Posts Tagged ‘socialized medicine’

Man Robs Bank of $1 to Gain Access to Needed Healthcare

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

Few news stories have provided more compelling testimony about how the nation’s healthcare system fails millions of people is the report that a North Carolina man robbed a local bank of just $1 so that he could have multiple healthcare problems treated in jail.  Richard James Verone,  a 59-year-old unemployed man with multiple health issues, robbed a local bank so he could go to prison and receive treatment for his conditions — he said it was the only way he could get healthcare.

Verone has an undiagnosed growth in his chest, two ruptured back discs, and a foot problem.  His medical condition made working difficult after his 17-year career as a Coca-Cola delivery driver ended.  He tried living off savings and part time jobs, but that proved inadequate.  He applied for Social Security but only received food stamps with no resolution to his medical problems.  When robbing the bank, Verone gave the teller a note explaining that he only wanted $1.  He did not want to frighten anyone and was not doing it for the money.  After the teller handed him a dollar, Verone said “I’ll be sitting right over here on the chair waiting for the police.”  When the police arrived, Verone was sitting on a sofa inside the bank.  “I’m sort of a logical person and that was my logic,” Verone said.  “If it is called manipulation, out of necessity because I need medical care, then I guess I am manipulating the courts to get medical care.”

Verone faces charges for larceny from a person, which is unlikely to keep him behind bars for more than one year.  He is being held in Gaston County Jail, where he has already been seen by several nurses, on a $2,000 bond.  If his sentence is too short, Verone said he plans to rob again.

“The pain was beyond the tolerance that I could accept,” Verone said.  “I kind of hit a brick wall with everything.”  Verone said he “exercised all the alternatives” before the bank heist.  As the day approached, Verone paid his last month’s rent, donated his furniture and moved into a hotel.  Before going to the bank, he mailed a letter to the Gaston Gazette outlining his plans.  According to the letter, “When you receive this, a bank robbery will have been committed by me.  This robbery is being committed by me for one dollar,” he wrote, wanting to make clear that the motive for his crime was strictly medical and not monetary.  “I am of sound mind but not so much sound body.”

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, John Thorpe says that “After depleting his life savings and realizing he had, literally, nowhere else to turn, Verone committed the crime, hoping he could get the medical care that he so desperately needs.  This is what America has come to?  Otherwise honest folks, with nowhere to turn in life, have to resort to fake-robbing a bank with the hopes they’ll be arrested so they can receive medical care?  There is absolutely no reason for an allegedly civilized country, particularly one as wealthy as America, to pass the buck on providing healthcare for everyone.  Yes, everyone: the employed and the unemployed; the sick and the healthy; old and young.  Before you scream ‘oh no, socialism!!!’ stop and consider what you mean by that.  How do socialist systems pay for healthcare?  Taxes are collected from businesses and citizens, and a portion of those taxes go to cover the healthcare costs of everyone in the plan – in other words, everyone in the country.

“How do health insurance systems pay for healthcare?” Thorpe asks.  “Premiums are collected from businesses and employees, and a portion of those premiums go to cover the healthcare costs of everyone in the plan.  The difference between the two?  Socialized care costs less (because it has a much larger pool of people to draw from), covers everyone at all times, and prevents people from purposefully committing crimes to get treated.  Insurance systems ARE socialized systems, except they don’t cover everyone and allow a corporation – an entity that neither receives nor provides the medical treatment – to skim a profit off the top.  In what sort of twisted mind is that the rational way to provide medical care?  It’s not like the marketplace can rationally set prices for healthcare.  A dying man has no ability to check prices and compare services before deciding which hospital he’ll take his heart attack to.”

Robert Oak of the Economic Populist,  agrees with Thorpe.  “He (Verone) got his healthcare and how many others are committing felonies so they can get food, shelter and medical attention to save their lives?  If we cannot get universal single payer, perhaps all of America should behave as Verone did, so finally, we could all get some healthcare.  What’s wrong with this picture?”

Suzy Khimm of Mother Jones, points out that the cost of caring for Verone for the year that he is likely to be incarcerated does not come cheaply.  “The story is telling not just because it shows the sad desperation of uninsured Americans who have trouble finding healthcare — but also how costly it is to leave such problems unattended.  James Verone may have only robbed the bank of one dollar, but the cost of jailing him for just one year in North Carolina is over $23,000, not to mention the legal fees his case will rack up as well.  Similarly, if he wasn’t in prison, and his health problems worsened, he could end up in an emergency room, where the state would again have to help foot the bill if he couldn’t pay.  Insuring him would likely be the cheapest option — which is one reason why Democrats have made universal coverage a priority under federal health reform.”

Verone concludes “I didn’t have any fears.  If you don’t have your health you don’t have anything.”

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Healthcare, Hospital Systems | No Comments »

Healthcare Reform – 3; Opponents – 2

Wednesday, March 16th, 2011

The score on legal challenges to the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act is now 3 – 2 – with the Obama administration and healthcare reform in the lead. Nor surprisingly, the three judges who have voted to uphold the law are Democratic appointees, while those who struck down the law are Republican appointees.

The law survived a challenge in federal court in Washington, D.C., the third win in a series of lawsuits attempting to overturn the legislation. U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler threw out a lawsuit brought in June by five individuals who claimed the requirement that people obtain minimum insurance coverage starting in 2014 is unconstitutional.  Judge Kessler said Congress was acting “within the bounds” of its constitutional Commerce Clause power when it imposed the insurance requirement.  “The individual decision to forgo health insurance, when considered in the aggregate, leads to substantially higher insurance premiums for those other individuals who do obtain coverage,” Kessler wrote.  “Thus, the aggregate effect on interstate commerce of the decisions of individuals to forgo insurance is very substantial.”

