Victory! The AMA Is Out Of The Coalition Opposing Medicare For All!
Aug 26 2019
Sameena Mustafa, Jane Addams Senior Connection Bi-Weekly Online Update Email
Over forty of JASC members and our allies chanting “Get out of the way!” holding hand made tombstones and signs would not seem like a formidable match for the largest physician group in the United States, the American Medical Association.
“The time is up for us to sit on the sidelines and complain about things,” says Reggie, JASC member who helped take over the floor of the AMA’s annual convention this June in Chicago. “I have two grown daughters, five grown grandkids, and five young great-grandkids. We’ve got to fight for them now, to preserve and improve what we have for the future.”
Reggie and other JASC Health Care and Economic Justice leaders helped lead the“die-in” that pressured the AMA to drop out of the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a lobby founded last year by private insurers, hospitals and pharmaceutical makers. The Partnership has spent hundreds of millions so far to stop the expansion of health care coverage.
Members of Jane Addams Senior Caucus joined over a dozen groups and about 400 people at the AMA’s Annual Convention in Chicago this past June with that goal in mind. And it worked.
The importance of this win cannot be overstated. Decades of education and direct action brought JASC members, activists and medical professionals to rally inside and outside the Hyatt Regency to make sure the AMA heard how the current system puts profits over patients’ well-being. Caregivers and the chronically ill gave testimony to the delegates and passersby how insurers and ballooning health care costs kept them and their loved ones from accessing needed care.
To be clear, the physicians’ group has not dropped its opposition to single-payer Medicare for All officially, but its recent 53%-47% delegate vote was the closest they have come to changing their official position since it first opposed single-payer in the 1940s. More importantly, the AMA will no longer be contributing to the millions spent by the Partnership to kill the bill. Last year alone, the members of the Partnership collectively spent $143 million on lobbying Congress according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
To see the video from the AMA action on June 8th, please click HERE!
I Was The Nurse For Five Chicago Schools Last Year. The District Desperately Needs More Of Us.
Aug 8 2019
Dennis Kosuth
Chicago’s public schoolchildren deserve a nurse in every school, every day.
I’m a certified school nurse, and I listened closely to Mayor Lightfoot’s recent announcement that the city would add 250 more nurses over the next five years. I’m cynical due to the history of promises that have been made to students that have gone unrealized.
Some people might be cynical for other reasons, arguing that more nurses in more schools is unnecessary, or overkill. My experience has taught me otherwise.
In my first year with the Chicago Board of Education, I was assigned to three schools. My second year, that number grew to five. This past school year I started out with six, which was fortunately dialed back to five about a month later.
There are multiple reasons that Chicago students deserve a nurse in every school, every day. One is to care for physical wounds. I was once called out of a meeting to help a 5-year-old who had fallen in the school’s playground. Soon into my assessment, I realized his leg was broken and was there to counsel against another adult who suggested we get the child up to walk. I called 911 and the parents, and he got the help he needed. I’m not sure what would have happened to the child’s leg if no nurse had been present.
Treating post-traumatic stress is another reason to have nurses. One day, a student had an altercation before school which led to someone else calling the police, and I tried to calm the student down. In this instance, I ultimately failed to deescalate the situation, as the student ended up being handcuffed and walked out of the building past a number of classmates. I later learned this student’s parent had been killed by the police, and I can only imagine the emotional trauma that was the source of their unregulated behavior.
We also need a nurse to help navigate health inequities. It was my dogged interrogation of a parent who was not getting their child’s health screening done that eventually revealed the reason: the parents were undocumented, and they understandably feared that applying for health insurance could result in their family being torn apart. Along with school support staff, I met with the parents and discussed their concerns. We connected them with other CPS staff in the area who work specifically with families and eventually got the student insured.
Nurses are known for their honesty and ethics for a reason: we care about our patients and demonstrate this every day through our work. I did the best I could with the time I had across five schools, but this year involved a lot of running around, and there was little room for preventative teaching.
