A medical test was recommended. Insurance cards and forms were completed, and competent health professionals conducted the procedure. A follow-up exam was urged and completed. Good news. Time passed. (More than six months.)

The first notice that hundreds of dollars was past due came as an initial statement from the medical center 26 weeks later. A kind woman answered a phone call, looked up the account, and noted that a Preferred Provider plan applied the first charge to a deductible, then denied the second charge. The secondary insurer, an HMO, never responded to the medical provider.

Contacted, the HMO said they’d not received an Explanation of Benefits from the PPO. Called again, the PPO - which sent no previous notice about anything - said they’ll send one.

The balance remains unpaid.

Health insurers that drag their feet like turtles on sedatives are familiar - for people fortunate enough to even have health insurance.

In fact, according to the state Office of Legislative Research in Connecticut (where several insurance corporations are based), such practices aren’t uncommon, with some actions “arbitrary, reckless, intentional, malicious [and] fraudulent.” States supposedly regulate insurers through laws like the Unfair Claims Settlement Practices Acts, which mandate that insurers process claims promptly and prohibit requiring unnecessary or repetitive reports or forms. Still, some health insurers don’t handle claims promptly, delay settling claims, deny claims without reasonable justification, require duplicate information, cancel policies or increase premiums - all to avoid paying and to boost profits.

The problem with health care is less about health providers than insurance providers.

Nevertheless, timid reformers in Springfield and Washington are confusing proposals to provide health insurance with providing health care. Only Democrats John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich advocate plans addressing the need to efficiently provide health care to all Americans: a single-payer system.

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has pushed an expansion of health-care coverage despite misgivings by public advocates, his own party, and an increasingly divided labor movement. The California Nurses Association strongly supports single payer, as do more than 350 union locals, as well as 80-some members of the House of Representatives on record as backing such as bill (HR 676), plus millions of regular Americans.

“Single-payer” describes a way to run a program in which one entity administers it - a government, in the case of Canada’s health-care system. The single payer collects all fees for the goal, like health care, and disburses all payments. Incidentally, “universal health care” isn’t the same thing. It may be single-payer, but it needn’t be. Universal health care refers to programs intended to guarantee that everyone in a certain place - state or nation - has access to most types of health care, and in theory that could be arranged through existing health insurers.

But they are part of the problem - financially more wasteful than skyrocketing hospital costs, redundant (and expensive) medical equipment, malpractice insurance and the lawsuits (and malpractice itself) that cause it, and exorbitant salaries for a few medical professionals.

Amazingly, AFL-CIO leader John Sweeney and leaders of the breakaway Change to Win labor coalition in November spoke out in favor of Blagojevich’s employer-based state health insurance reform plan, similar to one introduced by Governors Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.), Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) and Ed Rendell (D-Pa.).

Such employer-based “reforms” are criticized by the California Nurses Association (CNA), Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) and other progressive groups as undermining a better solution - a single-payer system.

“Blagojevich [first] proposed to raise taxes, which Illinoisans would then pay to insurance companies - but private insurers are the problem, not the solution,” said Dr. Quentin Young, an Illinoisan who co-founded and leads PNHP. “The only effective solution is a single-payer public insurance program.

“We pay the world’s highest health-care taxes already,” he continued. “While Canadians live longer and healthier, they spend just over $3,000 per capita, compared to our $7,000. Because we rely on private insurers, we pay more for less.”

Blagojevich says his plan is the best that can be done - echoing Hillary Clinton when she spearheaded the doomed “managed care” reform in the early 1990s.

“So much of what you do in government is done through political realities,” said Blagojevich, quoted in the publication Corporate Crime Reporter. “The art of politics in government is the recognition of what is possible. The choice is between whether you take an existing structure - an employer-based health care system - and build on that, shore that up, or whether you scrap the whole thing and create a whole new system that historically has not taken root in the United States.

“In a perfect world and in theory, the single-payer system is one that I could certainly support,” he added. “As a practical matter, I don’t think it is something we are going to achieve in the near future.”

Sweeney recognized single-payer’s popularity, but he seemed to surrender, too.

“I recognize that there is tremendous support for single payer,” he said. “But as the Governor has said, it is important that we move on health care coverage now with what we have the political will to achieve. That doesn’t mean we aren’t going to continue to strive for a single-payer health care system.”

However, other interests threaten to derail single-payer before it ever gets on track.

Behind the retreat-as-reform press conference with Sweeney were two (labored-backed) insurance companies, Union Labor Life Insurance Co. and American Income Life, plus PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America lobby), a Blue Cross Blue Shield consultant, and former Democratic Congressman Richard Gephardt, now with the world’s largest law firm, DLA Piper (which represents more than half of the top 250 companies in the Fortune 500). The appearance was put on by “America’s Agenda: Health Care for All,” whose board includes a few union leaders, attorney Joseph Bock (a campaign contributor to Republican and Democratic candidates alike) and PhRMA vice president Jan Faiks.

Young, the PNHP doctor, said other proposals for reform are inferior, “patch-quilt failed systems that won’t work.”

Only Edwards’ proposal even comes close, he continued, and Clinton in particular “is ultimately duplicitous. People are being ripped off and these liberal Democrats are doing nothing to ease their pain.”

Independent-minded progressives and conservatives see the problem with relying on insurers.

Daniel Gallington in the conservative Washington Times newspaper last month wrote, “Private insurance companies are licking their chops over national insurance ideas that would have billions of dollars paid to them - no matter who pays.”

Young summarizes the real choice - one ignored by all Republican and most Democratic Presidential candidates and a troubling number of labor leaders.

“Replacing private insurers with a single public coverage program - a kind of Medicare for all - would recover enough funds currently lost to administration to cover all Illinoisans without additional cost to the state, businesses or consumers,” Young said.

