Home

A federally-registered independent political party

Follow the CEC on Facebook Follow @cecaustralia on Twitter Follow the CEC on Google +


Follow the CEC on Soundcloud












Kill the HMOs, Save Lives! Resume the Hill-Burton Hospital Program, Save the Nation!

May 14, 2009 (LPAC)—Yesterday's third and last of the Senate Roundtables on Health Care Reform, plus the March-April White House Forums on the same theme, are a prescription for Nazi-medicine, under the pretext of "comprehensive health care reform" to deny medical treatment, while preserving the looting of the health care system by Health Maintenance Organization financial circles. The thinking and practices of the 28-year HMO-era must be stopped cold.

In 2000, Lyndon LaRouche launched a campaign, with a national 16-page dossier, titled, "Ban the HMOs Now! Before They Get You and Yours," providing draft legislation to revoke the HMO enabling acts. Now it is a matter of life and death for the nation.

On Dec. 29, 1973, President Richard Nixon signed into law the Health Maintenance Organization and Resources Development Act, which for the first time authorized, and encouraged, HMOs and practices known as "managed care," as the law of the land. Over the ensuing decades, this policy undermined the entire U.S. hospital and medical care delivery system, and directly and indirectly caused injury and death to millions. During the process, select private interests have made multitrillion-dollar profits out of the destructive "managed care" system.

Today, the United States has over 150 million people enrolled in various forms of HMOs, PPOs, or other kind of managed care, and also a record number of 46-50 millions citizens with no health insurance at all. Diseases which had been all but conquered, including tuberculosis, are on the come-back, and new diseases spreading. Hospitals are closing at crisis rates, and state and local communities are scrambling to keep them open.

In 1980, there were 9.1 million Americans enrolled in HMOs. In 1990, 35.1 million. By 2000, over 100 million were in managed-care plans. Fewer than a dozen select companies now constitute the private insurance "market," with sometimes only two companies dominating an entire state. They offer all kinds of "managed" care, based on administering systems on how and what to deny to people.   Aetna Inc., for example, by 2000, became the largest U.S. managed-care company, with 22 million members at that time—one in every 10 Americans. It then changed its structure several times, still remaining a top player in the lucrative market for delimiting care. Top Aetna officials today are participating directly and prominently in the White House and Congressional "reform" discussions. Little wonder that no attention at all is allowed to be given to the infrastructure crisis, nor rolling back the HMO system itself.   Prior to the 1973 HMO-enabling act, the U.S. health insurance system consisted of the Federal programs of Medicare (for the elderly), Medicaid (for the poor)—enacted in 1965, plus a wide range of non-profit coverage by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield system and other agencies, plus charities, local and state government plans, and an array of private insurance firms. All these relied on provision of care through the national infrastructure of hospital-systems, which were at the time being built up to modern, Federally-mandated ratios of beds-per-thousand and related ratios of modern care, under the 1946 Hospital Survey and Construction Act (known as "Hill-Burton", for its bi-partisan sponsors, Senators Lister Hill, D-Alabama, and Harold Burton, R-Ohio).

After 1973, all this was taken down. The number of community hospitals in the U.S. fell from nearly 7,000 in the mid-1970s, down to barely 5,000 in 1999, and today, stands at 4,897. The ratio of licensed hospital beds per 1,000 citizens has dropped from 4.5 in the 1970s, down to 3 today as a national average. Hundreds of counties have seen their one public hospital close. The inventory of community hospital beds nationally has fallen from 1.5 million in the 1970s, down to below 830,000. The Veterans Administration hospital system likewise—despite the Iraq and Afghan warfare, has been downsized. The current U.S. hospital base cannot even cope with the "normal" yearly influenza season, let alone the pandemic threat of the new A/H1N1.

Along with the drop in basic ratios of beds-per-thousand residents, has been a decline in diagnostic equipment, public health programs, and a host of other services associated with a hospital-centered system. In the the 1970s, there were over 200 public health workers per 100,000 residents; by 2000, this had fallen to 156. Since then, the situation has worsened, despite the experience with SARS, the Katrina disaster, and impending flu pandemic.


Citizens Electoral Council © 2016
Best viewed at 1024x768.
Please provide technical feedback to webadmin@cecaust.com.au
All electoral content is authorised by National Secretary, Craig Isherwood, 595 Sydney Rd, Coburg VIC 3058.