HealthCareForAmericaNow

The Institute for America’s Future and renowned health care and economics expert, Jacob Hacker, released a report today called: “The Case for Public Plan Choice in National Health Reform.” The report explains how the public plan option levels the playing field to allow for access and affordability by reducing costs, without reducing the innovation that can come from the private market. The Key Findings (pdf) of the report state:

A health care system that contains costs and drives value must include a good public plan if the broad goals of reform—universal insurance and improved value—are to be achieved. Private insurance and public insurance have distinct strengths and weaknesses, and thus should be encouraged to compete side by side to attract enrollees on a level playing field that rewards plans that deliver better value and health to their enrollees. Public insurance has a better track record at reining in costs, while preserving access; it has pioneered key quality and payment innovations that have often set the standard for private plans; it is essential to set a standard against which private plans must compete to drive value and can be a source of stability for people. Private plans are a source of new benefit options, and continuing pressure for innovation in benefit design and care management strategies.

HCAN Campaign Director, Richard Kirsch, voiced his support for the report’s conclusion: “Creating a high quality, affordable public plan alternative to private insurance is absolutely essential to achieving comprehensive health care reform solutions that will work for all of us in 2009.” Rep. Pete Stark stated his strong support for the choice of a public plan and HCAN agrees that a health care solution that does not include a public plan would be a non-starter. President-elect Obama also talks about the choice of a public option as a critical part of his plan, saying again and again in his speeches that every American should have a choice of a public plan similar to the health care that every Member of Congress gets.

However, we have seen signs that there will be debate on this issue. Advocates of real health care reform need to make sure that this critical part of the solution is not bargained away in a misguided attempt to placate those who see health care reform as a business opportunity, not a matter of the health of our families and our neighbors. This would be a tragic mistake.

Many of you who have been following Congressional politics for some time now will remember that in recent years, “Mr. Hastert was an advocate of governing the House by a ‘majority of the majority’ – a standard he thought best served the interests of his Republican members and, by extension, the nation.” By that standard on the list of Congressional supporters for the HCAN Statement of Common Purpose, we have a ‘majority of the majority’ supporting the public plan choice. We hope this will allay the fears of anyone who believes that real change can’t happen, because, in fact, this train is already pulling out the station.

Here is a little sampling of all the great work that is going on in the field with the HCAN campaign.

First, Representative-elect Himes in Connecticut made a public commitment to the principles for health care reform from the HCAN Statement of Common Purpose. You can watch his moving statement on video here from Connecticut Citizen Action Group:

Then, I got these photos from Progress Ohio where they are gathering forces from the around the state to fight for health care in 2009.

Progress Ohio Meeting

And finally, from Denver, Colorado our partners at SEIU are organizing health care workers from around the country to participate in health care community discussions with the transition team. Watch the video from Dr. L. Toni Lewis, President CIR/SIEU:

Keep up the great work guys! This is how will achieve change that works.

As reported in a recent New York Times article, the health insurance company UnitedHealth has a brand-new product. The company is selling the right to buy an individual health policy with the company at some point down the road when you may need it. Yes, what we’re talking about here is insurance for insurance. This new offer is meant to “reassure” those who currently have insurance but are (rightly) concerned that they may lose their coverage in the future and then have insurers deny them coverage when they try to obtain it again for themselves.

But first, let’s give credit where credit is due. UnitedHealth, in offering this “guarantee of insurance,” reveals critical problems with our current health care system, especially with the individual market, a market that is particularly hostile towards women. Today, you or I could lose our health insurance if we lose our jobs, or if our employers stop offering coverage, and be left to purchase health insurance directly from insurance companies in the individual market. In the current economic situation in which thousands of jobs are being lost every day, this has already become a frightening reality for too many. And while laws require insurance companies to cover individuals who get insurance through their employers even if they have pre-existing conditions or poor health histories, there are few adequate protections that stop insurance companies from rejecting individuals who are looking to buy coverage on their own.

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I'll be at the Campaign for Community Change's Realizing the Promise event in Washington, DC for the next three hours. It's a gathering of 2,000 leaders and community organizers. Top line quote of the afternoon so far: Community organizing is an American tradition.