Moreover, CPS nurses are often assigned new schools every year, making the job even tougher. Learning about a school, meeting new people, and building strong relationships within communities all take time, and this becomes almost impossible to do when the reset button is hit annually.
It does not take a statistician to understand that when a nurse has too many patients, is stretched between too many schools, or has to readjust to new school settings each year, the lower the overall quality of care will be. And quality of care truly matters, as full-time nurses can more effectively reduce absenteeism, increasing students’ access to learning.
And there’s also the problem of how Chicago’s nurses are employed. Currently, CPS employs about 300 nurses for over 500 schools. CPS currently fills this staffing gap with a less-than-ideal solution: contracting with private agencies to staff between 180-220 daily nursing assignments. Last December, the board voted to commit another $26 million to these companies through 2021. I worked with one contracted nurse who had built excellent relationships with the three diabetic students under her direct care. Eventually, she had to quit her agency job because it did not provide health insurance. But she couldn’t just go work for CPS, either, because temp nurses’ contracts prohibit them from immediately becoming direct school employees, meaning those students lost that relationship.
Other cities have been making headway on this staffing issue; students in Los Angeles, for example, will now have much more access to school nurses, due to the new contract that the teachers union negotiated. Mayor Lightfoot should follow Los Angeles’ example, making her promise to hire more school nurses real by writing it into a new labor contract.
Prior to working in the Chicago’s public schools, I spent more than eight years in the adult emergency department at Cook County’s Stroger Hospital. It was a rewarding and challenging job that I loved, but I made a career change because I wanted to be involved in educating our youth about the importance of health maintenance. My thought process was maybe too simple: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I also naively believed that my stress level and accompanying blood pressure might be ameliorated by bearing less witness to how the triad of poverty, racism, and health inequity wreaks havoc upon human bodies. Unfortunately, in schools, I see the same issues and hear the same stories almost every day — only hurting kids, rather than adults. More nurses in more schools would help.
Dennis Kosuth has been a school nurse in Chicago Public Schools for the past three years. Prior to that, he worked in the Stroger Hospital Emergency Room in Cook County.
American Medical Association Leaves Coalition Fighting 'Medicare For All'
Aug 15 2019
Peter Sullivan
The American Medical Association (AMA), the nation’s main group for doctors, announced Thursday that it is leaving a coalition fighting "Medicare for All," a blow to the industry’s efforts to push back on the progressive proposal.
The AMA said it is leaving the industry group called the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, which has been running ads against Medicare for All and public option proposals from the leading Democratic candidates for president.
However, the doctors group’s CEO, Dr. James Madara, said in a statement that the AMA still opposes Medicare for All. It just wants to focus its energies on advocating for solutions, such as improving ObamaCare by making its subsidies for helping people afford coverage more generous.
“The American Medical Association (AMA) firmly believes that the best pathway to expand affordable, high quality health insurance coverage to all Americans is through a mix of private and public health insurance options,” Madara said in a statement. “We remain opposed to Medicare for All, and policies that reduce patient choice and competition, and are built on flawed financing policies.”
The news was first reported by Politico.
The AMA is internally divided on whether to maintain its decades-long opposition to single-payer health care. Many young doctors tend to be more supportive of the idea than their older counterparts.
A vote at the group's House of Delegates was very close in June, with 53 percent voting to maintain opposition to single-payer health care and 47 percent voting to end it.
Amid that debate, the AMA is deciding to focus on advocating solutions, though more incremental ones than Medicare for All.
“Practical solutions have been identified and continue to be championed by the AMA,” Madara said. “The AMA decided to leave the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future so that we can devote more time to advocating for these policies that will address current coverage gaps and dysfunction in our health care system.”
The anti-Medicare for All coalition still has many powerful industry groups in it, including the American Hospital Association and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
In a statement, the Partnership for America's Health Care Future emphasized that the AMA still opposes Medicare for All.
