Why I Committed Civil Disobedience for Health Care Reform

2009 November 11th

Syracuse New Times, November 11, 2009
Syracuse City Eagle, November 12, 2009
CNY Vision, November 13, 2009

I attempted to deliver a letter on Nov. 4 from health care activists to WellPoint, Inc., a for-profit health insurance company. When WellPoint refused to accept the letter, I stood in their doorway and was arrested for criminal trespass.

My act of civil disobedience took place during a picket of WellPoint’s Syracuse offices sponsored by the Mobilization for Health Care for All, Single Payer New York, and the local chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program.

Our letter demanded that WellPoint stop denying benefits to sick policyholders and use its revenues for care instead of lobbying and profits.

Insurance companies are the real death panels in America. They are the bureaucracies that stand between you and your doctor and decide whether they will pay for the care your doctor recommends.

For-profit insurance companies have a direct conflict between profits and care. Their Wall Street investors demand that insurers boost profits by denying claims.

Reforming these predatory insurers into public servants is as futile reforming piranhas into vegetarians. The purpose of our demonstration was not only to expose the evils of for-profit health insurance, but also to expose the folly of the Democratic health care plan, which tries to reform for-profit insurance.

The Democrats took single payer, the least-cost option, off the table, and offer the most expensive option, an insurance industry subsidy plan. The Democrats’ plan will spend about $100 billion a year over the next decade subsidizing our inefficient, high-cost mixed system of public and private insurance, which shuttles the costly old, poor, and sick to public insurance and steers the profitable young, affluent, and healthy to private insurance.

The individual and employer mandates in the Democratic plan force you to buy insurance or pay a fine or go to jail. The mandates deliver at least 21 million new customers, many of them subsidized by taxpayers, and at least $70 billion in new annual revenues to private insurers.

The public option is just a fig leaf for this corporate option. The Democrats gutted the original “robust” public option, an option for everyone to buy into Medicare, enrolling 130 million. Now it’s a token option limited to a few, enrolling only 6 million by 2019. The Republicans who call this plan a “government takeover of health care” are nuts. The Democrats who still call it a “public option” are just as nuts.

Prescription drug prices will remain the highest in the world thanks to deal the Obama White House cut with Big Pharma to bar bulk-purchasing discounts by public insurance.

Insurance costs will continue to explode because the plan impotently relies on competition in monopolistic local markets to keep prices in check. Private insurers will even use the good reforms in the plan, such as the banning limits on lifetime coverage and exclusions for pre-existing conditions, to raise prices.

The Kucinich amendment protecting the right of states to enact single-payer nonprofit health care was stripped from the House bill adopted Nov. 7 at the request of the Obama Administration and then denied a floor debate and vote by House Speaker Pelosi.

Health care should be a right provided as a public service, not a buy-or-die commodity. A single public payer, as provided for in the National Health Insurance bill, HR 676, could provide universal access to top-notch care at less cost than we now spend on our inefficient multi-payer system. Patients could choose any doctor and clinic, unlike the managed care of most insurance today. The savings from single payer are well-documented by many studies over the last two decades by the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accountability Office, and the Harvard Medical School.

Even better would be a single-payer health service, as provided for in the US Health Service bill, HR 3000. Salaried physicians and other health workers would provide care in publicly budgeted nonprofit group practices. It would be democratic and responsive, governed from the bottom up by community health boards elected by local residents and health workers. A single-payer health service would cost even less than single-payer health insurance because it eliminates the other inflationary cost drivers: fees-for-service and profit-maximizing providers. Prospective budgets for community health boards on a per capita basis, in place retrospective fee-for-service reimbursements by third-party insurance, would enable the correction of other major health system problems: the shortage of primary care doctors, the bias toward acute curative care over preventive care, and the inequitable geographic and class-based distribution of health resources.

Whether or not the Democrats’ plan passes, the health care cost and coverage crisis will continue. It’s time to abandon illusions about the public option and for-profit insurance reform and go straight for the only solution that works: non-profit health care for all. As Amilcar Cabral, the West African anti-colonial leader, wisely advised: “Tell no lies. Claim no easy victories.”