Your Congressional Representatives who voted to Abolish Medicare aka The Ryan Plan

Erratum: In the original posting below, I stated that under the Ryan plan, seniors would receive $6,000 voucher to help with purchasing insurance. This is incorrect. The correct figure is $8,000 for the year or roughly $666 per month to pay your premiums, co-pays and pharmacy charges.

Link to full map of all Congressional reps who voted on the Ryan plan below. List of California reps who voted to abolish Medicare at bottom of posting.

As this Foundation has noted before, Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan calls for abolishing Medicare to all those under the age of 55 and handing your taxpayer money over to private corporations. What happens to all the money you have been paying into Medicare for the past 30+ years of your working lives? Answer is you get nothing in return.

This Foundation began in part because of the way my husband, who has Progressive-Relapsing Multiple Sclerosis, was treated by his insurance carrier, CIGNA, a private, for-profit corporation with a long and terrible history of denying claims to their sick, premium paying customers–one such denial resulted in the death of 17 year old Nataline Sarkisyan.

Rep. Ryan and all his GOP friends want to hand you a voucher for $6,000 and tell you to go and find a company, like CIGNA, who will insure you at the age of 65, for that amount of money–while at the same time they, the GOP, are trying to undo the Affordable Care Act that will prevent insurance companies from denying your claims. Doesn’t make one bit of sense, does it?

If you have Multiple Sclerosis or any other life-altering disease, you know how far $6,000 will get you. If you have MS, that’s the cost of your disease modifying drugs for just one month!

Call your representative if they voted to abolish Medicare. Tell them forget trying to get re-elected since they don’t seem to be serving the American public but their corporate paymasters instead. Contact information is embedded in each link and the full map of how Congress voted can be found at the New York Times. It’s time this country went to a single payer system. Medicare for Everyone, cradle to grave.

Call and be heard. It’s your money that pays for Medicare and pays for Congressional salaries. Remember, they work for us.

Your California Congressional Representatives who voted to abolish Medicare and hand your money over to private corporations:

1.  Rep. Herger, Walter [R-CA2] voted to abolish Medicare.

2.  Rep. Lungren, Daniel [R-CA3] voted to abolish Medicare.

3.  Rep. McClintock, Tom [R-CA4] voted to abolish Medicare.

4.  Rep. Denham, Jeff [R-CA19] voted to abolish Medicare.

5.  Rep. Nunes, Devin [R-CA21] voted to abolish Medicare.

6.  Rep. McCarthy, Kevin [R-CA22] voted to abolish Medicare.

7.  Rep. Gallegly, Elton [R-CA24] voted to abolish Medicare.

8.  Rep. McKeon, Howard [R-CA25] voted to abolish Medicare.

9.  Rep. Dreier, David [R-CA26] voted to abolish Medicare.

10. Rep. Royce, Edward [R-CA40] voted to abolish Medicare.

11. Rep. Lewis, Jerry [R-CA41] voted to abolish Medicare.

12. Rep. Miller, Gary [R-CA42] voted to abolish Medicare.

13. Rep. Calvert, Ken [R-CA44] voted to abolish Medicare.

14. Rep. Bono Mack, Mary [R-CA45] voted to abolish Medicare.

15. Rep. Rohrabacher, Dana [R-CA46] voted to abolish Medicare.

16. Rep. Campbell, John [R-CA48] voted to abolish Medicare.

17. Rep. Issa, Darrell [R-CA49] voted to abolish Medicare.

18. Rep. Bilbray, Brian [R-CA50] voted to abolish Medicare.

19. Rep. Hunter, Duncan [R-CA52] voted to abolish Medicare.

 

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A report on the one year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act featuring Paul Paez

One of the reasons this foundation started was to fight against health insurance injustices. Part of that was, and is, fighting to keep the Affordable Care Act in place and build to make it even stronger.

While I will not address the various arguments and downright lies against the law, suffice to say, they have no merit and proof of that is the report Health Access dot org put together to celebrate the one year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act. Health Access was founded in 1987, and is the statewide health care consumer advocacy coalition advocating for quality, affordable health care for all Californians.

