Have We Forgotten Why We Wanted Health Care Reform?

America is discontent with change. Only a couple years ago, we were calling for change, particularly in health care. Now change has come — and we are again grumbling. I witnessed this at a dinner party. The loudest dissenter was the epidemiologist, alongside the psychologist and mountaineer, who loathed being mandated to participate in a health insurance pool, and resented more the threat of a fine. I felt like I had fallen into the “Twilight Zone.” These were good people, educated people — PhD-holding, NPR-listening trusted friends. Such words would only be spoken at a tea party rally!

But these friends are not extremists. They identified with the tenets of liberalism — responsibility and empathy — but as middle class white collar workers, they were not immune to conservative fears of higher taxes and excessive government regulation. The media was saturated with such claims, claims that are frightening in a time of economic uncertainty. Fear makes us forget.

The American health care system was a child of World War II. During the war, the U.S. government capped wages to deter inflation, so private companies began luring workers with health insurance as a perk. By the time the war ended and the wage cap was rescinded, health insurance had become the standard to attract good workers, and thus America — quite accidentally — fell out of step with the rest of the industrialized nations that had already established universal health care by the 1940s.

Our market-driven health care system never made good on capitalism’s usual promise: that competition drives down costs and improves the quality of services and goods. Costs didn’t decrease with competition and eventually were the cause of 60 percent of the bankruptcies in the U.S. Quality of care paled in comparison to that in other developed nations; the life expectancy rate is 78.11 years in America, but 82.6 in Japan (did you know you’d actually live longer in Cuba than in America?). And don’t even try being a baby here; we have the worst infant mortality rate of all developed countries (Cuba trumps us in baby survival, too). To top it off – America actually spends the most on health care than all other members of the UN.

Health care never yielded the success of laissez-faire public policy typical for industries like entertainment and electronics. The World Health Organization notes this anomaly in its 2008 World Health Report: “Today, it is clear that left to their own devices, health systems do not gravitate naturally towards the goals of health for all through primary health care...Health systems are developing in directions that contribute little to equity and social justice and fail to get the best health outcomes for their money.”

The free-market U.S. health care system was not working. Do you remember how badly it was not working?

Christina Turner must remember. I found her story in The Huffington Post. The 45-year-old suspected drug-induced rape when she accepted a drink from two men at a bar and woke up hours later lying road side with cuts and bruises. Taking precautions, Turner took her doctor-prescribed month’s batch of anti-AIDS medicine. Now she is uninsurable. Insurers would not sell her a policy — telling her that maybe in a few years, they would reconsider if she could prove she was still AIDS-free.

It’s a dilemma many Americans faced: perverse insurance policies blocking access to affordable health care. Stories like Turner’s saturated the media only two years ago — but since the reform, the same media is suspicious of the change that was requested. Have we forgotten the Reuter’s investigation of insurance company Fortis?

Reuters reported that Fortis sought, found and targeted every policyholder who had contracted HIV and looked for any excuse for policy cancellation. In one case, Fortis used an obviously misdated handwritten note by a nurse, who wrote “2001” instead of “2002” to claim that the policyholder had concealed HIV as a preexisting condition. Fortis, now known as Assurant Health, made $150 million in profits alone between 2003 and 2007 by utilizing policy cancellation tactics.

And there is Mike Pyles, a 49-year-old man driven to homelessness by $230,000 in medical bills from his fight with renal cell cancer. Pyles lived out the statistic that every 30 seconds, an American goes bankrupt from medical bills.

Didn’t we used to rally at our dinner parties, denouncing the unfairness of the health care system? Instead, the epidemiologist asks me, “But if you use more health services—shouldn’t you pay more?” Bless his soul, but my friend’s innocent question is a kinder version of “Why should I pay for other people’s health? If you are the one sick, why should I pay for it?”

So I ask him, and the rest of America: “Why shouldn’t I help you? What’s so bad about you anyway that I cannot help pay for your health?”

Have we forgotten how our hearts went out to the millions of uninsured, to the bankrupt – how we once wanted to help them, how we once feared being victims of the same injustice? Now from our pedestal of optimum health, we ignore that the reform bans insurers from dropping coverage for the sick, prohibits denying coverage for preexisting conditions, and eradicates lifetime limits. We slump on our pedestal, lamenting how the reform will affect the healthy. Can we not see from our height – the old, the sick, and the poor?

Maybe with the new health care reform, we will want to help each other again.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Suphatra Laviolette and not of Marguerite Casey Foundation.

