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0