Hope Is On the Way?

John Edwards gave a pretty fine speech last night (text of speech); I watched the last half or so and I'll admit he had my attention. A lot of it was simply style; the man knows how to captivate an audience. But he said many things that I do hope we'll have a chance to hold him and John Kerry to beginning next January when they're sworn in as the next President and Vice President of the U.S. One of those things was about health care:

We can build one America where we no longer have two health care systems. One for people who get the best health care money can buy and then one for everybody else, rationed out by insurance companies, drug companies, and HMOs — millions of Americans who don't have any health insurance at all.

It doesn't have to be that way.

We have a plan that will offer everyone the same health care your Senator has. We can give tax breaks to help pay for your health care. And we will sign into law a real Patients' Bill of Rights so you can make your own health care decisions.

This had special resonance for me because I'd just gotten off the phone w/L., whose father is currently in the hospital. It looks like he's going to be ok, no thanks to our brilliant system of "managed" care. Long story short, he came much too close to dying Tuesday when his HMO tried to tell his doctor how to care for him. The doctor said L.'s dad needed emergency surgery, and that he needed to do it at a larger, nearby hospital. The HMO said, no, that hospital is not part of our network; you'll have to ship him 50 miles away to another hospital where he'll be assigned a new doctor not familiar w/the case. The doctor argued w/the HMO and finally told it, "Fine, I'll move him where you want him to go. But he's going to die on the way and I'm going to help his family sue you."

The HMO backed down. The doctor moved L's dad to the closer hospital, did the surgery, and L.'s dad is now recovering—finally. He's not out of all danger yet, but things are looking much better.

I'm tell this story because it's shocking, horrifying, and absolutely common. People are dealing with this kind of obscene greed from HMOs every single day, and I'm sure people die or suffer needlessly every day because they're not lucky enough to have a doctor who will stand up to the HMO, or because the HMO won't bend no matter how livid the doctor gets. I'm sure all too often the HMO does its cost-benefit analysis and decide, hey, the chance this patient will die is X, and even if this patient dies and we get sued, that will cost less than if we had to do this doctor-recommended procedure for every patient who needed it; therefore, lets gamble w/this patient's life and we'll make more money in the long run. That's the bottom line: Your HMO will murder you if there's money in it. Can you say "pathological pursuit of profit"? If you weren't yet sure what "purely self-interested, incapable of concern for others, amoral, and without conscience" meant, now you know.

And this kind of obscene immorality is happening to everyone—it's probably happened to you, or to someone you know and love. And we put up with it. We swallow it. We complain about it, but we don't demand change. Aren't you proud to be an American?

But it's even worse than I ever knew because this isn't a story about someone w/out a health care plan, or a story about someone w/a low cost, bare bones plan; L.'s dad has (or was supposed to have) one of the best health care plans in the country. He was a lifetime employee of a major corporation and he's got "great" insurance. So we have millions of Americans w/out health care of any sort, we have more millions with really bad budget plans, and now even if you have money, if you have top-of-the-line insurance, you're still not safe from HMOs.

So John Edwards is promising that hope is on the way. He and John Kerry have a plan for health care; they claim they will:

lower family premiums by up to $1,000 a year, cut waste from the system, lower the cost of prescription drugs to provide real relief to seniors, and use targeted tax cuts to extend affordable, high-quality coverage to 95 percent of Americans, including every child.

I don't see how any of that will change the control HMOs have over care or reduce their incentives to trade my health for their profit. Yeah, maybe the Kerry/Edwards plan would make us better off than where we are now, but it seems to me that health care in this country will remain tragically unjust until we put doctors back in charge of health care and take the profit out. Hope may be on the way, but real hope for a real solution still seems a long way off.

Posted July 29, 2004 07:00 AM | election 2004 general politics