“Our diverse and fast-growing coalition strongly agrees with the American Medical Association (AMA) that Medicare for all is the wrong approach for America’s health care and we have appreciated the opportunity to work with them throughout the past year," the Partnership said.
Cook County Board Of Commissioners Passes Resolution In Support Of HR 1384
Aug 4 2019
Anne Scheetz, ISPC member
On June 27, 2019, the Cook County Board of Commissioners passed Resolution 19-3838, RESOLUTION IN SUPPORT OF H.R. 1384, the Medicare for All Act of 2019.
Originally introduced by 1st District Commissioner Brandon Johnson, the resolution garnered 15 sponsors from among 17 commissioners, and was spproved unanimously by the 16 commissioners present at the meeting.
Johnson is a former public school teacher and a first term commissioner whose platform included "I will work to ensure that healthcare is not a privilege but a right."
Sheilah Garland, organizer for National Nurses United (NNU), spoke in favor of the resolution during the public comment period, detailing some of the commissioners' support.
Consuelo Vargas, member of NNU and an emergency department (ED) nurse at a safety net hospital, also spoke during the public comment period, about patients who come to the ED for medication refills, dental pain, medical supplies, cholesterol levels, mammograms, and other primary care issues, because they have no health insurance, owe medical debt, or can't afford their deductibles and co-pays.
The commissioners passed the resolution with no further discussion.
You can watch the video of the meeting at the above link; testimony in support of Resolution 19-1838 is at minutes 8:19 and 15:15.
Among Illinois legislative bodies, the Chicago City Council (2007), the Illinois House (2009), and the Thomson Illinois Village Board (2017) have previously passed resolutions in support of Medicare for all.
Voice of the People: We should protect the vulnerable at all times
Mar 21 2020
Steve Bohan, ISPC member
Various political leaders are now proposing policies to deal with the effects of the COVID-19 crisis: paid sick leave and free health care if needed are two examples. I applaud these moves. But I am startled at the inherent immorality of offering them only during the crisis, and saddened that I am not hearing this discussed.
If you’re “lucky” enough to get a virus that causes the stock market to crash, we’ll take care of you. Otherwise, you’re on your own. You got sick a year ago and had to declare bankruptcy from the medical bills? Too bad; you should have saved more. A year from now you get some infectious disease? Be prepared to get fired for taking off too much time.
I am in favor of health care for all; and I have been for a long time. I am in favor of paid sick leave for all; and I have been for a long time. Hundreds of national and local politicians have fought these policies for years as “restrictions on the free market” or “socialism.” Now, suddenly, these policies are OK during an emergency. I ask those politicians: “How many Americans must die for all of us to get health care? How many Americans must lose their jobs for all of us to get paid sick leave? What is the moral code you live by that forces you to resist government-paid medical care at some times but not others?”
It seems to me that taking care of each other is a part of the moral code of living in a civilized society. Every religion I ever heard of teaches that in some way we are all one. In the Christian tradition, we are all “brothers and sisters in Christ.” I understand that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. But I don’t think that human life is sacred only during extraordinary times. I think health care is a moral imperative. And millions of Americans don’t have access to it. Paid sick leave is a part of that.
Let’s come together during this crisis and put in place policies that protect vulnerable lives not just during emergencies, but all the time.
FROM COLUMBINE TO CORONA
The Virus of Poor Public Health Policy in the United States
Apr 14 2020
Kimberly J. Soenen — Creative Director, Curator and Editor of “SOME PEOPLE” (Every)Body, an ongoing multiverse group exhibition about Public
I grew up amongst the Shock Doctrine generation, Generation X.
We were raised in between the sentences of the book by Naomi Klein that has been referenced frequently as of late. The book supports the theory that exploitation of national crises such as perpetual warfare, mass shootings, climate disasters, environmental distress, domestic terrorism, income inequality, barriers to healthcare and other incessant upheaval enables business practices and policies that impose harm to Public Health.
