Democratic Platform Building: Healthcare

On Sunday, July 19, the MOMocrats cohosted a brunch with the Silicon Valley Moms Group after the BlogHer Conference in San Francisco.  We turned our social session into a working session, putting our collective knowledge together to create a position paper to be submitted to the Democratic National Committee for inclusion in the party platform.  This is the result of that meeting, and we invite our readers to comment and add ideas or ask questions.   We will submit this to the DNC on Sunday, July 27 as part of a nationwide series of community platform-building meetings.

ISSUE:  Healthcare

We believe that our nation’s system of healthcare is in need of reform.  We believe that it will take a unified effort, through government, private, non-profit, and citizen action to effectuate change in this area. 
In the coming years, the government must take a hard look at the following areas:

•    Providing affordable coverage to the uninsured and under-insured, including long-term disability care.
•    Ensuring access for all Americans to affordable, quality healthcare and preventive healthcare, by eliminating disparities in quality of care based on race or economic disadvantage and healthcare rationing.
•    Reforming and improving the existing care provided to Veterans, Seniors, the disabled and low-income individuals.
•    Alleviating the economic burden on local governments who now bear the brunt of costs not covered by state and federal agencies for the uninsured;
•    Eliminating corruption in public health agencies;

•    Promoting reproductive justice by:

o     keeping abortion safe and legal;
o    minimizing the need for abortions through better sex education and birth control;
o    providing pre-natal and post-natal care for all mothers
o    providing information and support for greater birth choices.
o    Eliminating the HHS rule changes that permit doctors to deny care to patients based on their beliefs about contraception.

•    Reducing the burden on small businesses through tax credits and incentives to provide healthcare for all employees.
•    Giving an equal emphasis on mental health, preventive healthcare, nutrition services, and further research on green vaccines and lower cost alternative medicines.
•    Giving consumers a means of assessing the quality of care.
•    Eliminating pre-existing conditions as a basis for denial of health insurance for all, not just group policy holders.
•    Better access to healthcare in schools, particularly in:

o    School health clinics
o    Sex Education
o    Health information

•   Improving care for terminally or chronically ill and services for family members of those who suffer from such illnesses.

Further, we challenge President Obama to sign the SCHIP Bill into law within the first 30 days of his administration, as a show of good faith and his commitment to changing America’s healthcare policies to cover the youngest among us.

Solutions

We believe that crisis in healthcare requires creative solutions that should not be dictated by pharmaceutical and insurance companies or by any single government agency.  We believe that moving forward, we will need to create strategic partnerships with corporations, non-profits, government agencies, and private citizen groups to come up with these solutions.

We believe that this should start by first analyzing successful programs, and providing a series of grants to replicate these programs nationwide.  We should highlight our successes, and focus on a positive message, putting successful programs in the spotlight and encouraging their growth. We need to look for successes in other countries and benchmark how we might replicate successful programs within the US, on a community level.

Any program we undertake to effectuate real change should have distinct and measurable goals.

We do not believe that raising taxes is the only way to pay for new programs or expansion.  We think that all levels of government (federal, state and local) should root out waste, eliminate programs that don’t work, and tap into grassroots organizing successes to find ways to mobilize people to act in their local communities and through online community-building activities. For example, sending members of Congress into war zones on fact-finding missions costs taxpayers millions of dollars, and increases the need for contractors to provide security details, and takes away members of the military from their mission. 

We believe that the Pentagon should undergo an extensive audit and military contractors should be under heavy scrutiny to determine how they add value to our efforts abroad.  Additionally, the government should make serious efforts to collect on fines imposed on Superfund sites and use those fines to pay for healthcare in the affected areas.

We believe that there are opportunities to improve healthcare for our children through the public school system, by increasing the number of school health clinics and adding health to the measure of a successful school.   Every school should have as a goal minimal healthcare coverage for every child, and provide information to parents who are uninsured or underinsured on how they can secure affordable healthcare for their children.  One source of information for such programs might be through pharmaceutical and healthcare provider community outreach programs.

As a nation, we need to look at long-term benefits of insuring all children versus the current system of expensive, ineffective emergency room care for uninsured children.  We believe that our individual health and wellness has a direct impact on our nation’s economy, and that by improving healthcare, we improve our fiscal, social, and physical well-being.

If you would like to submit your own "plank" to the Democratic Platform, click here to find out how to do and how to submit it.

Photo Credit:  Stephanie Himel-Nelson, copyright 2008, used with permission.  All Rights Reserved.
 

