Rep. Keith Ellison and Sen. John Marty speak at health care reform forum

BY KIP SULLIVAN

On Saturday, Feb. 21, 50 to 60 people drove through four inches of freshly fallen snow to hear Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Sen. John Marty
(DFL-Roseville) explain single-payer legislation pending in Congress and the
Minnesota Legislature. The forum took place at the Communication Workers of
America headquarters on Lake Street.

Sen. Marty began his presentation saying, “The easiest way to explain single-payer is to compare it to other public services like police and fire
protection. If you go home after this forum and find your house is being burglarized, you’re going to call the police. Are the police going to ask
you if you have burglary insurance? Of course not.”

He briefly explained the Minnesota Health Plan (MHP), a program that his
bill (SF 118/HF 135) would create. It would include all Minnesota residents, cover all necessary medical services, and maximize our choice of doctor. “There would be no preexisting condition exclusions,” he said. “For some insurance companies, being a woman is a preexisting condition.” He said one of the ways the MHP would lower administrative costs would be to give budgets to the state’s 134 hospitals. To illustrate how this saves money, he asked the audience to imagine what our schools would be like if we asked teachers to keep track of every expenditure on a per-student basis the way we ask hospitals to keep track of every little expenditure on a per-patient basis. “Do we ask teachers to keep track of every crayon students use so we can bill their insurance company? Do we ask them to report how much time they spent with this student and how much with that one? If we did that our teachers would be spending half their time on administration.”

Sen. Marty observed that SF 118 has now passed two committees in the Senate and currently has 28 co-authors in the Senate (nearly half the 67 members of the Senate) while nearly one-third of the House of Representatives has co-authored the companion bill (HF 135).

Rep. Ellison began his talk making the same point Sen. Marty had just made—that HR 676, the national single-payer bill, has 94 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives (it had 93 when the last session of Congress ended
in December). “But the House leadership has not yet seen fit to give it a hearing,” he said. “We need maximum pressure on Congress if we’re going to get this bill heard,” he said. “We need to look outside our box of friends for support,” he observed. To illustrate why business needs single-payer, Rep. Ellison said, “The best thing we could do for General Motors is give them a single-payer system.” The audience laughed and applauded.

Rep. Ellison noted that when he is knocking on doors, he finds the health care crisis is constantly on people’s minds.  “Other issues, like the Iraq war and now the economy, might be the issue you hear about the most, but you
always hear about the cost of health care,” he said. “It’s the political issue that never goes away.”

Kip Sullivan sits on the steering committee of the Minnesota chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program.

Kip Sullivan, health systems analyst for the Greater Minnesota Health Care Coalition and author of “The Health Care Mess,” will speak on the American health care reform debate at Valley Comm-unity Presbyterian Church, 3100 Lilac Drive North, Golden Valley, at 6:45 p.m., Thursday, March 26. Sponsored by NW Neighbors for Peace. Free and open to the public. For more information email NWN4P@yahoo.com.