Health care special interests are spending millions to kill reform. We can’t let them get away with it. | Opinion
We’ve seen this before. Hospitals, insurers, prescription drug manufacturers and other moneyed interests become concerned when politicians promise big health care reforms harmful to their bottom-line, especially when they see public support for such reforms increasing.
So they spend huge amounts of money to scare voters into opposing change. In the early 1960s, the
Many of them are at it again.
The Partnership plays fast and loose with the truth. Its website falsely claims: “Whether you call it Medicare for All, Medicare buy-in, single-payer or the public option – a one-size-fits-all approach to health care will lead to the same consequences for Americans. All these new proposals would ultimately eliminate patient choice and control over their coverage and force every American off their current plan and into a single, government-controlled health insurance system.”
They’re not at all the same. A Medicare-type plan without private insurance would have a very different impact than giving people a choice of enrolling in a public plan or keeping private insurance.
Eliminate patient choice and control over coverage? Both Medicare-for-All and a public option model themselves on the traditional Medicare program for seniors, which offers unlimited choice of physician. In private insurance, most people don’t choose their coverage, their employer decides, and access to clinicians is limited to the insurer’s narrow provider networks. What kind of control do people really have over their coverage when private insurers get between them and their doctor, requiring that they go through bureaucratic hoops to get needed care authorized?
Most importantly, the Partnership does not want voters to know that other wealthy countries with publicly-funded and regulated coverage are able to cover everyone, spend far less money on administration, and deliver better health outcomes than the
Not only is the Partnership misleading voters, the
The Partnership needs to be taken seriously because its message-tested anti-reform advertising works, and they have the big bucks required to keep it going.
There’s one big difference this time from past experiences when special interests blocked needed reforms: for the most part, they don’t have the doctors behind them. The AMA, to its credit, dropped out of the Partnership in August. The current roster of organizations supporting the Partnership identifies only one physician membership society; none of the largest physician membership organizations belong.
The
We don’t have the millions of dollars to go toe-to-toe against the insurers, hospitals, and drug manufacturers. We have something they don’t have: the voices of physicians who each and every day see patients who skip a follow-up appointment or don’t take life-saving medications because they can’t afford it. Physicians know that this time, we can’t let the big money groups get away with blocking needed reforms, because it’s their patient’s lives at stake.
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