Millionaires' "grassroots" activism

Apparently, in the health care fight, millionaires have learned to become community organizers. check out this piece from McClatchy Newspapers:

Who's behind the attacks on a health care overhaul?
By Margaret Talev | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Much of the money and strategy behind the so-called grassroots groups organizing opposition to the Democrats' health care plans comes from conservative political consultants, professional organizers and millionaires, some of whom hold financial stakes in the outcome.

If President Barack Obama and Congress extend health insurance coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for it, and limit insurers' discretion on who they cover and what they charge, that could pinch these opponents.

Most of them say they oppose big government in principle. Despite Obama's assurances to the contrary, many of them insist that the Democrats' legislation is but the first step toward creation of a single-payer system, where the federal government hires the doctors, approves treatments, sets the rules and imperils profit.

These opposition groups appear to have spent at least $10 million so far on ads attacking the Democrats' plans. Still, supporters of a health care overhaul have outspent opponents by more than 2-to-1 so far, according to Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks ad spending. Supporters include drug makers angling for their own protections, unions, the American Medical Association and AARP, the seniors' lobby. Supporters announced this week that they intend to spend $150 million promoting an overhaul.

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1 reason why health care is broken

While you're struggling to pay rising health insurance premiums, out-of-pocket expenses, co-pays and for less and less coverage, these are the amounts some of the current and former top CEOs in in just one single private insurance company have been raking in. Remember, most of this comes from denying claims for care.

From Crain's Business Detorit:

Here was the compensation last year for several of the top executives at Blue Cross, according to documents filed with the state Office of Financial and Insurance Regulation:

• CEO Dan Loepp earned total compensation of $1.79 million in 2008. Loepp, who became CEO in July 2005, received $910,000 in base pay,$727,000 in bonus and $160,000 in other compensation. He earned $1.65 million in 2007.
• CFO Mark Bartlett earned $1.2 million in total compensation. Bartlett received $571,000 in base salary, $559,000 in bonuses and $108,000 in other compensation. He earned $1.17 million in 2007.
• D. Robertson, vice president of innovation and emerging markets, earned total compensation of $1 million. He earned $439,000 in 2007.
• Darrell Middleton, senior vice president of business efficiency and human performance, earned total compensation of $995,000. He earned$580,000 in 2007.
• Jean Carlson, senior vice president of subsidiary operations, earned total compensation of $960,000. She earned $707,000 in 2007.
• Kevin Seitz, executive vice president of health care value enhancement, earned total compensation of $936,000. He earned $877,000 in 2007.
Four other former Blue Cross executives received large retirement packages:
• Les Viegas, former executive vice president, received $3.46 million in total compensation. He earned $998,000 in 2007.
• William Smith, former executive vice president of operations, received$2.06 million. He earned $943,000 in 2007.
• John Austin, former senior vice present and chief actuarial officer, received $1.49 million. He earned $802,000 in 2007.
• Jann Cantelon, former vice president of group servicing and support, received $1.34 million. He earned $341,000 in 2007.

Is it any wonder your premiums seem to go up faster than your paycheck?

Republican Policies Put 759,000 Children with Asthma at Risk

According to Science Daily, 759,000 children who suffer from asthma are at risk each year of suffering an attack while they have no health insurance.

759,000.

About 114,000 of them lacked insurance the entire year, and were 14 times as likely to go without needed medical care.

According to the article, 70% of the 759,000 were eligible for S-CHIP. George W. Bush and and a handful of Republicans in the House of Representatives twice blocked the S-CHIP reauthorization bill which would have expanded the program to cover as many as 4 million additional uninsured children.

Childhood asthma disproportionately affects African American children in lower income families. According to a Boston University study published in 2005, African American children in poor families were at a "substantially higher risk of asthma" than white or Latino children.

Objectively, the Republican Party's successful fight to block S-CHIP expansion was a racist attack on Black children. And in my mind there is no doubt, given the Republican Party's and the Bush administration's history on these questions, that their lack of concern and even hatred is subjective too.

Also disturbing is that 30% of children with asthma who lacked health insurance at some point last year live in families above the 200% federal poverty threshold for S-CHIP eligibility. Now Republicans tried during the S-CHIP fight last summer and fall and will try to tell you these folks are rich. But they're not.

Many of these families live in places where the cost of living is so high that being at 210% or 250% or even 300% of the federal poverty level is meaningless. Try living in New York City (or San Francisco or Newark or Chicago or DC) and caring for a family of four with an income of $26,000 dollars. That is above 200% of federal poverty. But it doesn't mean you can afford private insurance.

It's time for a change. People want to know what "change" means. This is it.

The Science Daily article also provides one key piece of information that can put to rest claims by the extremist Republicans who blocked the S-CHIP bill and the insurance companies about the quality of public versus private insurance:

No differences were found between children with private and public insurance, when it came to unmet needs, discontinuity in care or poor access. This suggests that consistency of coverage for children with asthma is more important than the source of insurance. [emphasis added]

You can read more about S-CHIP in the January print edition of Political Affairs – coming soon!

Capitalism and Diabetes

Along with the good news of the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party's huge defeat in upper house parliamentary elections in Japan and the not so good news that Gordon Brown was disappointing many members of his own British Labor Party by saying kind words to GW Bush about the wars against terrorism generally and the disastrous Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, there was story about diabetes, a disease that killed my mother and may in the future threaten me along with millions of other Americans. Diabetes is related directly to the long-term effects of diet and in general the way one lives one's life, along with what most medical researchers believe is genetic predisposition, although there remains a great deal about genetic factors and their relationship to diseases neither known or effectively proven.