Occasionally, a catastrophe can motivate humans to rid themselves of—or at least mitigate— unbridled discrimination and greed, and instead, view that working toward the common good is salient. As Americans file for unemployment and stand in line for food assistance in the weeks ahead, will they come to believe this virus could be the catastrophic catalyst for a profound shift in the way we view healthcare?
Yet again, the modern-day economic expansion-in-perpetuity house of cards has crashed. Businesses from the Atlantic to the Pacific are boarded up while riding out the public catastrophe that is COVID-19, allowing space for capitalist institutions to profit and establish policies that not only benefit an “elite” small portion of the population, but also endanger the masses while they, the masses, are distracted by the ongoing catastrophe.
A record-breaking number of people are now unemployed. Despite that, the Affordable Care Act marketplace remains closed in all but a handful of states. COBRA, the temporary health insurance hustle, is cost-prohibitive. Commercial health insurance companies in states where attorney generals haven’t issued an executive order to end billing, continue to bill patients for COVID-19 testing and treatment while trumpeting the “health insurance choice” talking point. What is the argument for tethering employment to healthcare access now? Where is the “choice” now?
Through shared pain and collective strife, this is our chance to wake up and create a new definition of responsible healthcare—one that emphasizes empathy over judgment, equity over discrimination, human potential and human capital over obscene record-breaking profit at any cost. This virus is asking us: Will we one day see one another as equal? Equally fragile? Equally vulnerable?
The time has come to enact a Single Payer National Health Program / Universal Healthcare and protect it as settled law.
Sheila Wessenberg, a 44-year-old mother who had a mastectomy, and lost her health insurance coverage after her husband lost his job at a technology company in Dallas, Texas. (Ed Kashi / VII).
From Columbine to Corona
Ongoing failed United States Public Health policy is at the heart of all this endless disruption and economic distress. Healthcare should not be a political football or a bloody free market combat sport that Wall Street plays to profit from illness, injury, disability and death.
Let’s take a closer look at the three major man-made public health crises in the United States over the last 20 years:
In 1999, it was Columbine. That horror triggered an ongoing mass shooting virus, a vicarious trauma virus, a man-made public health crisis. Just last week, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that between 1999-2018—the year of the mass shooting at Columbine to the COVID-19 pandemic—the rate of suicides in the United States rose by 35%.
In 2001, it was the mass murder at the World Trade Center on September 11. Afterward, we watched as the U.S. Congress refuse to allocate tax dollars to pay for the healthcare of first responders and aftermath healthcare workers. Congress continued to periodically delay support until 2019, when figures such as journalists and celebrity voices with global platforms, shamed them into acting. Not only did the lack of support impact the physical health of those individuals, it also fractured their hope, their spirt and their belief in good. That was a health inequity and wealth disparity virus: members of Congress deserve health insurance and health workers do not.
In 2007, private insurance companies, hedge funds and banks created the subprime mortgage scandal. Some called that an “economic crisis,” but in actuality, it was a man-made public health crisis caused by greed; a lack of business ethics virus that had been slowly spreading in the U.S since the 1980’s. When people lose their life savings, their homes and their businesses, their health can be irreversibly impacted by suicide, heart conditions, cardiac issues, hypertension and depression, to name a few.
Commercial Health Insurance Hustle
The statistics and research illustrate the widespread harm our current approach to healthcare imposes, and why we need a Single Payer National Health Program.
The University of North Carolina last week published a study confirming 170 rural hospitals have closed in the U.S. between January 2005 and April 2019. 128 have closed since 2010. Also last week, a new Annals of Internal Medicine study estimated that far more than 7.3 million Americans will lose their commercial health insurance coverage by June 30, 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2009, Harvard University linked illness, commercial health insurance costs and medical bills to nearly two-thirds of bankruptcies in the U.S; a 50 percent increase from 2001. That was 10 years ago.
But, we don’t need more data or statistics.
