Where'd all the fear come from? Somewhere that led to my mom's email inbox

My mom received an email about "Health Care Info," from a large community listserve, sent by a person who received the email "routed from a credible former colleague," originally written by... Who knows; maybe Sarah Palin? Here is my response:

The first sentence is not only written to scare (with no explanation whatsoever), but it is a complete outright lie: "...is over 1,000 pages long and puts the government in charge of our health care system."  The mention of 1,000 pages is a pointless scare tactic (as someone said, the last Harry Potter book was >700 pages long), and nothing proposed by anyone even comes close to "government in charge of our health care system." 

For the past 30 years, it is the insurance companies who are already dictating how doctors practice, and what care patients can or cannot get.  This has happened while every year there are over a million more Americans without health insurance (this year now there are 48 million uninsured), many of these uninsured people either get very sick or end in the hospital--which all Americans have paid for via high & rising premiums, and bankrupt public hospitals--while insurance companies have shown record profits year after year & their CEOs earn increasing salaries in the millions. 

If you or anyone you know have ever dealt on the phone with an insurance company trying to deny you care, I strongly urge you to read this New York Times article on Wednesday explaining why.   This former executive in the health insurance industry, who's job was to devise ways to scare Americans from important health reform (just like the email below), reached his conscience and now is speaking out strongly in support of needed health reform.

Insurance companies are also afraid of & against progressive ideas like the Health Info "Exchange" (mentioned in the email below) which will promote free-market competition and make it much easier for you to individually compare & contrast different health plans (currently, sorely lacking), and therefore improve health coverage + bring down premiums by competition.The types of rules that health care reform plans indeed want to enact that do affect health care are things like requiring all health insurance plans to cover annual checkups, cancer screenings--saving lives & saving costs by preventing end-stage hospitalizations--and to outlaw insurance companies from denying care based on "pre-existing conditions."  These are all changes in the current Health Insurance Reform that everyone (except insurance company CEOs & others people trying to scare Americans) agrees are good and necessary.

Therefore, I would indeed agree with going online "AND WRITE YOUR REPS"--as the email below urges you--but I would advocate for contacting them in support of real substantial health reform aspects like these (instead of the vague scare tactics announced elsewhere).
-Abe

 [The original email forwarded, forwarded, forwarded, from some unidentified "guru," into my mom's inbox is right here below:]

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Saturday's Health Care Rally @ Times Square

See slideshow of Healthcare Rally also in New York Times.

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New York Times Op-Ed: Health Care Fit for Animals

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/opinion/27kristof.html?_r=1