Grantees in the News: National Council of La Raza

Clarissa Martinez, immigration expert with National Council of La Raza (NCLR), was recently interviewed by Latino USA to discuss a new report criticizing a Homeland Security immigration enforcement program. The report found that the hotly contentious Immigration and Customs Enforcement's local enforcement program was disobeying its original agreements and lacking oversight of its officers.

NCLR, a think tank of applied research and policy analysis, is the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in America. Latino USA is an NPR distributed program that opens the doors of knowledge for Americans about Latinos, as well as educating Latinos about each other. You can hear it on your local National Public Radio station.

You can safely listen to the episode here.

The Party of Me--not Tea

Written by Alan Brinkley, who is the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University, and the author of “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century,” a forthcoming biography.



The Party of Me

The Times/CBS News Poll shows that there is broad unhappiness with the state of the economy and the performance of Congress, but on the whole the participants seem to be responding fairly normally to a weak economy with high joblessness. The 18 percent of those polled who identified themselves as Tea Party activists, however, have sharply different views — and a sharply different profile — from the population as whole.

The most important clue to the views of the Tea Partiers is who they are: mostly white males, over 45, more wealthy and more conservative than the norm.

This is a profile that matches other highly motivated protests over many decades — the supporters of Joseph McCarthy, for example, in the 1950s. Today, the target is not communism, which is no longer a major issue for the right (although “socialism” appears to have taken its place). But what seems to motivate them the most is a fear of a reduction in their own status — economically and socially.

Economically, they fear that government spending and high deficits will lead to higher taxes and to inflation, both of which would threaten their own livelihoods.

It is telling that the Tea Partiers display a very high level of concern about deficit spending, but a significantly lower concern when they are asked if they would prefer higher taxes and lower deficits, or lower taxes and higher deficits. Most Tea Partiers choose the latter, which suggests that their concern is not the state of the economy as a whole, but their own economic conditions.
The other striking finding in this poll is the importance of race and diversity, something that Tea Partiers do not emphasize in their rallies and literature. But they show very clearly the racial anxiety that many of them appear to feel. This is not traditional racism, although there are almost certainly traditional racists within the movement.

The real issue, I believe, is a sense among white males that they are somehow being displaced, that the country is no longer “theirs,” that minorities and immigrants are becoming more and more powerful within society. And, of course, they are right about that. They just fear it more than many other Americans.

*This piece is reposted from the New York Times.

"Si se puede!" Seattle's Immigration Reform Rally in Pioneer Square

The "We Must Act Now!" Immigration Reform Rally on April 10th in Pioneer Square, Seattle drew an impressive crowd of 7,000 people. The rally hosted a line up of speeches from politicians, community leaders, and families affected by a broken immigration system, as well as entertainment from local and statewide groups. Below is a slide show of the rally.



Check back for a written post about the rally and other facets of immigration reform.

We On the Border Don't Count

Ann Cass, member of our Equal Voice Network, wrote this while reflecting on the very poorly organized Census effort in our area. The blog post originally appeared on this blog and is entitled "More Than Just a Number."

SAN JUAN, April 5 - I have been greatly disturbed by the news that census forms will not be mailed to families who live in the colonias.

The amount of energy we have spent in getting information out about how important it is to fill out the forms so we can get more money into the Valley for infrastructure, housing, health care, education, etc. seems to be wasted, but the more important issue is that there does not seem to be a workable plan on the part of the Census Bureau to make sure that families will be counted.

They prefer to send people, enumerators, into the colonias to do the house by house data collection rather than mailing the forms out. How many enumerators are necessary to visit 900-1000 colonias in Hidalgo County, in the evening hours?

So, the forgotten people in the colonias continue not to count. I drive by the billboard erected by the Census Bureau that reads, “Be counted so we know how many hospitals we need here.” What a silly message. We all know that most people in the colonias do not have health insurance, and when they go to the hospital, they don’t count. They don’t count either when it comes to safety in their neighborhoods, lights on their streets, easy hook ups for water and sewer, having the post office notify them when their house number changes. They do count when it comes to paying their taxes, when their vote is needed to elect politicians, when universities want to do studies on low income families, and those who are undocumented do count when ICE needs to make their monthly quota on deportations. Now they don’t count for the Census?

