Psyche, Science, and Society

National Nurses United opposes Senate healthcare bill

Raw Story reports that the newly-formed National Nurses United has apparently come out in opposition to the Senate healthcare bill, claiming that it may actually make healthcare worse.

In a statement, the union has identified 10 major flaws in the bill:

1. The individual mandate forcing all those without coverage to buy private insurance, with insufficient cost controls on skyrocketing premiums and other insurance costs.
2. No challenge to insurance company monopolies, especially in the top 94 metropolitan areas where one or two companies dominate, severely limiting choice and competition.
3. An affordability mirage. Congressional Budget Office estimates say a family of four with a household income of $54,000 would be expected to pay 17 percent of their income, $9,000, on healthcare exposing too many families to grave financial risk.
4. The excise tax on comprehensive insurance plans which will encourage employers to reduce benefits, shift more costs to employees, promote proliferation of high-deductible plans, and lead to more self-rationing of care and medical bankruptcies, especially as more plans are subject to the tax every year due to the lack of adequate price controls. A Towers-Perrin survey in September found 30 percent of employers said they would reduce employment if their health costs go up, 86 percent said they’d pass the higher costs to their employees.
5. Major loopholes in the insurance reforms that promise bans on exclusion for pre-existing conditions, and no cancellations for sickness. The loopholes include:
   • Provisions permitting insurers and companies to more than double charges to employees who fail “wellness” programs because they have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol readings, or other medical conditions.
   • Insurers are permitted to sell policies “across state lines”, exempting patient protections passed in other states. Insurers will thus set up in the least regulated states in a race to the bottom threatening public protections won by consumers in various states.
   • Insurers can charge four times more based on age plus more for certain conditions, and continue to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees.
   • Insurers may continue to rescind policies for “fraud or intentional misrepresentation” – the main pretext insurance companies now use to cancel coverage.
6. Minimal oversight on insurance denials of care; a report by the California Nurses Association/NNOC in September found that six of California’s largest insurers have rejected more than one-fifth of all claims since 2002.
7. Inadequate limits on drug prices, especially after Senate rejection of an amendment, to protect a White House deal with pharmaceutical giants, allowing pharmacies and wholesalers to import lower-cost drugs.
8. New burdens for our public safety net. With a shortage of primary care physicians and a continuing fiscal crisis at the state and local level, public hospitals and clinics will be a dumping ground for those the private system doesn’t want.
9. Reduced reproductive rights for women.
10. No single standard of care. Our multi-tiered system remains with access to care still determined by ability to pay. Nothing changes in basic structure of the system; healthcare remains a privilege, not a right.

Here is the Raw Story article:

Nurses explain how health bill could make crisis worse
‘Unchecked influence of health industry lobbyists’ means bill could be weakened in the future, union’s reps say

By Daniel Tencer

The newly-formed nurses’ “mega-union” has issued a scathing indictment of the Senate health bill expected to be voted on this week, calling it a “deeply flawed” piece of legislation that could make the US health care system’s problems worse.

National Nurses United, the US’s largest nurses’ union since it was formed earlier this month, issued a statement Monday implying that it doesn’t support the health care reform bill championed by the White House and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

“It is tragic to see the promise from Washington this year for genuine, comprehensive reform ground down to a seriously flawed bill that could actually exacerbate the health care crisis and financial insecurity for American families, and that cedes far too much additional power to the tyranny of a callous insurance industry,” said NNU co-president Karen Higgins, a registered nurse.

The nurses’ statement implied that it would be better if Congress passed no reform legislation, rather than the current proposed bill. NNU co-president Deborah Burger dismissed arguments that the bill can be improved in the future, and that it marks the start of a comprehensive overhaul of the US health care system.

“Those wishful statements ignore the reality that much of the expanded coverage is based on forced purchase of private insurance without effective controls on industry pricing practices or real competition and gaping loopholes in the insurance reforms,” said Burger.

And Jean Ross, another NNU co-president, said it’s likelier that the health care bill will be weakened, rather than strengthened, in the coming years, “due to the unchecked influence of the health care industry lobbyists and the lessons of this year in which all the compromises have been made to the right.”