One needs only to walk out their door in the city, suburbs or rural America to observe the gravity of disparity, chronic illness and wealth inequity. As I type, the addicted throw-away people that live on the streets of Lower Randolph, Lower Columbus and Lower Wacker Drives beneath my home in Chicago languish, as their daily rush hour supply of food and money handouts has been cut off by the “Stay at Home” mandate. Hungry opioid-addicted persons are emerging into the sunlight—literally—and floating like walking corpses around the 42nd Ward of the city with endocarditis and bleeding limbs. Do they deserve healthcare?
In the meantime, emergency medicine physicians are using band-aids and bandanas as Personal Protective Equipment (PPE); Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago and Mt. Sinai Hospital on the Upper Eastside of New York City are actively soliciting donations for equipment and money, patients are reporting bills of more than $10,000 from their health insurance companies for testing and treatment, and physicians are reporting how barriers to healthcare are making COVID-19 deadlier for minority and low-income communities due to lack of health insurance and medical facility deserts. But, professional athletes, CEOs, Senators and Hollywood actors—modern day deities and throne sitters—are accessing tests and treatment ahead of persons who are paid $8.25 per hour to clean our hospitals.
Within a year, the Wessenbergs went from living in a luxury townhouse on an income of over $100,000 to facing bankruptcy and desperation. (Ed Kashi / VII).
The Good News
The last thing Americans need is more incremental tourniquet-style healthcare policy.
Last year, 150 CEOs signed on to endorsing Common Sense Gun Laws in the United States. 181 business roundtable CEOs signed on to prioritizing stakeholders rather than shareholders. Nurses and physicians continued to strike across the country standing up for patients’ rights and quality of care. We witnessed the largest global outcry in history for environmental health. Are these merely PR declarations or truly a shift in the American business philosophy? In January of 2020, international biotech and pharmaceutical industry CEOs even published a “Commitment to Patients” stating their intention to begin considering the “common good” over greed.
That greed has motivated physicians and nurses to be very vocal about the stress unaffordable healthcare, budget cuts and lack of resources creates for them and their patients. Long before the COVID-19 crisis, they began talking directly to the press and testifying before Congress about how understaffed, undersupplied and overworked they were.
The time has come for more business owners, elected officials and executive boards to change their tact and prioritize health and healthcare—the very cornerstones of economic dignity—as essential to manifesting human potential to its fullest. This opportunity for a business ethics revolution is not solely about implementing a new “system.” This is about a new way of thinking by the individuals who propel systems forward.
Sheila battled breast cancer all the while remaining uninsured and unable to receive needed healthcare. She was uninsured at the time of her death on June 27, 2005. Bob Wessenberg was left a widower with two small children. (Ed Kashi / VII)
A New Philosophy of Health
Seismologists have stated that with the worldwide “stay at home” order, they can now hear the Earth’s tectonic plates shifting like never before. Perhaps, too, in the wake of the Coronavirus, we may witness a profound shift in the American philosophy of, and approach to, healthcare. Americans may begin to assign social, economic, cultural and ethical value to healthcare access as a fiscal priority, like they do highways or mass transit, clean water and clean air. We might soon wake to a society that makes no distinction between lives that are or are not, worthy or worth-while. We may enter a new era led by business owners who prioritize health rather than the hustle, the make and the take.
The mood in the United States is currently mournful, empathic and suspect. The streets are mostly empty. But long before this invisible Coronavirus began to infect people indiscriminately, you could possibly not see the millions of letters from commercial health insurance companies arriving to the homes of patients nationwide denying them needed healthcare. Possibly, you could not feel the weight of worry from the mother in rural Kentucky who has to drive four hours to access a hospital. Possibly, before the pandemic, you could not understand the distress the business owner feels when they cannot afford to pay for their staff’s health insurance or the distress the disabled person feels who routinely receives seven-digit medical bills in the mail.
