Corporatizing Health Care for Investor Profit -
Gene Farley

I want first to describe my basic beliefs about health care and then to give you some of the facts about our present system that lead me to oppose the present corporatized-for-investor-profit system that denies coverage to many and to favor a publicly-funded, single-payer health-care system.
Basic beliefs:
1. Health care is a right, and all should be covered for it whether old or young, employed or unemployed, ill or well.

2. It is unethical to make investor profits from denying people health care coverage.
Milton Friedman - Capitalism and Freedom, 1962: "Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their share holders as possible."
Non-profitable patients rather than the system are considered the problem.
The profits of drug companies and some other providers are immense.

Facts and Issues:
1. The reality is that the United States has the most expensive, complex, bureaucratic, administratively top-heavy and rationed system among all the developed nations. This system provides good care to many but leaves over 44,000,000 Americans without coverage, over 50,000,000 with inadequate coverage, and is the basis for one- third (1/3) of the personal bankruptcies in this country. It requires people to be "Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise."

2. Medicare as it presently exists provides coverage for a group of people (the elderly and handicapped) whom insurance companies did not want to cover because of inability to make a profit from them.

3. The median income of people 65 and over is $13,000/year. 79% of those over 65 have annual incomes of less than $25,000.

4. One problem is that so much health care coverage is private-investor-controlled, with the bottom line being profit rather than patient-care. Increasingly this includes organizing medical practice into private-for-investor-profit corporations.

5. Medicare is almost universal for those 65 and over or with a disability. It is almost a single-payer system except for the co-pays and Medigap insurance. Most of the snafus credited to it are in reality those of the private intermediaries who handle Medicare payments.

6. The problem is not how to save Medicare, but how to bring more people into it. Medicare is totally savable if people want it. The threats to it are from those who never wanted it and those who want it to "wither on the vine". (Newt Gingrich speech 10/24/95)

7. None of the presently proposed remedies for Medicare reduce costs; they shift more of the cost to the individual, increase the administrative overhead and offer greater profits to insurance companies and investors.

8. From 1997 to 1998 Medicare expenditures increased by 1.5% while private health plans in the competitive market place increased expenditures by 6.1%. Most Medicare patients cost very little.

9. Attacks on Medicare include:
The Kyle Amendment
The Breaux-Thomas proposals - (Can seniors make informed consent?)
Proposals for "means testing" or vouchers to aid in paying premiums, either of which would make it a welfare program rather than a social insurance program.
Increasing the age at which one becomes eligible - this increases the number of uninsured by about 1.5 million.
Underfunding it so that patients are pushed through more rapidly--"You can get dressed now, Mr. Smith. The doctor saw you while you weren't looking."
The ideology that "the government can do nothing right",
The theology that the unfettered market place is the answer to all problems.

10. Essentials of a National Health Care Program
Universal, Comprehensive coverage
No out-of-pocket payments
A single public payer
Hospitals receiving "lump sum" operating budgets and separate Capital budgets
Public accountability but minimal bureaucracy
No for-profit HMOs or providers