Here is the report: ACA One Year Report 3-23-11

My husband, Paul, is featured in the report to highlight the need for the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Pool or high risk pool. Paul has Multiple Sclerosis. Paul was ousted from his job at Fidelity Investments just after he finished chemotherapy.

A year without income left us unable to afford our COBRA payments. Paul is without insurance.

Going without insurance when you are sick is what happens in this country. It kills people and burdens our system. Paul has been without care for five months now, was turned down for coverage by Blue of California and must wait one more month before he can even apply to the new high risk pool.

Yes, there is a bizarre and draconian provision in the new law (thanks to the Senate Finance Committee) that states applicants to the pool must go without insurance for six months prior to applying for coverage. It does not make any sense at all and we have been doing everything we can to call attention to this issue and have asked our lawmakers to simply change this.

Truthout dot org ran a story on this very issue and called on our lawmakers to rid the law of this provision. But our lawmakers are too busy trying to do things like undermine public school teachers and defund NPR to pay attention to real matters–like the economy, health care and jobs. That would be the GOP portion of our lawmakers. When presented with facts like these below, the GOP all put their collective heads in the sand and cry something about taxes. Shameful as real Americans face real problems. Please read the report and know that we still have a long way to go, but this is a start.

During those six months, these individuals could become too sick to work. They may never return to work or pay taxes again, leaving them on the unemployment and disability rolls, or they may go bankrupt or have foreclosed homes: three problems that we know are already bedeviling our economy. These are very real possibilities, because an astounding 62 percent of bankruptcies and 23 percent of foreclosures in this country are due to medical bills.

Make no mistake about it, GOP’s Rep. Paul Ryan wants to take your money and give you nothing in return.

Part of the efforts of this Foundation include the push for Medicare for Everyone in this country, from cradle to grave. But Rep. Paul Ryan wants to take away the system that seniors have paid for all their working lives, Medicare.

The private, for-profit system of health insurance has gone unchecked in our country for 60 years now and we have nothing but skyrocketing costs and a system that is ranked 37th in the world.

Medicare has kept costs lower than the private system and “…Medicare outperforms private sector plans in terms of patients’ satisfaction with quality of care, access to care, and overall insurance ratings.”

The Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s much demonized by the GOP plan, has been the only thing to come along and attempt to make the private health insurance companies pay when you get sick; not rescind your policy, not tell you that your cancer treatment is too expensive, not deny you a transplant, actually pay your medical bills since they collect your premium dollars.

And we all get sick, some more than others, like waking up one day as my husband did and not being able to feel his legs.

And now along comes GOP congressman, Paul Ryan from Wisconsin. Rep. Ryan has been in Congress since 1998. If you are curious as to his pension and benefits (he does hail from Wisconsin) Ryan became fully vested after a mere five years of service (it’s one of the perks of being a freely elected member of Congress) and Rep. Ryan will leave Congress with a taxpayer funded pension–we do pay his salary as he is a public servant! Rep. Ryan’s net worth can be found at Open Secrets dot org and here is the link.

But I don’t see Rep. Ryan going on about his own pension, just things like Medicare and Social Security, two programs seniors in our country have 1. paid for, 2. need for their own retirement and 3. are programs indicative of a civilized society. Keep reading.

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program the morning of Feb. 17, 2011, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., defended Walker’s efforts to force public employees to pay more in pension and health care costs to solve the state’s budget deficit.

“It’s not asking a lot,” said Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and one of the stars of the new GOP House majority. “It’s still about half of what private sector pensions do and health care packages do.”

That’s interesting as Rep. Ryan is in public (not private) service himself and we the people will be paying his pension. Period. We pay our public servants’ salaries, subsidize their wonderful health benefits program and pay their pensions when they retire. It was created under the Reagan presidency and is called the Federal Employees Retirement System.

Lawmakers with less service qualify for full pension benefits starting at age 62. The retirement package includes automatic inflation adjustments and guaranteed access to post-retirement private medical insurance in addition to Medicare protection provided all Americans.

Barely 20 percent of the American workforce has pensions comparable to congressional pensions, according to the independent Employee Benefit Research Institute. Almost no one in the private sector has the kind of cost-of-living escalators that keep Capitol Hill pensions moving upward.

That is in total disagreement with what Rep. Ryan said about private sector pensions and is what he will receive when he retires. I find that hypocritical, at best and completely uninformed of him.

