Healthcare costs skyrocket

Letter to the Editor in Orange Coast Voice

4/07

As our healthcare crisis inexorably metastasizes until nobody can ignore it any longer, phony “reforms” have been popping up like lesions, all of them cruel hoaxes, some of them laughable.  Arnold’s celebrated “plan” is properly characterized as Private Insurers’ Pork, with ten pages of band-aids added on, but at least it allows the Governor to play a caring maverick reformer on TV and in the national press.  Newport Beach philosopher Allan Beek likens it to politicians sitting down with auto manufacturers to deal with a transportation crisis by forcing every Californian to buy a car, and creating a government program to steer scarce tax dollars to poor Californians who can’t afford one.  Pure genius!

But SB 840, Senator Kuehl’s single-payer bill, the only true reform of the bunch, refuses to die, and just comes back stronger each year.  Let me get you up to speed just in case you haven’t been following the issue:  Americans spend far more than any other nation on healthcare—over $7000 per year per person now—and yet we are #37 in quality of healthcare, below all other industrialized nations.  18,000 Americans die each year due to denial of medical care;  and half of all bankruptcies are due to medical debt—and mostly that’s folks who were insured when they got sick.  There are many problems contributing to this crisis, but by far the biggest is the unnecessary, parasitic private health insurance industry, which pulls in untold billions by charging us higher premiums every year while covering as little of our medical necessities as they can legally get away with (they refer to that as “medical losses.”)

And that’s why SB 840 just keeps not dying but coming back stronger than ever—it is the only reform on the table in this state that will actually cover all of us, comprehensively, while saving us $8 billion a year.  It does this mainly by eliminating the private, for-profit health insurance industry, which we need like a fish needs a bike, and replacing it with a single-payer system like every other civilized nation has.  (It saves additional money in some other ways—for example, enabling the government to negotiate down drug prices by purchasing in bulk, and a renewed commitment to preventive care.)

SB 840 won’t die but will become law because, just like with the Iraq war, the people are way ahead of the politicans, and the Republican politicians are dragged along last of all, kicking and screaming.  To pass the bill with funding (and to break Arnold’s veto if he does veto it again) we need at least two Republican senators and six Republican assemblymen to break ranks, and break their silly pledge to never raise taxes.  That is the wall we are hammering at now.

The state senator for most of us OC Voice readers—that is, those of us in Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa, and nearby—is Tom Harman, a genial Republican who has been reasonable on environmental and gay rights issues.  We’re beginning a full-court press on Senator Harman to get him to change his mind and support the bill;  once one Republican jumps ship and does the right thing, others will follow.  (And Arnold himself has finally been meeting, discreetly, with our hero Senator Kuehl—after years of refusing to.)

Senator Harman needs to understand that, sure, this bill involves taxes, but almost all of us will be spending far less than we are now on premiums, deductibles, co-pays, and the “hidden tax” Arnold correctly mentions where the rest of us cover all the uninsured in many unnoticed ways.  The good senator needs to be reminded that SB 840 will save lots of money for the businesses and constituents in his district, and save lives on the Orange Coast, and that more and more of us know it.

Senator Harman’s local mailing address is 950 South Coast Dr., Ste. 240, Costa Mesa CA 92626;  his phone numbers are (916) 651-4035 in Sacramento and (714) 957-4555 in Costa Mesa.  You know what to do, gentle reader.  We’re also going to set up a meeting between him and a posse of local SB 840 supporters who happen to be Republicans (yes, we do have that many.)

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