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Opponents suggest that a “government takeover” of health care will be a milestone on the road to “socialized medicine,” and when he hears those terms, Wendell Potter cringes. He’s embarrassed that opponents are using a playbook that he helped devise.
“Over the years I helped craft this messaging and deliver it,” he noted.
Mr. Potter was an executive in the health insurance industry for nearly 20 years before his conscience got the better of him. He served as head of corporate communications for Humana and then for Cigna.
He flew in corporate jets to industry meetings to plan how to block health reform, he says. He rode in limousines to confabs to concoct messaging to scare the public about reform. But in his heart, he began to have doubts as the business model for insurance evolved in recent years from spreading risk to dumping the risky.
Then in 2007 Mr. Potter attended a premiere of “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s excoriating film about the American health care system. Mr. Potter was taking notes so that he could prepare a propaganda counterblast — but he found himself agreeing with a great deal of the film.
A month later, Mr. Potter was back home in Tennessee, visiting his parents, and dropped in on a three-day charity program at a county fairgrounds to provide medical care for patients who could not afford doctors. Long lines of people were waiting in the rain, and patients were being examined and treated in public in stalls intended for livestock.
“It was a life-changing event to witness that,” he remembered. Increasingly, he found himself despising himself for helping block health reforms. “It sounds hokey, but I would look in the mirror and think, how did I get into this?”
Mr. Potter loved his office, his executive salary, his bonus, his stock options. “How can I walk away from a job that pays me so well?” he wondered. But at the age of 56, he announced his retirement and left Cigna last year.
This year, he went public with his concerns, testifying before a Senate committee investigating the insurance industry.
“I knew that once I did that my life would be different,” he said. “I wouldn’t be getting any more calls from recruiters for the health industry. It was the scariest thing I have done in my life. But it was the right thing to do.”
Mr. Potter says he liked his colleagues and bosses in the insurance industry, and respected them. They are not evil. But he adds that they are removed from the consequences of their decisions, as he was, and are obsessed with sustaining the company’s stock price — which means paying fewer medical bills.
One way to do that is to deny requests for expensive procedures. A second is “rescission” — seizing upon a technicality to cancel the policy of someone who has been paying premiums and finally gets cancer or some other expensive disease. A Congressional investigation into rescission found that three insurers, including Blue Cross of California, used this technique to cancel more than 20,000 policies over five years, saving the companies $300 million in claims.
As The Los Angeles Times has reported, insurers encourage this approach through performance evaluations. One Blue Cross employee earned a perfect evaluation score after dropping thousands of policyholders who faced nearly $10 million in medical expenses.
Mr. Potter notes that a third tactic is for insurers to raise premiums for a small business astronomically after an employee is found to have an illness that will be very expensive to treat. That forces the business to drop coverage for all its employees or go elsewhere.
All this is monstrous, and it negates the entire point of insurance, which is to spread risk.
The insurers are open to one kind of reform — universal coverage through mandates and subsidies, so as to give them more customers and more profits. But they don’t want the reforms that will most help patients, such as a public insurance option, enforced competition and tighter regulation.
Mr. Potter argues that much tougher regulation is essential. He also believes that a robust public option is an essential part of any health reform, to compete with for-profit insurers and keep them honest.
As a nation, we’re at a turning point. Universal health coverage has been proposed for nearly a century in the United States. It was in an early draft of Social Security.
Yet each time, it has been defeated in part by fear-mongering industry lobbyists. That may happen this time as well — unless the Obama administration and Congress defeat these manipulative special interests. What’s un-American isn’t a greater government role in health care but an existing system in which Americans without insurance get health care, if at all, in livestock pens.

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Join "Rally for Health Care Reform" this Saturday!

Saturday, August 29

Downstate Contingent Joining

UNITY RALLY FOR HEALTH CARE REFORM

(Please join at any point!)

10am-12pm:

· TABLING @ GRAND ARMY PLAZA

· Gathering signatures supporting a public option (for Sen. Schumer)!

· Flyering for the 2pm rally at Times Square to demonstrate our support for PROGRESSIVE health care reform!

• RSVP here!

12pm: leave together for Times Square

2pm-4pm:

· HEALTH INSURANCE REFORM RALLY @ TIMES SQUARE

· A partnership of NYC grassroots groups and Organizing for America

· Speaking program begins at 2pm. Arrive early!

“It's our health care. It's our time. Save the date to make your voice heard.”

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Helping Primary Care NOW!

In regards to a proposed 8 percent increase in reimbursement rates to primary care physicians in the 2010 Medicare fee schedule, an email from the American Academy of Family Physicians notified me that "As you would expect, the subspecialists are mobilizing their members to oppose this change."
On the other hand: Below is the "comment" I left at the Regulations.gov webpage to show my support, and if you believe so too, you can do so too here.

I am happy/relieved to hear of this proposed 8% increase in Medicare reimbursement rates to primary care physicians. Happy because it is the first I have learned of an indication that consideration for primary care is valued; relieved because even in my brief introduction into medicine so far it has been hard not to become cynical sometimes about where I was headed.

Whereas access to primary care has

proven to be the leading indicator for an individual's and community's health, the reputation of primary care medicine has sunk to the bottom of the barrel, in the eyes of this whole generation of students entering the medical profession. Primary care physicians "make the least," "are the most ignored and undervalued in society," and they "are not respected"--these are just a few of the "truisms" I have heard mentioned by many peers so far.

I am on my way to become a second year medical student, and one of the few medical students remaining these days thinking of pursuing primary care medicine (down to only about 1% of us, in fact, despite an exponential explosion in the nation's impending need). I urge all of my peers & our political leaders to push & pass this increase in reimbursement to primary care physicians. If so, this will help encourage more future physicians to fill the much-needed primary care roles that will accompany America's increasing demand and (hopefully) expanded health insurance coverage. If not, the alarming trend of medical students' aversion to primary care will continue, and folks like me will be even lonelier, and maybe even altogether discouraged.

Sincerely, Abraham Young

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