Take a Deep Breath and Read

That’s the opening of Steve Lopez’s column in Wednesday’s paper. It’s been emailed to me by four different people, so I finally managed to read it. I’ve printed the opening below, but be sure to read the whole thing. Then let’s get more agressive at holding these candidates running around Iowa accountable for this issue.

Here’s the heart of what Lopez writes:

I was on my way to the Encino home of a 10-year-old boy named Preston, but I could have gone in any direction for the same kind of story.

Ever since I wrote a few years ago about a San Gabriel Valley woman who had breast cancer and couldn’t get health insurance (her family resorted to a yard sale to pay her medical bills), I’ve gotten a steady trickle of similar tales. Last week, I had one involving an oncologist whose cancer treatment is not being covered because his health insurance company says his illness is a pre-existing condition.

Preston doesn’t have cancer, but he was born with cystic fibrosis. And the cost of the medicine that keeps him breathing just shot up like a rocket, thanks to an insurance company decision I’m still trying to decipher.

I’ll get to the details in a moment, but first, some political context.

The last place to expect a workable healthcare reform proposal is in a presidential campaign, and this one will be no exception in the end. There’s way too much money riding on keeping things as they are.

Here in California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez would have you believe they stepped into the leadership void with last month’s health insurance-for-all proposal.

But all they’ve done is come up with a shaky idea to require nearly everyone to buy medical insurance from the same companies we’ve all become so fed up with. Employers and hospitals would have to pick up part of the tab, and there might be a new tax on cigarettes to provide some support. But even if the vague and dubious funding proposals come to pass, there would be little or nothing in the way of additional controls on insurance companies in terms of what they cover or what they charge.

State Sen. Sheila Kuehl, one of the legislature’s strongest advocates of healthcare reform, eviscerated the Schwarzenegger-Nuñez package in a Dec. 17 analysis you can read on her website . She said if it came to pass, and insurance companies were forced to take on everyone who is now uninsured, premiums for the rest of us would balloon.

“And it seems to me that they will probably have to resort to more and more denials of care,” said Kuehl. Her single-payer proposal would take insurance companies and their profit machines out of the equation, but it has languished for all the predictable reasons, including the huge influence of the insurance lobby.

I began telling Kuehl about Preston and his family’s issues with their insurer, but halfway through I stopped myself, figuring she’s heard hundreds of similar stories.

“No,” she said. “It’s in the thousands.”