You can tune in live here. Stay tuned for more. (click read more below for the liveblog…)

In previous blog posts, we’ve called it the “Wild, Wild West” of health insurance. In the new report we released a few weeks ago, we described it as a “last resort” for coverage. There are just so many ways to describe the individual health insurance market and the problems that women and their families encounter there. The first of a 3-part series published in the LA Times earlier this week reports that individual market policies “often the only coverage available, are pricey and precarious.” The article describes how insurance companies denied coverage to a newborn with a minor joint problem (which corrected itself within months), cancelled the policy of a woman after she was diagnosed with lupus, and rejected an applicant because she was on a commonly-prescribed drug to manage acid reflux disease.

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As I settled into the back of a taxi headed to the Tampa airport on Tuesday, the cab driver—eyeing my plastic name badge and the brand new screen-printed tote bag on my lap—asked what had brought me to his city.  In the course of explaining the conference I’d just attended, I mentioned that my work involved health reform—“you know, changing the health system so that we all have good health insurance, and so that we all get high-quality health care.”

This was met with skepticism—“Sure, it sounds good.  But look at what is happening to our economy.  Can we afford to do these things you are talking about?”  He was right about one thing—the economy is going belly-up, and it seems to be taking American’s retirement funds, hopes of homeownership, and general peace-of-mind with it.  But his observation about health reform was off-target.  The question is not “Can we afford health reform?” but rather “Can we afford not to have health reform?”  Health reform isn’t just a wish-list item that we can save for another day; in fact, the problems that plague our health system contribute in a major way to the economic troubles that families are facing.  Nearly 1 in 3 Americans report a serious problem paying for health care and health insurance, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll.  Similarly, our July poll found that a quarter of women are not at all confident that they will be able to cover health care costs for themselves and their families in the years ahead.  For low-income women, this proportion doubled, with half saying they weren’t confident at all in their ability to pay for health care.

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When a friend of mine got her first job, she was devastated to learn that her company's health care plan wouldn’t cover her. She has a pre-existing condition, and needs expensive medicine, so this was some seriously bad news for her.

When she went to talk to her employer to see if anything could be done, he was surprised—-but not at the fact that my friend couldn’t be insured. No, her boss was surprised at my friend’s concern. "I thought young people didn’t care about stuff like health insurance," he said.

It's one of the biggest myths about health care: the idea that young workers don't need it and don't want it—-that they’d rather spend the money on video games or clothes or concerts instead…

That may be true of a few young adults, but I suspect not many. The union I work for, the UFCW, has one of the youngest memberships of any labor union, so we spend a lot of time talking with young workers. And the vast majority of young workers I’ve spoken with count health care as one of the issues most important to them.

They are a diverse group. Some are working to pay their way through college, some are still in high school, some are career employees, and many have families and children of their own. Most are no longer on their parents' health care; and indeed, their parents may be among the growing ranks of the uninsured.

But these young workers are the lucky ones. Since they belong to the UFCW, the vast majority have access to quality, affordable health care—-even if they only work part time.

The overwhelming majority of people get their health insurance from an employer or through a public program like Medicare or Medicaid. So it’s not surprising that most people have absolutely no idea how tough it is to buy insurance directly from an insurance company in the individual insurance market. And for women –- it is a particularly tough place.

At the National Women’s Law Center, we just released a report identifying the many obstacles women face in getting affordable comprehensive health coverage in the individual insurance market. The barriers include being rejected for coverage for reasons that are relevant to women, being charged more than men for the exact same coverage, and experiencing great difficulty in finding affordable health coverage that includes comprehensive maternity care.

There are many federal laws that protect women who get their health insurance through their employer.  Those federal protections simply don’t apply when you try to buy coverage in the individual insurance market.

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Check this new documentary from POV on PBS next week:

"What happens if you fall sick and are one of 47 million people in America without health insurance? Critical Condition puts a human face on the nation's growing health care crisis by capturing the harrowing struggles of four critically ill Americans who discover that being uninsured can cost them their jobs, health, home, savings, and even their lives." Watch it>

Last week we wrote about the Census Bureau’s recent release of 2007 data on health insurance coverage in the United States. On the simplest level, the news looks positive, with fewer uninsured women—and uninsured Americans in general—in 2007 than in 2006.

But since when was anything about health insurance simple?  The message became more complex when we found that the 2007 decline in uninsurance was only due to an increase in the number of people with public health insurance.  We summed up last week’s blog post discussion on this by warning readers not to be fooled by the seemingly positive news – our fight for progressive health reform is far from over!

Now that we’ve had another week to work with the Census data, we have found even more evidence of women’s need for comprehensive health reform. For certain groups of women, the news on 2007 insurance rates is not even seemingly positive. Things just went from bad to worse. Period. The data shows just who lost out.

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