Republicans: BULLYING GRANDMA

Big Bertha--Republicans--are now shifting their horrible gaze from
muslims to grandma as they set out to pass a bill that Senator Edward
Kennedy says would "privatize Medicare in return for a limited,
inadequate, small prescription drug benefit."

Why toss out a program that has been a glowing success to a system that
has left a trail of suffering and death across the country due to
spiraling health care costs?

Medicare has done a "much better job" of cutting the cost of healthcare
than the private insurance market, though Medicare has been insuring a
"much riskier population" that is  "older and sicker" during the last 30
years, said Mr. Frank Clamentay, head of Public Citizen's Congress
Watch,  who was speaking at a briefing on universal health care
sponsored by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Congressional
Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus, May 1, 2001.

To Dr. Marcia Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of
Medicine, who now lectures at Harvard University,  Medicare is the sole
of efficiency and simplicity, with overhead costs of "less than 3
percent."

In comparison, she said at the briefing that our private health care
system is "the most expensive in the world," and that we spend, on
average, "twice as much per person as other developed nations."

The reason for this high cost is "not because we're sicker or more
demanding," asserted Angell, pointing out that Canadians, for example,
"see their doctors more often than we do and spend more time in the
hospital." And the reason for our high cost is not that we get better
results, she said, since "by the usual measures of health, life
expectancy, infant mortality and immunization rates, we do worse than
most other developed countries."

Explaining the high cost of private health insurance, Angell said there
are estimates that "no more than 50 cents of the health dollar reaches
providers, who themselves have high overhead costs to deal with the
requirements of multiple insurers, often bent on avoiding payment."

Much of the health care dollar in a private health care system is spent
on administrative costs, marketing, profit, brokers, disease management
and utilization review companies, drug management services, billing
agencies, information management firms and so on, she said.

Moreover, private markets compete, Angell said,  "by not insuring high
risk patients, excluding expensive services such as heart
transplantation, by  passing costs back to patients and by denying their
claims, deductibles or copayments. ...  Markets are not a good way to
distribute health care."

So instead of dismantling Medicare, let's extend it to all citizens.
The group Angel was representing, the Physician's Working Group on
Single Payer National Health Insurance, said this would save us "at
least $150 billion annually."

Let's also pass a bill that would sharply control the costs of
prescription drugs--as the Canadians did years ago.  We could then
afford to pass a Medicare drug benefit without passing on a staggering
debt to future generations.  We already pay $332.5
billion per year just in interest.  What a sad waste of resources.