The NNU’s statement lists what it sees as 10 major flaws with the bill, including the bill’s mandate requiring individuals to purchase health insurance, without doing enough to reduce insurance costs; no limitations on health insurance monopolies in certain states and cities; and “reduced reproductive rights for women.”

The NNU also points to little-discussed provisions in the bill it says put the lie to the idea that the bill will stop insurance companies from canceling policies on account of pre-existing conditions.

– Provisions permitting insurers and companies to more than double charges to employees who fail “wellness” programs because they have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol readings, or other medical conditions.

– Insurers are permitted to sell policies “across state lines”, exempting patient protections passed in other states. Insurers will thus set up in the least regulated states in a race to the bottom threatening public protections won by consumers in various states.

– Insurers can charge four times more based on age plus more for certain conditions, and continue to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees.

– Insurers may continue to rescind policies for “fraud or intentional misrepresentation” – the main pretext insurance companies now use to cancel coverage.

National Nurses United is a member of the umbrella labor group AFL-CIO. Last week, the AFL-CIO’s president, Richard Trumka, called the Senate health bill “inadequate and too tilted toward the insurance industry.” The NNU’s criticism this week indicates that the labor movement is lining up against the Senate version of the health bill, which — unlike the House version — doesn’t include any sort of public option.

Earlier this month, as the union was being formed, NNU Co-President Burger criticized the health bill — even before the Medicare buy-in was removed.

“What we’ve got now isn’t really health care reform, it’s a reshuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic as far as our patients are concerned, and we’re going to make sure that we … have universal health care that is truly universal and has eliminated the insurance companies,” she told Reuters.

December 22nd, 2009

Britain used waterboarding in Northern Ireland after promising to stop torture

From Britain comes the news that the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the former Northern Ireland police force, used “waterboarding” against suspects in the 1970s. Note that this was after the British government had promised to stop using five other techniques — hooding, sleep deprivation, starvation and the use of stress positions and noise  — that had been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights. Note also that the Guardian, unlike the US press when describing the same techniques when they are used by US forces,  is not afraid to call these “torture” techniques:

Ted Heath, banned five other notorious torture methods which were subsequently condemned by the European court of human rights as being inhuman and degrading. [Emphasis added.]

Given that waterboarding was used after the Prime Minister promised to stop using other torture techniques serves as a cautionary note. We should never trust governments when they promise to cease abuses unless there is independent verification.

As Daurius Rejali has pointed out so clearly, so-called “clean torture techniques” are, alas, emblematic of democracies, and of authoritarian regimes subject to human rights monitoring. We have yet to figure out how to truly end the use of such techniques. Surely, however, accountability for past use is one step along the way.

The full article:

British Army ‘waterboarded’ suspects in 70s
Evidence casts doubt on guilt of man sentenced to hang for killing soldier

By Ian Cobain

Evidence that the British army subjected prisoners in Northern Ireland to waterboarding during interrogations in the 1970s is emerging after one of the alleged victims launched an appeal against his conviction for murder.

Liam Holden became the last person in the United Kingdom to be sentenced to hang after being convicted in 1973 of the murder of a soldier, largely on the basis of an unsigned confession. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he spent 17 years behind bars.

The jury did not believe Holden’s insistence that he made the confession only because he had been held down by members of the Parachute Regiment, whom he says placed a towel over his face before pouring water from a bucket over his nose and mouth, giving him the impression that he was drowning.

But now the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has referred Holden’s case to the court of appeal in Belfast after unearthing new evidence, and because of doubts about “the admissibility and reliability” of his confession. The commission says it believes “there is a real possibility” his conviction will be quashed. After a preliminary hearing earlier this month, Holden’s appeal was adjourned to the new year.

However, the account that Holden gave at his trial is remarkably similar to those that have emerged since the CIA began using waterboarding techniques while interrogating al-Qaida suspects during the so-called war on terror.

