Alaska Dispatch

OPINION: Sarah Palin, the very same one who declared April 16, 2008 "Health Decisions Day" in Alaska to encourage more citizens to talk to their health care providers about "advanced directives," is at it again with the death panels.

Today, Palin posted on her Facebook page a letter that she was invited to write to the New York State Senate Aging Committee's hearing. In the letter, she continues the death panel meme, and offers her version of "real" reform. Here's a taste: 

...they could ultimately be used by government bureacrats (sic) to help determine the treatment of our loved ones. We must ensure that human dignity remains at the center of any proposed health care reform. Real health care reform would also follow free market principles, including the encouragement of health savings accounts; would remove the barriers to purchasing health insurance across state lines; and would include tort reform so as to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending connected to the filing of frivolous lawsuits...

At this point, it makes one nearly soporific to try to point to all of the groups and publications and people who have debunked the death panel myth, including our own Republican senator. But it might not hurt to mention what the "free market" leads to when health care is what's being marketed.

This week the New York Times reported that the new big idea on Wall Street is to get bankers to buy "life settlements" which are:

... life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash - $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to "securitize" these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

Today Reuters is reporting that from 2002 to 2009 in California, insurance companies denied more than 21 percent of health insurance claims, some of them life-saving procedures. In the first six months of this year alone, PacifiCare denied 40 percent of claims, Cigna 33 percent and the California Blues rejected 28 percent of claims.

Alaska's division of insurance doesn't keep track of such numbers, but that doesn't mean that Alaskans don't lack for stories of nightmares with insurance companies. If she chose, Palin could read some of these here.

In 2007, Palin said that providing adequate health care "is one of the most pressing domestic issues facing the United States as a nation." But as governor of Alaska, she did virtually nothing to ensure "real" or any other kind of health care reform.  While she and her family had access to some of the very best health insurance available (which was tax payer funded) nearly 33 percent of her constituents-- about 200,000 residents -- were uninsured at some point in 2008, one of the highest rates in the country.

Alaska, which has one of the least restrictive insurance markets, is dominated by two insurance companies that control over 96 percent of the market. Premera Blue Cross insures about 60 percent of the market, while Aetna insures more than 30 percent. And what they offer is some of the most expensive coverage in the U.S. Between 2000 and 2007, insurance premiums in Alaska rose more than 74 percent, while wages grew 13 percent.

That's the free market working its magic with our health care. I wonder if she would hold up her own state as a model for what is in store with "real" health care reform? And if not, I wonder if it ever occurs to her that she actually had the chance to do real work on health care, as other governors have, before she quit and began her job as a Facebook pundit.