Just
Health CareThere are so many reasons. Most recently, my HMO tried to ruin my summer vacation. I confess it was foolish to rush across a plank deck with no shoes on. The splinter was huge, but a friend got it out, no big deal. A few days later, though, while I was still on vacation, my foot started showing signs of infection. I decided to make a visit to the local emergency room.
But not before a morning-long string of long distance conversations with my HMO,
followed by an urgent call to my "primary physician" in an effort to get her
referral to the emergency room. My doctor, an oncologist, was probably in the middle of a
consultation with a breast cancer patient when she took my call. When I told her my
pathetic little story, she gave a world-weary sigh and immediately authorized the visit. 
Then it was more calls to the HMO.
Finally I made it to the emergency room, where everyone was very nice. I spent a half hour filling out forms and about four minutes with a physician's assistant, who prescribed an antibiotic. The next day, I got a surprise call from the HMO. They wanted to know exactly what had happened at the emergency room.
Photo: İHazel Hankin, Impact Visuals
One splinter. Five minutes oncologist time. Four minutes physician's assistant time. Thirty minutes emergency room administrative staff time. Two hours HMO administrative staff time. Not to mention the follow-up paperwork. I just hope I don't end up with a bill. But I might.
The problem is, my HMO is driven by a passion for something, and it isn't my well-being. It's profit.
If only I were Canadian. Then, my story would go something like this: Stupidly dash across the deck with no shoes on. Drive to the emergency room. Show my national healthcare card. See the physician. Get the antibiotics. Go home.
I tell this trivial story because I'm the kind of person that our healthcare system is supposed to work for: the healthy insured. The horror stories about what happens to people who are uninsured or who have serious illnesses or injuries are countless. I could have talked about my mother-in-law, who got Alzheimers, fell between the Medicare cracks and died leaving a half million dollar medical bill. Or my husband, who is currently caught in the surreal world of Workers Comp, where the money, if it ever shows up, shows up two years too late. And that's just in one small family.
Our piecemeal, for-profit healthcare system is sick, and everyone knows it. And yet, almost no one is pushing for the real cure. The current fashion is incremental reforms. Last year, for instance, Congress passed a new program to finance healthcare for some uninsured children. Now the Democrats and Republicans are pushing competing versions of bills to make it harder for HMOs to deprive people of needed care.
Fine. But none of these reforms address the underlying problem: A healthcare system that is driven by giant insurance conglomerates, supplemented by an inadequate patchwork of public programs that segments the population into unequal fragments, rich and poor, healthy and sick, young and old, employed and unemployed. There's no real solution short of creating one unitary publicly funded system that treats everyone the same - that is, fabulously. And remarkably, the experience of other countries tells us this kind of system would actually be cheaper than the sick one we have now.
Four years ago, there was a movement to win this kind of healthcare system, called single-payer (meaning, there is only one payer of medical bills: the federal government). That movement was undermined in part by President Clinton, who, instead of pressing for the simple, single-payer plan, came up with a reform plan that added even more bureaucracy to the system without addressing the system's most fundamental flaws.
Do we really have to resign ourselves to patching up a system that is among the least effective and most expensive in the industrialized world?
The Labor Party says no. Our healthcare plank, adopted by the delegates at our founding convention, is clear and bold.
There's a political vacuum out there that we would like to fill. While others are spending their energies on incremental reforms, we want to spearhead a new movement for the real thing. The Labor Party is set to launch a major national campaign to reignite the fight for "Just Healthcare." We're talking about a healthcare system in which:
In this issue, we introduce the campaign that the Labor Party's Interim National Council will present to delegates at the Labor Party's convention in November: Just Healthcare.
Back
to LP Press November 1998 Index
Labor Party Press Archives
Labor
Party Press Current Issue
Labor
Party Home Page