Killer Politics by Ed Schultz Page B

proposed legislation under consideration as this book went to press, Americans will no longer be denied coverage, but what we don’t know is how high rates will go. Can we expect real competition? Will we finally have a country in which getting sick doesn’t mean financial ruin? Folks, it’s too early to tell.
    According to a Harvard and Ohio University study in 2007, medical-related expenses triggered almost two thirds of all bankruptcies in the United States that year, a 50 percent increase from 2001. “Our findings are frightening. Unless you’re Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy,” lead author Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said in a news release.
    Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and coauthor of the Harvard and Ohio University study, said, “Only single-payer national health insurance can make universal, comprehensive coverage affordable by saving the hundreds of billions we now waste on insurance overhead and bureaucracy.”
    Sadly, as the health care debate unfolded, we could see that most Republicans and some Democrats—enough to screw things up—were more concerned with the health of health insurance companies than they were about American workers.
    Here was the response of Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) in a town hall meeting after hearing about a woman who had recently lost her job and her insurance and then discovered that she had stomach cancer: He encouraged her to look to “existing government programs” or “charitable organizations.” Maybe she could get a tin cup and beg on the streets.
    Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) said sarcastically during a speech on the House floor, “Don’t get sick. If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly.” The failure of health care reform to cover everyone does kill, and the sad thing about the new health care legislation is that it will not cover some 23 million Americans.
    A family that falls between the cracks and is living hand to mouth in a tough economy can’t afford cancer screening. Too many people wait too long for treatment because they cannot afford it. How many victims of our for-profit health care system will we accept before we finally do the right thing and embrace universal care?
    Think about this: During the past eight years, there’s been about a 428 percent increase in profits for the insurance industry giants, while middle-class families have been getting financially butchered—and the Republicans want to blame big government!
    This is not America.
    This is not the country I grew up in.
    Fairness left the building with Elvis.
    SO MANY PILLS, SO MANY DOLLARS
    Let’s take a look at the whole way we approach pharmaceuticals. Lobbyists have fixed the game against American consumers. Nowhere is the fix more blatant than in the Bush Medicare prescription plan for seniors.The law is specifically written to deny the government the right to negotiate prices. Tell me, is that capitalism or theft?
    Pharmaceutical prices are much higher in America than around the world because American drug companies charge what they can get away with—and they can get away with a lot. In fact, with health care legislation brewing, drugmakers raised their prices more than 9 percent in 2009, according to the New York Times . In that story, Harvard health economist Joseph P. Newhouse said he found a similar pattern of unusual price increases after Congress added drug benefits to Medicare: “Just as the program was taking effect in 2006, the drug industry raised prices by the widest margin in a half-dozen years.”
    In countries with some kind of socialized medicine, such as Canada, the government negotiates drug prices. Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) offered an amendment to the health care bill to allow