Patient stories show why health care is central in the election

By Malinda Markowitz and Courtney Farr
Potomac News
July 23, 2008

If you need a reminder of why healthcare remains such a centerpiece of the fall election campaign, meet Kathryn McGinn of Woodbridge.

Last December McGinn’s daughter, who was being treated for poly cystic ovarian syndrome, lost her dependent status on her mom’s insurance plan because she was no longer a full-time student.

McGinn wrote to the National Nurses Organizing Committee. “(The insurance company) told us we could enroll her in an independent plan and pay her premiums of under $200 a month. We filled out the application and sent it in to enroll her. They denied her coverage under the normal plan; but did offer her insurance at over $400 a month premiums… That’s $4,800 a year not including the costs of copayments and prescriptions. So now she has to go to a free clinic to get the bare basics, and not very quality, healthcare when there is an emergency.”

If McGinn’s story sounds familiar, you may be among the 59 percent of Americans who told a June Kaiser Health tracking poll that they are having a “serious problem” with paying for gas, getting a decent paying job or paying health care or food bills.

Or you may be one of the 20 percent of Americans cited in a June survey in the Wall Street Journal who said they’d delayed or gone without needed medical care, mainly due to cost.

It’s not a “mental recession” for the families who have seen premiums for their employer-sponsored health coverage jump 10 times faster than wages in recent years, according to a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report in April.

Anyone counting on Sen. John McCain for systemic change will likely be disappointed. McCain’s health plan emphasizes once-a-year tax credits to buy insurance for those who can afford it and expanding state high-risk pools that charge higher premiums and have long waiting periods and declining participation. 

To control rising costs, McCain relies on more deregulation of an already too out-of-control insurance industry to promote more competition. But insurance companies don’t compete by expanding access or improving quality, they compete by cutting their own costs, primarily through denying care or dumping people when they get sick.

Sen. Barack Obama’s plan goes farther with expanded subsidies for those who can’t afford to buy insurance and prohibiting insurers from refusing to sell policies to people with prior medical conditions.

However, both Obama’s and McCain’s plan leave too much control over our health in the hands of the insurance giants.

“This is insane. Maybe I’ll have to take her to Canada to get treated,” writes McGinn. Why Canada? Care there is not dependent on your pocketbook. You don’t face loss of coverage or a doubling of your premiums if you have a pre-existing condition.

It’s an approach in place in other industrialized countries as well, and it works.

A report earlier this year found the U.S. ranks last in preventable deaths among 19 major industrial nations, even though we spend twice as much on health care.

You shouldn’t have to go outside our borders to find a more human medical system. HR 676, with 90 co-sponsors in Congress, more than any other reform plan, would establish a single-payer system, such as improving and expanding Medicare to cover everyone here. 

It would have uniform, comprehensive benefits, real choice of doctors and providers and coverage that’s not dependent on your job or your parents. It would end the escalating out-of-pocket costs that price you out of getting coverage or care, and denials of needed medical treatment because the insurance company doesn’t want to pay for it. Isn’t that what families like McGinn’s and the rest of us deserve?

Courtney Farr is a registered nurse in Arlington. Malinda Markowitz, RN, is a co-president of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association, http://www.guaranteedhealthcare.org.