Health Care

"Patients' Rights?" Some Never Get the Chance to Be a Patient

by Tim Foley

categories: Enemies Of Reform, The Uninsured And Underinsured

Published May 26, 2009 @ 10:43PM PT

Frank Luntz, in his now-infamous Borg-like memo on how to defeat health care reform, stressed that opponents needed to stress that they understood there really was a health care crisis in this country even as they worked to undermine the solution in Congress.  Many have translated that as “Use the word ‘patient’ as often as possible.”  It’s ironic that so many who are so invested in defeating some or all of the comprehensive reform legislation being debated in Congress claim to be speaking for patients.  In effect, by fighting reform in the name of a semi-fictionalized “patient,” they’re continuing to prevent many Americans from ever becoming one.

I suppose it makes sense at first glance – “patient” is the great leveler.  Most of us are not patients day-to-day, but all of us can imagine a time when we’ll need care, and will wonder if the proposed changes to health care will help us or hurt us.

So it is that Rick “My hospitals were forced to pay the largest Medicaid fraud settlement in history and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” Scott has his Conservatives for Patients Rights, with its planned expose on the evils of health care in Canada and the U.K.  I’m not sure Rick has noticed – he knows we’re trying to reform health care in America, right?  I’m not even going to ask if he realizes how consistently British health care outperforms the American health care system in quality indicators, wicked scary anecdotes notwithstanding.  I’m sure actually making us healthier is irrelevant when it comes to the making sure we spend still more on skyrocketing costs…

Joining them, we now have Patients United Now.  Sounds like a patient advocate group, or possibly a labor union, right?  Nope.  They’re sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, the same group that helped finance those teabag parties.  So we’ve got both the PR agency behind “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” (CPR) and the lobbyists and power players who drummed up support for the teabag parties (PUN) both claiming the mantle of the patient.  But if you’re thinking this new group might actually be vocal about how we only receive the recommended preventative care 50% of the time in the U.S. (according to a RAND study), you’re mistaken.  Instead, it’s more smack talk about Canada and the U.K., and a complete media blackout on the dozens of other countries with high performing national health care systems.  (There are only three countries in the Western world, right?)

I’ve already talked about the Partnership to Improve Patient Care which, as noted, is largely funded by Big Pharma and dedicated to giving the industry a veto over the comparative effectiveness research designed to test their products.  And of course, there’s the Patient’s Choice Act, a bill that has no chance of passing itself and is largely being offered in the attempt to water down the most patient-empowering aspects of the Obama-Baucus plan, including having a choice of private insurance or a public health insurance option.

These groups all claim to have patients’ interests at heart.  They all intend to rebut part or all of the legislation for comprehensive health care reform.  As a direct result, they’ll continue to keep some portion of the over 50 million Americans who are likely to be uninsured at this moment from every getting to that doctor’s office for that check-up, getting that medication, or having help managing a serious chronic condition – all because they cannot afford to pay for it, don’t have insurance offered by their employer, and have no options to get the care they need.  Chico David RN had a post on Daily Kos, filled with stories of people who simply didn’t get the chance to become a patient and to get the care they need.  We talk in the abstract of the estimated 20,000 in this country – not Canada, not the U.K., but right here in the United States of America – who die each year because they did not have access to our health care system.  But each one of those 20,000 is its own unique tragedy, like this one:

I had a good friend in New Mexico who developed a brain tumor. On her doctor's recommendation, she flew to San Francisco where gamma knife surgery was being done regularly at the University of California San Francisco medical center. She was told that the procedure could get the whole tumor but she had to act within three months or the growth would be too invasive. Her health insurance denied her the surgery claiming it was "experimental". By the time I found out about my friend's condition, she was desperate but resigned to her fate. I urged her to contact the NM Commissioner of Insurance whose office is famous for "encouraging" insurance companies to cooperate. She did that and the commissioner made the call. The company agreed to pay for the surgery but it was, you guessed it, too late. My friend, whom the New Mexico Navajo and Pueblo people would call a valuable person, was lost.

So as you’re watching more and more ads and more and Web site crop up that lay claim to speaking on behalf of patients, ask yourself this critical question:  what are they doing to help those of us who, through a stroke of economic or bodily misfortune, may never get the chance to be a patient?

(Photo credit:  ^i^heavensdarkangel2 on Flickr.)