Diabetes is also a disease that interacts with the general circulatory and cardiovascular system particularly to bring about other health crises which can lead to amputations of limbs, blindness, kidney failure, and of course to life threatening heart attacks and debilitating strokes along with other illnesses.

The story concerns Dr. David Graham, a drug safety official of the FDA, who has called for the the withdrawal of a drug, Avandia, because it is not not necessarily more effective than existing drugs to control blood
sugar levels and also brings with it an increased risk of heart attacks. The drug is produced by GlaxoSmithKline, a major transnational pharmaceutical firm, which like its competitors produces prescription
drugs for profit and markets them through massive advertising campaigns.Both the advertising costs and also the fact that there is no system of national health care currently in place in the U.S. which would compel private pharmaceuticals to sell drugs through public agencies is the explanation used globally to explain why prescription drugs in the U.S. cost on the average twice as much as they do in other developed countries and why Americans consume nearly twice as much prescription drugs as people in other developed countries.

In recent years, as is noted abroad with some disbelief, pharmaceuticals have spent large sums of money advertising anti-depressants, sex aids, digestive aids, and other prescription drugs, calling upon television
viewers to contact their doctors about these drug for possible prescriptions (side effects are mentioned as rapidly as possible in these commercials)

The story mentions that the FDA has known about the possible dangers of Avandia for a year and has only called an advisory committee to discuss the question after an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, the leading professional journal of medicine raised questions about the drugs safety. The news reports have also expressed doubts about whether or not Dr. Graham's criticisms will actually lead to anything, since he, as a drug safety official at the FDA, has often challenged FDA approved drugs like Avandia with limited success. Sales of the drug have already dropped sharply because of the New England Journal article.

I am an historian, not a medical doctor or medical research of any kind. But as an historian, a Marxist historian, I know something about both the for profit health care industry and the FDA, which like regulatory agencies generally are as good or bad as the administration in power which appoints the high officials to direct the agency. This administration, like other right Republican administrations in the past, has seen the regulators as the enemy and the corporations as the "victims" to be protected from "big government."

I know as a Marxist that medical conditions have to be dealt with dialectically and holistically if human health is to be maintained and life extended. At the hearing, Dr. Robert Ratner, of the Medstar Research Institute testified about the "epidemic" of diabetes currently in the United States, the increasing heart attacks, strokes, kidney failures, amputations and blindness that it has caused. Ratner stated the obvious, that contemporary drug care isn't doing an effective job in preserving health and life and that "new therapies" are called for (in the press reports he didn't elaborate on why there has been an almost total reliance of drugs and also what new therapies he was specifically talking about, but criticized both patients for failing to take their drugs properly and doctors for failing to "aggressively" treat patients with diabetes.

Diabetes is directly related to longterm dietary factors, particularly to obesity. The U.S. food industry bombards Americans, particularly children and teenagers with advertisements for high "empty calorie" foods that have caused an "epidemic of obesity" in the U.S. which the media is chattering about endlessly but about which nothing seriously is being done, since that would require both regulation and serious social investments in educating people and creating public institutions for recreation and exercise among other things that would encourage them to led healthier lives

Adult diabetes is now becoming a factor among more and more young people, particularly among working class and minority youth. And you don't have to be a Marxist to understand why this is happening, although, as with virtually all other things, Marxism helps a lot.

The class system plays a major role in who is more or less likely to get diabetes and other illnesses for that matter. Low income people are far less likely to get or in many cases even know about the tests that
exist to find "pre-diabetic" conditions. Even when they have reasonable medical coverage (and we should remember that close to 50 million have no "health insurance in the U.S. and tens of millions more are seriously under-insured) they are likely to avoid getting medical care because of the copays and other out of pocket expenses and they are likely to be treated by medical personnel in the HMO's on an assembly line basis. Even though the insurance company controlled HMO's today are making propaganda about encouraging "preventive health care" (if only to reduce their own costs from providing services for patients) we should remember that they are still in effect doing business with doctors, with for profit medical testing corporations, and of course with the hugely powerful pharmaceutical firms, which reduce medical care to more and more drugs. This suits the drug firms in terms of profit maximization, the HM0's in terms of giving subscribers the list in benefits for the premiums that they pay, and perhaps even the doctors who get incentives from both the HM0's to restrict care and from the pharmaceuticals to push drugs. Doctors can also make the most profit for themselves in the present system from an private assembly-line approach to health care. It doesn't suit patients however, and with a disease like diabetes can lead to far-reaching negative health consequences, including death.

What should be done. For people, especially young people, without diabetes, a program of education about the uses of diet and exercise as part of a preventive health program should and could be initiated both
in schools and in mass media. Just as tobacco commercials have long been banned from television, serious attempts to regulate the commercials for pastries, soda pop, potato chips, fast food outlets, and other high fat high and "empty" calorie foods that are pushed through the society, and which have created a "snacking culture" in which people eat so foods along with regular meals through the day, increasing both the obesity numbers and also making them prone to illnesses connected to high fat, high salt and other processed foods.

Also, both doctors and the general public should be educated about the uses and abuses of prescription drugs, which drug company advertisers in recent years are treating the way Pepsi Cola and Lays Potato Chip advertisers have long treated their products.

Planning for public health, a serious regulatory policy that informs people about the health issues in food and in drugs, and of course, a commitment to both educate people to live healthy lives and restrict the businesses that bombard them with advertising to encourage them to live unhealthy lives are necessary parts of a national health policy, along with Universal Health Care that will and a Federal Drug Administration that regulates pharmaceutical firms in the interest of the people who use their drugs rather than serving as a shill for them.

--Norman Markowitz