I can’t help but remember one of the photos we had when we started our Equal Voice Campaign. It was a photo of a small child with numbered stickers all over his face. The caption was, “More than just a number.” And that is what I am thinking now. People in the colonias who are not being counted are more than just a number. If people could appreciate that, maybe colonia residents would count for everything.

Colonia residents are health care providers, that counts if it is your parent they are caring for. Colonia residents are landscapers, that counts if it is your lawn that needs to be taken care of. Colonia residents are teacher’s aides, that counts if it is your child that needs some extra attention at school. Colonia residents are construction workers, that counts if you are trying to build an office or home at a reasonable cost. Colonia residents are farm workers who pick the crops, that counts when you go and buy the fruits and vegetables in the stores which they can’t even afford to buy. Colonia residents are human beings, and that counts when we have a society that puts a value on everyone’s presence, not just a certain class.

Each and every one of the colonia residents is more than just a number!

Ann Williams Cass is executive director of Proyecto Azteca, a non-profit based in San Juan, Texas, that builds affordable homes for colonia residents.

What It's Like to Lose a Home

By now, everyone knows the dismal facts on foreclosure: Almost 8 million families are behind in their mortgage payments, and more than 8 million are expected to lose their homes over the next four years.

Sobering, indeed. But to read the testimony behind these figures is shattering: The mother who sank all of her savings into a dream house and walked away with nothing; the father, forced to move into a far-away rental, who now drives an hour each night to retrieve his son from daycare.

Foreclosure has hit Latinos in disproportionate numbers (an estimated 400,000 are believed to have lost their homes in 2009 alone) so last week the National Council of La Raza published a report focusing on their experience. For those anticipating a dry recitation of facts and figures, “The Foreclosure Generation” will be a shocker.

Here, speak Latino families from Texas, Georgia, Florida, California and Michigan, reeling from dislocation and disillusionment as they describe layoffs, shattered dreams and banks that refused to help.

“…the house that you’ve been wanting for your life. You know, you – that's something you want to accomplish and you accomplished it, and you put all your money into it, that you worked hard for and commuted every day for five years, and set all my money up and to lose it, it was depressing,” said a mother from California.

Among the Latino families profiled, homes generally represented two-thirds of total wealth so home loss rocked their entire economic foundation. Most families reported marital discord, depression and poor school performance for children as a result of foreclosure. Young people, in particular, were deeply affected.

“Did you say goodbye to the house, Grandpa?” a little boy asked his grandfather as the family prepared to move away.

“And I was like, “Yes, I did. I said goodbye to the house.”

Music to Count By

Just in case getting a chunk of $400 billion for local schools and hospitals doesn't motivate you to fill out a U.S. Census questionnaire, how about free music?

The group Voto Latino, which was co-founded by actress Rosario Dawson and works to increase political engagement among young people, offers 25 free downloads from iTunes to anyone who visits the web site BeCountedRepresent.com and pledges to be counted. With selections from Pitbull, Mos Def, Morrissey and Ozomatli, the choices are weighted toward fans of Latino and world music.

The project may have a commercial agenda behind its civic intentions: Census forecasters predict that Latinos -- already the nation's fastest-growing minority group -- will make up 16 percent of the U.S. population when all the data is counted.

Marketers, no doubt, will take note. But in the meantime, enjoy the tunes.

With Idealism, and Homework, Kids Help Chicago Elections

On Tuesday, more than 2,000 Chicago students, many of whom are not old enough to vote, nonetheless hit the polls, acting as election judges in the Windy City's important primary election.

They brought their homework -- and idealism -- and in some cases taught an important lesson to older judges who had been doing the job for years.

Mikva Challenge, an organization that works to improve civic engagement among youth, recruited and trained the students. Now, in the program's 10th year, the gig has grown so popular that Mikva kids comprise almost 20 percent of the city's pool of eligible election judges.

That is not to say the job is without its rough spots.

"There was an older judge who did not want our student judge to have her homework out on the table," said Mikva staffer Cristina Perez, 22, who noted that the teens are allowed to do schoolwork. "So we train the students to remind people that they get the same pay, the same training and the same information as every other judge."

Some may grumble at the youthful faces, but officials at the Board of Elections have come to see their value. "It really clicked when touch-screen voting came in," Perez said. "The students made that transition much smoother and that's when people realized having young people in the polling place who are tech savvy is really an asset."

The main point, say Mikva organizers, is to remind youth (not to mention adults) that being too young to vote does not mean kids are too young to participate in the political process.

One student, 18-year-old James Alford, spoke about his experience on Chicago radio:

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