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8A NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
THURSDAY, MARCH 6, 2008
》 INSURANCE
Forum teaches students about American health system
BY JESSICA WICKS
lwicks@kansan.com
Jennifer Thomas, Scott City junior, pays $950 a month in private family insurance because she has a son with a disability. Amy Lindgren, Houston junior, doesn't have personal health insurance at all.
Thomas and Lindgren attended a forum at the Ecumenical Christian Ministries Center Wednesday, which addressed the American health care system and privatized insurance.
"I could pay the $340 a month, but it doesn't make any sense," Lindgren said. "I just go to Watkins."
David Goering, a physician at Lawrence Memorial Hospital and president of Kansas Health Care for All, said that Lindgren was among many Americans who risk living without insurance, but overall, Americans paid heavily for these risks.
Compared to other industrialized nations, the United States ranks the lowest in life expectancy and the highest in infant mortality. Goering said.
He said he worked with the uninsured patients daily and could see the crisis in its trenches, right here in Lawrence.
"This is not only a crisis at the poverty level," Goering said, "but it has really hit the middle class."
Goering said that more than 47 million Americans lacked health care coverage and that about 80 percent of those uninsured people were employed.
The problem, he said, was that private insurance companies were using America's health problems as an opportunity for profit rather than caring about individual people. Goering said people should ask whether health care was a human
right or a privilege.
Thomas said that she would like to find a cheaper plan, but her son just doesn't qualify for any.
"When they find out he has a disability, they immediately deny the application," Thomas said.
Thomas said that a few years ago she was denied personal insurance because she was classified as obese. Obese was described as weighing more than 135 pounds for her height, about 5-foot-5. According to the Center for Disease Control, Thomas' insurance provider's standard for obesity rates a 22.5 on the body mass index. The CDC recommends that a body mass of 24.9 is still within the healthy limits of an adult. While Americans like Thomas continue to be denied basic coverage, CEO's from insurance companies continue to benefit.
Individuals attending the talk gasped when they learned how much money insurance company CEO's earned while middle class families were being denied basic health care.
In 2005, United Health CEO William McGuire made upward of $37 million annually. He resigned in 2006 because of stock fraud, but his exit compensation was $1.1 billion.
Lindgren said that individuals without private health insurance ended up having to pay more because the insurance companies get bargains from health care providers that the individuals can't get.
"I actually tried to negotiate once. I told them I would pay what the insurance companies get to pay," Lindgren said. "They looked at me like I was crazy."
Thomas said she couldn't believe that the government has let insurance companies take advantage of Americans for this long.
She said that when her mother
had surgery, her mother was covered by Blue Cross Blue Shield. After the procedure, Blue Cross said her mother was not covered completely because her physician did not have a contract with them. The operation cost $65,000. Blue Cross cut her a check for only $6,000 because that was how much Blue Cross would have negotiated to pay the physician.
Making a change in how the American system works is not an easy process, Goering said. The Clinton administration tried and failed in the early '90s to implement a national health care system. Meanwhile, the cost of insurance has risen exponentially, according to Physicians for a National Health Program.
Salaries of health insurance company CEO's, in millions
Goering said that the cost of insurance was mostly administrative. Insurance companies have hired 2,500 percent more administrators since 1970, while the number of physicians has only grown 160 percent. So Americans are paying nearly 40 percent in insurance administrative costs before they even start paying for actual medical procedures, Goering said. He said that health care should not be a for-profit business. Goering said with a national health care plan, the government could not discriminate who they gave coverage to, and since it would be non-profit, people would not pay more than necessary.
William McGuire United Health 37.7
Dale Wolf Coventry 22.8
John Rowe Aetna 19.7
Anthony Marlon Sierra 19.3
Edward Hanaway Cigna 17.7
Larry Glasscock Wellpoint 16.3
"Physicians would no longer focus on what the patient can afford, but what they need for the long run," Goering said.
Goering said that government health care would allow people to take care of health issues at the first sign instead of waiting until it gets so serious that they cannot ignore it. Americans are not inclined to take on a health care system like Canada or Great Britain, Goering said, because many American's believe it is not the government's responsibility.
Referring to other nations' health care systems, Goering said, "No other industrial nation has decided to adopt a national system and then switched back."
—Edited by Mandy Earles
Graphics bv Jessica Wicks
Life Expectancy
RESEARCH
Photo uncovered showing Helen Keller with teacher
ASSOCIATED PRESS
BOSTON — Researchers have uncovered a rare photograph of a young Helen Keller with her teacher Anne Sullivan, nearly 120 years after it was taken on Cape Cod and tucked inside a family album.
The photograph, shot in July 1888 in Brewster, shows an 8-year-old Helen sitting outside in a light-colored dress, holding Sullivan's hand and cradling one of her beloved dolls.
Experts on Keller's life believe it could be the earliest photo of the two women together and the only one showing the blind and deaf child with a doll — the first word Sullivan spelled for Keller after they met in 1887 — according to the New England Historic Genealogical Society, which now has the photo.
For more than a century, the photograph was hidden in an album that belonged to the family of Thaxter Spencer, an 87-year-old man in Waltham.
Spencer's mother, Hope Thaxter
Parks, often stayed at the Elijah Cobb House on Cape Cod during the summer as a child. In July 1888, she played with Keller, whose family had traveled from Tuscumbia, Ala., to vacation in Massachusetts.
Spencer, who doesn't know which of his relatives took the picture, told the society that his mother, four years younger than Helen, remembered Helen exploring her face with her hands.
In June, Spencer donated a large collection of photo albums, letters, diaries and other heirlooms to the genealogical society, which preserves artifacts from New England families for future research.
It wasn't until recently that staff at the society realized the photograph's significance.
D. Brenton Simons, the society's president and CEO, said the photograph offers a glimpse of what was a very important time in Keller's life.
Sullivan was hired in 1887 to teach Keller, who had been left blind and deaf after an illness at the age of one-
and-a-half. With her new teacher, Keller learned language from words spelled manually into her hand. Not quite seven, the girl went from an angry, frustrated child without a way to communicate to an eager scholar.
While "doll" was the first word spelled into her hand, Helen finally comprehended the meaning of language a few weeks later with the word "water", as famously depicted in the film "The Miracle Worker". Sullivan stayed at her side until her death in 1936, and Keller became a world-famous author and humanitarian. She died in 1968.
Jan Seymour-Ford, a research librarian at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, which both Sullivan and Keller attended, said she was moved to see how deeply connected the women were, even in 1888.
"The way Anne is gazing so intently at Helen, I think it's a beautiful portrait of the devotion that lasted between these two women all of Anne's life," Seymour-Ford said.
This 1888 photo released by the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston shows Helen Keller when she was eight years old, holding hands with her teacher, Anne Sullivan, during a summer vacation to Brewster, Mass., on Cape Cod.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
CRIME
CRIME Former sailor convicted of supporting terrorists
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — A former Navy sailor has been convicted of leaking details about his ship's movements to suspected terrorism supporters.
Jurors were in their second day of deliberations when they convicted Hassan Abu-Jihaad of Phoenix of providing material support to terrorists and disclosing classified national defense information.
But his attorney said an investigation failed to turn up proof that Abu-Jihaad had leaked information.
Federal prosecutors said the 32-year-old sympathized with the enemy and admitted disclosing military intelligence.
Associated Press
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