And just maybe, in decades past, you could not hear the voices of American nurses and physicians reporting about how pre-authorizations, pre-approvals and methodical denial of care by commercial health insurers harm their patients.
But now, over the incessant sirens in Queens and Williamsburg, over the crouched shoulders of undocumented underpaid workers in the Central California Valley, over the overcrowded prisons of Mississippi and Chicago, and above people hauling water in the Navajo nation of New Mexico, over the churches of Birmingham, the fast food restaurants of Detroit and the billion dollar technology companies in Seattle, you can hear exhausted physicians and nurses—along with those of us, like me, who have been bankrupted by denial of care and unaffordable medical bills—all shouting loudly through their N95 masks next to the haunting hum of ventilators: National Improved Medicare For All now. Single Payer now. Universal Healthcare now.
The Need for Universal Health Care Has Never been More Obvious
By Pam Gronemeyer, MD
May 14, 2020
The pandemic has wrought pain and death on our neighbors, friends and coworkers and has hurt the economic well-being of Americans. In addition, it has demonstrated the frailty and inadequacy of our current patchwork health care system. As the number of persons laid off increases weekly, the number of uninsured Americans rises.
We watch as others lose their health insurance or feel the pain of our own loss at a time when we see that the coronavirus does not select its victims by any fault of their own. Rather, like most diseases and illnesses it can strike any person at any time in his or her life. We worry about how we will pay for expenses if we ourselves get sick or our loved ones do. Nurses have heard dying patients whisper: Who will pay for this?
Upon losing health coverage, individuals can pay for expensive, temporary coverage under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, or Cobra. They can try to purchase new coverage on the insurance exchanges if this is allowed. They can sign up for Medicaid in states that expanded Medicaid, get a new job with benefits, or just go without insurance.
The sheer cost of Cobra when no money is coming in is a nightmare. This is also a terrible job market, with 36 million people now seeking unemployment benefits. Some politicians and unions are suggesting that the government cover all medical charges for coronavirus treatment and then subsidize Cobra payments temporarily during the pandemic.
Once again, like the Affordable Care Act and its subsidies, we taxpayers would be providing corporate welfare for the insurance barons. These are the same companies whose chief executives receive million-dollar salaries and stock options and golden parachutes when they either leave their company or fail and are terminated. The Affordable Care Act helped decrease the number of Americans who were uninsured. However, the efforts of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party to destroy the program cannot be ignored. The number of uninsured Americans has risen in the last few years. So has the number of underinsured Americans with high deductibles and larger premium shares paid by employees. These have combined to make people defer seeking treatment. Sen. Bernie Sanders has a much better idea. He proposes to fill the void with Medicare. Isn’t now the time for us to embrace improved Medicare for All? Health care would finally be recognized as a human right rather than something that has to be earned and rationed by one’s ability to pay. Those who have lost their insurance would be enrolled in Medicare through his Health Care Emergency Guarantee Act. Others would seek enrollment once they see that Medicare works and is much better than their employer insurance, which can change or disappear overnight. Seniors uniformly agree that Medicare works. For many, it is the best health plan that they ever had.
This guaranteed enrollment would also include people from all age groups rather than only those over 60 who would be added by former Vice President Joe Biden’s plan.
It is almost a certainty that insurance companies will follow their usual track record and use this pandemic to raise premiums in the upcoming year. Small businesses would no longer be able to offer health insurance, and those left in the trap would see their premiums, deductibles and copays rise as employers endure losses due to the pandemic.
Let us make something good come out of this tragedy. We have all sheltered in place to protect each other. Now we can make quality health care part of our life, our liberty, and our general welfare. We can ensure that our children and grandchildren do not have to decide whether to eat or see a doctor when they are ill, nor will they be forced to stay in miserable jobs just because they need health insurance. Americans can work to create innovative job opportunities and not be driven into bankruptcy by health care costs. This is the American dream.
Pamella Gronemeyer, M.D., is a pathologist with a pathology/cytology practice. She lives in Glen Carbon.