Lawyers who have taken up his case have identified a second man who gave a similar account of being waterboarded after being arrested by detectives of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and questioned about the murder of a police constable. In a statement to a doctor in April 1978, this man said officers had put a towel over his face and poured water over his nose and mouth, and that “this was frightening and was repeated on a number of occasions”. He was eventually released without charge. The CCRC also has a statement taken from a third man who says he was waterboarded by the British army in the early 70s.

All of the allegations of waterboarding come from a period after March 1972, when the then prime minister, Ted Heath, banned five other notorious torture methods which were subsequently condemned by the European court of human rights as being inhuman and degrading.

Holden, a Roman Catholic, was 19 and a chef when he was detained during a raid by soldiers of the Parachute Regiment on his parents’ home in the Ballymurphy area of west Belfast in October 1972. Apparently acting on a tipoff from an informer, the soldiers accused Holden of being the sniper who, a month earlier, had shot dead Private Frank Bell of the regiment’s 2nd Battalion. Bell had just turned 18 and had joined the regiment six weeks earlier. He was the 100th British soldier to die in Northern Ireland that year.

When Holden came to trial in April 1973 he told the jury he had been playing cards with his brother and two friends in a public place at the time Bell was shot. He said that after being arrested in his bed the soldiers had taken him to their base on Black Mountain, west of Belfast, where he was beaten, burned with a cigarette lighter, hooded and threatened with execution.

Holden also gave a detailed account of being waterboarded, although he did not use that term. In a court report published the following day, the Belfast Telegraph said the defendant told the jury that he had been pushed into a cubicle where he was held down by six men, that a towel was placed over his head, and that water was then poured slowly over his face from a bucket. “It nearly put me unconscious,” Holden was quoted as saying. “It nearly drowned me and stopped me from breathing. This went on for a minute.” A short while later he was subjected to the same treatment again, he said.

A sergeant from the Parachute Regiment and a British army captain told the court that Holden had confessed to the shooting during an “interview”. The unnamed sergeant said Holden had wanted to confess to the murder because “he wanted to get it off his chest”, while the officer said the teenager had told him that he had left the IRA a short while later because he felt such remorse.

The jury took less than 75 minutes to convict Holden of capital murder, and the judge, Sir Robert Lowry, told him: “The sentence of the court is that you will suffer death in the manner authorised by law.” The then Northern Ireland secretary, William Whitelaw, commuted the sentence the following month, and the death penalty was abolished in Northern Ireland shortly afterwards. Holden did not appeal, however, with relatives saying at the time that he believed his trial had been “rigged” and a “farce”.

He was eventually released from prison in 1989.

Holden’s solicitor, Patricia Coyle, said: “At trial Mr Holden gave compelling evidence that the alleged confession was obtained by the army using water torture. He spent 17 years in jail. He is looking forward to the court hearing his appeal.”

The new evidence that the CCRC has submitted to the court of appeal is being kept secret. The CCRC is unwilling to discuss this material, other than to say that it has not yet been disclosed at the request of the public body from which it was obtained. Holden’s lawyers are now asking for it to be disclosed.

The Ministry of Defence said it was unable to confirm whether British service personnel had received instruction in waterboarding techniques as part of their counterinterrogation training at that time, and it would not disclose whether personnel currently receive such instruction “for reasons of operational security”.

There is evidence that such instruction has been given, however. In 2005 Rod Richard, the former Welsh Office minister, told a Welsh newspaper that he had been waterboarded during his counterinterrogation training as a Royal Marines officer in the late 60s.

The Guardian has spoken to a former Royal Marines officer who says that he and his fellow officers and their men were all waterboarded at the end of their escape and evasion training at Lympstone, Devon, in the late 60s and early 70s. “You were tied to a chair and they would tip you over on your back, put a towel over your face and pour water over you. I can’t recall what we called it – not waterboarding – but it produced a drowning sensation and it was pretty unpleasant.”

Seven months before Holden was detained by British soldiers, the Heath government had publicly repudiated and banned five “interrogation techniques”. RUC officers had learned the techniques – hooding, sleep deprivation, starvation and the use of stress positions and noise – from British military intelligence officers, but Heath assured the Commons that they “will not be used in future as an aid to interrogation”.