Now let’s look at Rep. Ryan’s campaign donors. From OpenSecrets.org we find that Rep. Ryan’s top contributor was the faux industry called Retired. This is not the AARP, who if you recall, were in favor of The Affordable Care Act. This Retired industry is something entirely different. These are high net worth individuals. His other top donors were insurance companies, money movers like Harris Associates, Big Pharma and of course, Koch Industries.

So what does Rep. Ryan want to do to “balance the budget?” Let’s face it, we have money in this country. We printed it to bail out the banks (Rep. Ryan voted for TARP) and we are in two incredibly expensive wars (Rep. Ryan voted yes to invade Iraq but won’t put military budget cuts on the table but will cut veteran’s benefits), so tell me why would we have to undermine our own well-being?

Because people like Rep. Ryan are beholden to their corporate paymasters. Rep. Ryan’s less than stellar voting record is here. No to health care, no to unemployment benefits extension, no to fund Planned Parenthood (unwanted pregnancies can be avoided with contraception, Paul), no to aid to states for Medicaid and teachers and no to food safety regulations. He’s a regular GOP No to everything kind of guy–except when it comes to attempting to take your money away from you and handing it over to his buddies.

Rep. Ryan wants to take your money and give it to his corporate friends. He wants to privatize Medicare. That’s your money. Medicare works beautifully as it is (although there is always room for improvement) and you pay into it–it’s your money–and he wants to hand it over to who? The private health insurance companies? Those same upstanding corporate citizens who denied 5 year old Kyler Van Nocker his cancer treatment? Kyler never saw his 6th birthday.

And he wants to raise the retirement age (while undermining your health care) and give out vouchers for your Social Security dollars, so you can give them to the reckless fools (his campaign donors) who got us into this financial mess in the first place: Wall Street.

Ryan has been calling for big changes to the social safety net for years. Known as “the roadmap,” his approach calls for individuals to take on more of the financial responsibility for retirement, including the costs of health care. The government would provide a floor of protection for everyone, particularly the poor and those in failing health, but middle-class people who desire more than a basic plan would have to pay extra.

He’s also proposed allowing younger workers to divert part of their Social Security taxes to personal investment accounts, an idea that’s lost currency among other Republicans given President George W. Bush’s failed 2005 Social Security overhaul and the recent swoon in the stock market.

The plan Ryan rolled out last year for Social Security would gradually increase the full retirement age, from 67 to 70. It would also reduce initial benefits for middle- and high-income retirees.

“Give me a cocktail napkin and I can write you a plan on the back of it,” Ryan said. “It’s not that hard.”

Under the roadmap, Medicare would be converted into a voucher system that offers seniors a fixed payment to pick their coverage from a range of private insurance plans overseen by the government. Today’s Medicare recipients and those nearing retirement would remain under the current system, in which the government determines what’s covered and sets payments for providers.

We cannot stand by and allow our money, our tax dollars, to be given to private corporations who pay little or no taxes themselves. This kind of power grab will ultimately make us, as a country, less stable and less healthy. Our social safety nets are ones we pay for and to give away our tax money to companies who have no other interest than their bottom lines (much like the for-profit health insurance industry) will be our undoing. They will give us less and less for each dollar we give them.

It’s a power grab to attempt to take away our government and create a large corporate bureaucracy where We the People will have no say in how our lives, our health and our money are handled.

Here is Rep. Ryan’s contact information. Tell him to stop the power grab. Tell Wisconsin voters we don’t agree.

What repeal of health care would mean, by congressional district.

Today Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Ranking Member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Rep. Frank Pallone released, for each congressional district and the 30 largest metropolitan areas, an analysis of the impact of the repeal of patients’ rights, protections, and benefits contained in the historic health care reform law. Click on the highlighted text to be taken to the Committee’s website.

There you will find a map with all the states broken down into their districts with each representative’s name. The numbers of people the Affordable Care Act would help, and are helping, speak for themselves.

The very high expectation Genzyme has for Campath, now known as Lemtrada.