A right-wing group called the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) is appealing Judge Kessler’s ruling.  The group maintains that it is unconstitutional for the law to require that each person purchase insurance; they perceive it as a move towards adopting socialized medicine.  According to the appeal, the group wants to spare Americans “all of the horrors you have heard coming out of Canada (and) Europe, where it is a bureaucrat who decides — not your doctor — what care you have.”  According to Edward White, an attorney with the ACLJ, “That does not mean that Congress cannot fix the healthcare problem we have in this country.  It’s just the way they’re going about it now by requiring people to act and buy a product and using its Commerce Clause power to an extent that is beyond what Congress has ever done in the 200 some odd years of this country.”

Judge Kessler could not disagree more strongly: “To put it less analytically, and less charitably, those who choose — and Plaintiffs have made such a deliberate choice — not to purchase health insurance will benefit greatly when they become ill, as they surely will, from the free healthcare which must be provided by emergency rooms and hospitals to the sick and dying who show up on their doorstep,” she said.  “In short, those who choose not to purchase health insurance will ultimately get a ‘free ride’ on the backs of those Americans who have made responsible choices to provide for the illness we all must face at some point in our lives.”

Nearly one year after President Obama signed the healthcare reform bill, more than half of the states have challenged the legislation in the courts. In comments filed in a Florida federal court, representatives of the 26 states that successfully challenged the healthcare reform law asked the judge to halt the healthcare law’s implementation, according to The Hill. The comments are a response to the Obama administration’s request that U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson explain his January 31 ruling that the healthcare reform law is unconstitutional.  Of five federal court rulings on the reform law so far, Judge Vinson’s is the only one that strikes down the entire law.

Additionally, Florida and Alaska have declared the reform law effectively dead unless an appellate court reverses the decision.  Court comments by the 26 states – which were backed by the National Federation of Independent Business — said the Obama administration should have requested a stay, pending appeal, rather than request a clarification.  “If the Government was not prepared to comply with the Court’s judgment, the proper and respectful course would have been to seek an immediate stay, not an untimely and unorthodox motion to clarify,” the plaintiffs wrote.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Healthcare, Hospital Systems | No Comments »

Attacks on Healthcare Reform Similar to Medicare Battle in 1965

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Dr. Atul Gawande: “The battle for healthcare reform has only begunWhen President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law on July 30, 1965, he faced a year of nearly crippling attacks from groups like the American Medical Association (AMA) and conservatives who feared an onslaught of “socialized medicine” and threatened to boycott the new program.  Although memories of the Medicare battle have faded over 45 years, similar battles could be fought over the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This is the opinion of Dr. Atul Gawande, general and endocrine surgeon at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School.

Writing in The New Yorker, Gawande notes that because most of the healthcare reform act’s provisions phase in at a slower pace than did Medicare, it is even more open to attack.  “The context, of course, is different.  The AMA endorsed the legislations; hospital associations were supportive.  Once the public option was dropped, most insurers favored the bill.  The medical world will wage no civil resistance.  This time, the threat comes from party politics.  Conservatives are casting the November midterm elections as a vote on repealing the health-reform law.  If they regain power, they are unlikely to repeal the whole thing.  Instead, they will try to strip out the critical but less straightforwardly appealing elements of reform – the requirement that larger employers provide health benefits and that uncovered individuals buy at least a basic policy; the subsidies to make sure that they can afford those policies; the significant new taxes on household incomes over $250,000 – and thereby gut coverage for the uninsured.”

Gawande notes that reform is hardly a government takeover of healthcare, as many opponents contend.  Rather, its success relies on communities and clinicians.  “We are the ones to determine whether costs are controlled and healthcare improves – which is to say, whether reform survives and resistance is defeated,” according to Gawande.  “The voting is over, and the country has many other issues that clamor for attention.  But, as L.B.J. would have recognized, the battle for healthcare reform has only begun.”

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Healthcare | No Comments »

Medicare President Johnson’s Great Society Legacy

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

On July 30, 1965 – nearly 20 years after Harry Truman first proposed national healthcare insurance – President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare  into law. The program, one of the most consequential legacies of the Great Society, provides affordable healthcare insurance for people aged 65 and above.

Franklin Roosevelt was the first president to propose government-mandated healthcare insurance as part of his Social Security program, an effort that proved unsuccessful.  After World War II, Truman asked lawmakers to enact a national health insurance plan – again to no avail.lbj_big_picture46152620

“By the time Truman prepared to leave office in early 1953, he had backed off from his original plan of universal coverage.  The focus increasingly turned toward Social Security.  Nearly two decades of futile debate ensued, with conservative opponents, joined by the American Medical Association, repeatedly warning of the dangers of ‘socialized medicine.’”

The legislative gridlock broke when Johnson won the presidency in the 1964 landslide election and brought sizeable Democratic majorities to the Senate and House.  The breakthrough came when House Ways and Means Committee chairman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas had an epiphany and decided to support Medicare.  According to Mills, “I can support a payroll tax for financing health benefits just as I have supported a payroll tax for cash benefits.”

The Medicare bill easily cleared the House by 313 – 115 and the Senate by 68 – 21.  When Johnson signed the legislation into law at a White House ceremony, Harry Truman – aged 81 – attended and was enrolled as the nation’s first Medicare beneficiary.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Healthcare | 1 Comment »