There were subsequently unconfirmed allegations that the British army had experimented with other methods of torture, including electric shocks, and the use of drugs. Towards the end of the decade, Amnesty International was reporting that terrorism suspects were again being mistreated, this time by RUC detectives, “with sufficient frequency to warrant the establishment of a public inquiry”.

A number of Republican former prisoners have told the Guardian that waterboarding was used as a form of punishment, as well as a means of extracting confessions.

December 22nd, 2009

Huffington: Stop the special interest healthcare bill

Ariana Huffington describes the #1 reason she hopes the healthcare bill is defeated. I am glad she brought up the No child Left Behind debacle as I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently as I’ve tried to figure out whether I would vote for or against this bill, if I had a vote. I still haven’t decided. but I do know that, regardless of the vote, I’d feel like vomiting, just as I do when I hear Obama, Axelrod, and other figures describe this massive gift to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries as a great victory for you and me:

The Senate Health Care Bill: Leave No Special Interest Behind

By Ariana Huffington

With Monday morning’s 1 a.m. 60-40 vote, the Senate’s health care bill took another step towards passage, prompting a fresh round of public celebrations. “I think it’s very exciting,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told HuffPost. “It’s a big day.”

Even many of those with serious reservations about the bill were slipping on their party hats. “Make no mistake about it,” said SEIU president Andy Stern, “for working Americans, this vote signals progress.”

And Paul Krugman, while calling the legislation “a seriously flawed bill we’ll spend years if not decades fixing,” applauded it as “an awesome achievement.”

This typifies the current thinking of the “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” crowd. Unfortunately, there are three faulty premises at work in this line of reasoning. First, that those who oppose the bill do so because it’s not perfect (as opposed to because it’s a hot health care mess). Second, that the bill is, well, good (as opposed to a total victory for Pharma and the insurance industry — witness the spectacular spike in health care stocks following Monday’s vote).

Third is the premise that this is as good a bill as we can get right now, and we can always go back and improve it later.

It doesn’t work that way. We heard the same kinds of sentiments about No Child Left Behind when it passed in 2001. Backers on both sides of the aisle had problems with it, but both sides celebrated it as a major step forward — and promised to make it better in the future.

“The agreement we reached reflects the best thinking of both sides,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman.

“This was a reform bill. We can’t have reform without resources, and that will be the next step,” said Sen. Tom Daschle.

“This is a good bill… And there are going to be many additional steps that will be necessary along the way, but all of us are committed to following in those steps,” said Sen. Ted Kennedy, the primary Democratic co-sponsor of the bill.

But despite the widespread commitment to taking the “many additional steps” needed, the steps were never taken, the resources were never allocated, the bill was never improved, and, indeed, is now generally regarded as a disaster (or, as Bill Clinton put it last year, “a train wreck”).

In an ominous sign of things to come, Vicki Reggie Kennedy, Sen. Kennedy’s widow, made many of the same arguments that were used in support of No Child Left Behind in her Washington Post op-ed promoting passage of the current health care bill.

It’s a moving piece of writing — and nobody doubts her late husband’s heartfelt dedication to health care reform. But nobody doubted his dedication to education reform, either.

If the miserable Senate health care bill becomes the law of the land, it’s only going to encourage the preservation of a hideously broken system. Just how broken the system is is summed up in the fate of Byron Dorgan’s drug re-importation amendment.

This is an idea that Obama co-sponsored when he was in the Senate and unequivocally championed on the campaign trail: “We’ll allow the safe re-importation of low-cost drugs from countries like Canada.”

But when Dorgan introduced an amendment that would do just that, the White House, sticking to the deal it made with the pharmaceutical industry, lobbied against it — and the commissioner of the supposedly non-political FDA just happened to release a letter citing “significant safety concerns” about all those dangerous drugs from Canada. Big Pharma’s many congressional lackeys trumpeted the letter and the amendment was killed.