We have been posting (see here and here) on Genzyme’s possible treatment for Multiple Sclerosis, Campath, or as it is now being marketed, Lemtrada. Campath is a drug used to treat certain types of cancer but now Genzyme is looking to sell it for the treatment of Multiple Sclerosis. They think they can reach around $3 billion in sales doing so as well.

To get an idea of how much money is already involved in the marketing of this drug, which still has not received FDA approval, I found an article at PR Week where it was reported, back in December of last year, that Genzyme had already engaged a PR firm, Cohn & Wolfe, to help in their “global pre-launch communications,” of the drug.

Genzyme has said that the drug could generate between $3 and $3.5 billion in annual sales by 2017. That is, simply, a lot of money for one drug. But, considering what the CEO of Genzyme, Henri Termeer said of the market for Multiple Sclerosis, they obviously have very high expectations for their drug:

Termeer also noted that the overall market for multiple sclerosis is $14 billion, and Genzyme executives said their research showed there is significant demand for new treatment options. Alemtuzumab, they said, is more effective, convenient, and easier for patients to tolerate than drugs now on the market.

We agree with Mr. Termeer that there is a very significant demand for new treatment options, especially ones that don’t just manage the disease (or cause other debilitating diseases in the process, see Tysabri and brain infection, PML), but ones that could actually cure the disease. It’s why so many people with MS are looking at the new liberation treatment for CCSVI with great hope. 

To get an idea, a glimpse if you will, of how much Genzyme (or Sanofi, if the take-over does succeed) will charge for their still unapproved Multiple Sclerosis treatment of Campath/Lemtrada, a little mathematics and some fact gathering is in order.

Remember, Campath/Lemtrada is still a relatively inexpensive drug, especially for the treatment of Multiple Sclerosis, since the amount of the drug used is much smaller than for the treatment of cancer. So for Genzyme to be touting the market in the billions, we wanted to get an idea of how much they think they can charge.

We’ll start here with the population of the United States. It is, roughly, 310 million people. One report has it at 307 million, while this from the Census Bureau has it at 311 million. We’ll use 310 million as a mid-range, easy-to-calculate number.

Of that number, roughly 400,000 people have been diagnosed with MS. No one really knows how many people have it, according to the National Institutes of Health. My number is being a bit generous, by about 50,000, to play it safe.

What I found is, based on my numbers, roughly, .1% (that is point one percent) of the population of the United States has Multiple Sclerosis.

Based on Mr. Termeer’s number of the Multiple Sclerosis market being around $14 billion globally (I am assuming globally here) then Genzyme hopes that this one drug will corner around 21% of the global Multiple Sclerosis market–$3 to $3.5 billion of a $14 billion market.

And it still has not been approved. And they’ve hired a PR firm to help in pre-launch communications. Are they this certain? There are high expectations for this one drug and it seems there are even higher expectations on the pricing of this drug.

How much does Genzyme have to charge to gain 21% of the market?

Genzyme will either have to corner a very large share of the Multiple Sclerosis market by 2017, unless a cure is found before then, or raise the sales price of the drug for Multiple Sclerosis patients to hit those numbers.

Campath now generates roughly $112 million in sales for Genzyme* (2008 sales figures) so to get to $3 billion, that would have to be, roughly, a 97% increase in price combined with a deep market reach.

But how many people have Multiple Sclerosis and more importantly how many people globally with MS have access to adequate health care? Who can afford this?

The numbers on those questions remain elusive. We think that Genzyme sees its billions coming from raising the price of this relatively inexpensive drug to the price shared by the drug, Gilenya (which was first synthesized in 1992 for use in organ transplants),which is the most expensive Multiple Sclerosis treatment available at $48,000 per year.

Already MS patients are seeing issues with getting their supply of this expensive drug. See the MS World.org forums here and here.

It would be more humane (if this drug does get FDA approval) for Genzyme to keep their expectations of achieving a $3 to $3.5 billion share of a market more in line with reality and with what people with Multiple Sclerosis have to go through–from a body that is leaving its sufferers frustrated and debilitated, to insurance issues like the ones you see here.

After all, spin and PR it any way you want, Genzyme (and Novartis, since Gilenya or Fingolimod is relatively cheap to synthesize), its investors and executives are hoping to make money as the Multiple Sclerosis market grows–betting more will be diagnosed and suffer its effects–and then more money will be made from a drug that is, after all, relatively inexpensive for the treatment of MS in the first place.