Comments

[PunditMom]

Bravo, ladies! I was so sorry that I had an early plane and had to miss this session, but I am fully on board with "our" health care policy.

[Lawyer Mama]

I'm still amazed that we all came up with that collectively. Wow! There are some awesome women in the MOMocrats and SV Moms Blog groups!

[Karen]

Bravo for you guys. This is a clear and ambitious document. I'm so sorry I missed the brunch--I had been so looking forward to it. My husband called me back early. Sigh.

Before you present this, you may want to make a teensy edit: As much as I want Barack Obama to become our next President, it may be a bit premature to be calling him "President Obama" in this document, if it is to be presented to the DNC tomorrow. Or maybe I'm just superstitious.

[cynematic]

What an incredible plank we've put together, collectively. I am so proud of what we accomplished together.

Something I just noticed--maybe we could add that we need our government to negotiate on *our* behalf, and not for pharmaceutical companies--so we citizens pay the lowest possible prices for high quality drugs that are available internationally.

I know seniors especially are hit hard by the cost of prescription medication.

[Nicole]

Actually (follow up from SV Moms) I think everything you said up there is great. Eliminate waste, ahh, in my dreams. Can we also propose that Elizabeth Edwards be put in charge?

[Alix]

This is a fabulous summary of our session, MOMocrats. I'd like to see something in there about giving "complementary" care an equal seat at the table.

You wouldn't believe the history of how the practitioners and the treatments are constantly being shunted off, first, because historically there were some true snake oil salesmen who, like the extreme Islamists, are the minority but can unfortunately taint the reputation of an entire group. Non-AMA practitioners were maligned to reduce competition with AMA doctors.

The main problem today is that no one can hold a patent on a natural substance, and therefore, no single company can afford to do the "gold standard" double-blind, placebo-controlled studies that big pharma can do.

Medical journals are so bought-off by big pharma that they run articles with abstracts that say natural remedies like glucosamine chondroitin don't work, when the study data included in the same article actually show they do. The NEJM published a study on echinacea showing it doesn't work either, but the researchers used the wrong species, the wrong part of the plant and too low a dose to be effective in the study.

There are so many big pharma payments to the AAP, American Cancer Society, etc. that they are incredibly compromised - that this is not transparent to us is tantamount to a crime, if not an outright crime.

Also, think about the USDA's Food Pyramid - it launched an epidemic of the diseases it was supposed to prevent - diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. Why is the agency in charge of food production also in charge of marketing it and saying what we "should" eat? Where are the checks and balances? The pyramid emphasizes the least nutritious refined grains. We should swap out the pictures of bread and pasta for candy canes. Sound like hyperbole? Think again. The glycemic index of our pasta and white bread and pretzels (that we all think are so healthy, thank you very little USDA) is HIGHER than the glycemic index of pure sugar. Yes, that slice of white bread has a glycemic index of 70, while pure sugar is 68.

And, in that vein, all type II diabetes is controllable through diet. All. The reason diabetics are told to eat so much grain is that when the sugar-blood glucose-insulin connection was made (at Stanford), we already knew that too much protein was bad for the kidneys and we thought (erroneously) that fat makes us fat, and MDs said, "well, we can't tell people not to eat carbs!" They only thought in terms of the 3 macronutrients. So, they just advised diabetics to eat carbs and medicate with glucophage and/or insulin - do you see the not-so-invisible hand of big pharma again? (Read Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories for more info on this saccharine piece of history.)

Anyway, if you want to know why we all voted for healthcare at the MOMocrats meeting, you need to look no further than the USDA food pyramid that has caused most of the chronic illness in this country. A recent gallup survey among 100,000 people showed that 51% of us have chronic illness. Sure, refined white flour is cheap so no one is starving, but now it accounts for 70% of the average diet. We are nutritionally starved and the whole population may as well be mainlining glucose.

Anyway, I could go on and on with more examples, but the fact that true non-toxic, medication-sparing, preventive care is shunted off is a crime against humanity, and that's the reason I'd like to see complementary care have an equal seat at the table. When it does, the population will slowly re-gain its inherent health. Worker productivity will be up, there will be fewer lost days from work, quality of life will go up, and, hey, guess what? National healthcare will be A LOT LESS EXPENSIVE.

Maybe the US could even move up the global charts showing that we are something like 47th in life expectancy and 42nd in infant mortality. Speaking of metrics - this is what I recommend watching. And, since making people live longer with disability and chronic illness is merely robbing Peter to pay Paul, we need to establish a new QUALITY of life index compared to people in other countries.