But that didn’t stop David Axelrod from insisting in an interview with John King this weekend that “the president supports safe re-importation of drugs into this country. There’s no reason why Americans should pay a premium for the pharmaceuticals that people in other countries pay less for.”

No reason other than our broken system surrendering to the special interests.

From start to finish, the insurance and drug industries — and their army of lobbyists — had control over the process that resulted in a bill that is reform in name only. The postmortems of how they pulled it off have already begun. On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune published an exhaustive front-page analysis by Northwestern University’s Medill News Service and the Center for Responsive Politics of how it was done. The main culprit: “a revolving door between Capitol Hill staffers and lobbying jobs for companies with a stake in health care legislation.”

The study found that 13 former congressmen and 166 Congressional staffers were actively engaged in lobbying their former colleagues on the bill. The companies they were working for — some 338 of them — spent $635 million on lobbying. It was money extremely well spent — delivering a bill that, by forcing people to buy a shoddy product in a market with no real competition, enshrines into law the public subsidy of private profit.

As we approach the end of Obama’s first year in office, this public subsidizing of private profit is becoming something of a habit. It is, after all, exactly what the White House did with the banks. Just as he did with insurance companies, Obama talked tough to the bankers in public but, when push came to shove, he ended up shoving public money onto their privately-held balance sheets.

This is not just bad policy, it’s bad politics.

Sharp-eyed opponents are already seizing on the opportunity to rebrand Obama and the Democrats as the party beholden to special interests.

Sunday night, just before the post-midnight vote was taken, John McCain took to the Senate floor and, hearkening back to his days as a crusader for campaign finance reform, lambasted Obama and the Democrats’ “negotiations with the special interests,” adding: “We should have set up a tent out in front and put Persian rugs in front of it. That’s the way that this has been conducted. So the special interests were taken care of, then we had to take care of special senators.”

This kind of populist rhetoric resonates with voters across the board, including independents. If Democrats cede this turf by celebrating a bill that is a victory for special interests and special senators, look for a lot more of this kind of rhetoric in the run-up to 2010.

President Bush brought us preemptive war. President Obama’s specialty seems to be preemptive compromise. He gave the farm away to Pharma, and then had to keep on giving when Lieberman, Nelson, and the other industry-backed Senators came calling.

There are many reasons for hoping the current Senate bill doesn’t become law. But the biggest reason of all is the desperate need for a DC pattern interrupt. The desperate need to draw a line in the sand against the continued domination of our democracy — and the continued undermining of the public interest — by special interests.

December 22nd, 2009

Public loves public option, Medicare buy-in, hates Senate-Obama bill

A new poll shows yet again that the Senate-Obama bill is very unpopular, while the dropped public option and Medicare buy-in are wildly popular. Fifty percent of Republicans support the Medicare buy-in. No wonder Obama did nothing to pass the public option:

Poll: Public Still Doesn’t Like Health Care Bill — And Still Like Public Option, Medicare Buy-In

By Eric Kleefeld

A new Quinnipiac poll finds that a large majority of Americans continue to oppose the health care bill — and that two policies that have been dropped, the public option or the Medicare buy-in, which were both very popular.

The poll finds 53% of respondents saying they mostly disapprove of the health care plan in Congress, to only 36% who approve. From the party internals, support is at 64%-22% among Democrats, 10%-83% among Republicans, and 30%-58% among independents.

The now-departed public option, however, is supported by a 56%-38% majority, including a 54%-41% margin among independents. Also, the Medicare buy-in for Americans ages 55-64 was supported by 64%-30%, including 57%-36% among independents and even a 50%-44% margin among Republicans.

The poll also finds that only 31% agree both that the President and Congress must take on health care reform now and support the current proposals. Another 28% want reform now but don’t support the current proposals (a number spread pretty evenly across all partisan sub-samples), while 36% don’t think reform should be taken on now.

From the pollster’s analysis: “While the Senate leadership reportedly has the votes to pass a health care overhaul plan this week, outside the Beltway there appears to be weak support, both to what voters understand as the plan, and the need to pass that plan now.”

December 22nd, 2009