How much money is too much?

*I could only reach the cached version of the article I quoted. Here is the original link:
http://www.bioworld.com/servlet/com.accumedia.web.Dispatcher?next=bioWorldHeadlines_article&forceid=50472 It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Dec 29, 2010 23:18:07 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime

The GOP using states’ rights to repeal health care reform. What about ERISA?

The GOP loves big business more than they care about those constituents who elect them. Even thought the GOP uses states’ rights as a big rallying cry for repealing health care reform, they have been totally against amending the federal law that strips the states of their rights–when it comes to health insurance.

Let me explain.

ERISA laws or the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 set standards for pension plans so that when employees retired (and retire even though 401k plans have replaced most pension plans) they can breathe some sigh of relief that their employers did not raid their pension plans leaving them penniless for retirement. That’s one of the things it does, but it does a lot of other things as well. It covers employer-based health insurance plans, 401k plans and some severance plans.

The unintended consequences of having a federal law cover these things, especially health benefits, are that these federal laws pre-empt state laws.

The law limits the abilities of state legislatures to regulate many types of health insurance, it restricts the kinds of remedies that states can authorize (such as a patient’s right to independent appeal of denials or to see specialists) and it can limit the ability of states to experiment with novel ideas for health care solutions.

Two real-life examples of how our state laws and consumer protections are meaningless if we have been abused by our health insurers: The first one is in the Michael Moore movie, Sicko, and features a child named Annette Noe. This is also brought up in Wendell Potter’s book, Deadly Spin. Annette needed cochlear implants in both her ears but CIGNA only paid for one, calling implants in both ears, “too experimental.”

Think Progress featured another child in November of last year, Madison Leuchtmann, who CIGNA also refused to pay for her cochlear implants with the knowledge that this child may remain deaf the rest of her life if she did not receive the implants:

Unfortunately, the Leuchtmann’s family insurer, Cigna, has issued “one denial after another,” flatly refusing to cover the $20,000 bill for the implant. In a written statement to the local news station Fox 2, Cigna explained, “It is not unusual for commercial benefit plans to exclude hearing assisted devices,” prompting Dr. Clary to angrily respond, “This is obviously medically necessary. You have a child that has no ear canals!” Dr. Clary also told Fox 2 that he sees these sort of denials “on a weekly basis.” Watch Fox 2′s report:

Now in Annette Noe’s case, her father used the power of Michael Moore’s movie to get Annette her implants. I have no follow up news for Madison. But more importantly here, could Madison’s parents sue CIGNA to make them pay for her implants? The answer is no. And that’s because of ERISA.

And why is that? Let’s turn to an ERISA expert, an attorney, Richard Johnston and his blog, The Problem is ERISA:

As of now we have a situation where the law tells insurers they face no meaningful consequences if they deny care improperly or even commit outright fraud. As one federal judge has commented, “if an HMO wrongly denies a participant’s claim even in bad faith, the greatest cost it could face is being compelled to cover the procedure, the very cost it would have faced had it acted in good faith. Any rational HMO will recognize that if it acts in good faith, it will pay for far more procedures than if it acts otherwise, and punitive damages, which might otherwise guard against such profiteering, are no obstacle at all.” Insurance companies, of course, are not charities, but corporations; their boards are subject to a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. If it is possible to accomplish this by mistreating insureds, then it follows insurers will do precisely that (and believe me, they do).

There is no incentive, financially speaking, to pay for benefits and these include treatments, transplants and disability benefits that are all covered under the ERISA umbrella.

Where does that leave the GOP who are so “anti-big government but pro-states’ rights? They side with those who would keep these laws in tact every time: The Health Insurance Industry. Disturbing about both groups is their love of thumbing their noses to the new (unconstitutional, as they say) federal law while remaining steadfast on guarding another federal law that hurts the common good. I guess it’s only unconstitutional when it hurts the corporate common good.

Every time ERISA has come up in Congress for some tweaking, guess what has happened? AHIP hires lobbyists, front groups (like this National Coalition on Benefits, they are a real gem) and this group; they all go into action and We, the People, are left in serfdom at the corrupt feet of the Insurance Lords.