For details on single-payer health-care, go online to -http://www.pnhp.org/facts/what_is_single_payer.php.

Also, Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) has a valuable Frequently Asked Questions page - http://www.pnhp.org/facts/singlepayer_faq.php

Bill Knight is an award-winning journalist who teaches at Western Illinois University.Contact him at bill.knight@hotmail.com.

December is a wonderful month of mystery, a time with a lot of religious holidays and secular good will to others, but a time of tension, friction and foolishness, too. Some of the most outlandish foolishness seems to come from the Bush administration’s Bureau of Prisons and - in a bit of bipartisan boobery - Presidential candidates from the Democratic Party as well as the GOP.

It’s unsettling to see federal intervention continue to prohibit prisoners from reading many religion books; it’s annoying to see people vying for the White House proclaim their spirituality yet ignore Scriptures’ teachings.

Of course, besides Christmas - which dominates the culture in commercial as well as religious terms - December has Hanukkah (for eight days and nights early in the month), Bodhi Day Dec. 8 (when Buddhists mark the day when Prince Gautama attained enlightenment), Islam’s Hajj pilgrimage (concluding with Eid el Adha on Dec. 20), Yule/Litha (ancient days to celebrate energy poured into the service of life, the “rebirth” of the sun, and the winter-born king [somewhat appropriated by the early Christian church in dating Jesus’ birthday], still celebrating by some Christians, Wiccans and neo-pagans on Dec. 21), Zarathosht Diso Dec. 26 (the Zoroastrian anniversary of the death of their prophet Zarathushtra), and Kwaanza (the mostly secular African-American holiday to celebrate family, community and culture, marked from Dec. 26-Jan. 1, 2008).

December is more than three months since the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) prohibited prisoners from reading 99 percent of the books about religion and church, having drawn up a list of “acceptable” texts - and having drawn the ire of a couple of upstate New York inmates who filed a class-action lawsuit. Plaintiffs including Protestant Christian John Okon, Jewish Moshe Milstein, and Muslim Douglas Kelly note that the BOP banned “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” by Rabbi Harold Kushner, books by Robert Schuller (the televangelist familiar from Sunday morning shows), Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Hebrew theologian Moses Maimonides (the centuries-old “Code of Jewish Law”), and best-selling author and mega-church pastor Rick Warren (”A Purpose-Driven Life”)

At stake are the already-limited First-Amendment rights prisoners retain. Obviously, penitentiaries strictly limit the rights to Assemble, but they maintain remnants of the freedoms of Speech, Press, the right to ask for a redress of Grievances, and, until now, Religion. Before this charge against prison chapels, chaplains screened books, mostly to filter out hate literature - much of it white-supremacist screeds purporting to be Christian, but some of it extremist tracts from other faiths.

The justification - as in many of the more onerous changes in society since 2001 - is the war on terror generally, and a 2004 U.S. Department of Justice report on religious services for Muslims in particular.

“The presence of extremist chaplains, contractors or volunteers in the BOP’s correctional facilities can pose a threat to institutional security and could implicate national security if inmates are encouraged to commit terrorist acts against the United States,” the report said.

Now, instead of relying on people of faith working in prisons to remove inappropriate publications for reasons of common sense and safety, bureaucrats in the federal government are defining what’s suitable for different faiths. The government purge is institutionalized as the BOP’s Standardized Chapel Library Project, which lists titles for 19 religious groups. For some, the number of permitted books and audio-video items is more than 300, while other lists are severely cut. A list for “Other Religions” for example, contains only two books - both on Christian Science. Catholic and Protestant Christian lists are among the longest. The Jewish list is shorter with 134 items, although separately Messianic Judaism gets 60. Separate lists are maintained for Islam and the Nation of Islam.

“We would have hoped that our prisons would be well-stocked with books advising how to live ethically, religiously and morally,” said evangelical Christian advocate Jeremy Gunn, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.

Religion can be a meaningful route to rehabilitate federal inmates - many of whom are incarcerated for drug or other nonviolent offenses.

Elsewhere in the public realm, the Presidential campaign treats religion as all form and little content. In forum after forum, some twit newscaster attempts an ambush question and asks someone about their faith, and the candidates dutifully play along. OK, they’re devout, they attend, they believe, and so on. But what do these self-described Christians specifically plan to do about what the New Testament calls its works of mercy: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, visiting prisoners, visiting the sick, etc.?

* Fifty-nine percent of 23 major U.S. cities reported an increase in requests for emergency shelter for families last year, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

* More than 35 million Americans live in hunger, including more than 12 million kids, according to the faith-based Bread for the world.

* “Giving drink to the thirsty”? The country’s water supply is at risk from local contaminants and global warming alike.

* “Most inmates had scant opportunities for work, training education, treatment or counseling because of taxpayer resistance to increasing spending on prison rehabilitation programs,” reports Human Rights Watch.

“The question is not ‘What do each of these candidates tell us about how religious they are’,” writes Catholic Sister Joan Chittister. “The question is: ‘What do each of these candidates plan to do to make the corporal works of mercy a living sign of the (faith)?’ ”

It’s difficult to be disappointed without being a scold, which is a step or a stumble from the intolerance practiced by extremists wearing beards and birkas or ties and toupees. It helps to hope that the universal yearning for More - shown in the presence of the Golden Rule in all faiths - or the logic of common sense will help devotion overcome intolerance. Reform might start small, with open libraries for prisoners, and end up big, with national leadership so comfortable with their faith that it’s unnecessary to force it on others, any month of the year.

Bill Knight is an award-winning journalist who teaches at Western Illinois University. Contact him at bill.knight@hotmail.com.

There’s a new vision for some public policy, and the country cries out for it. It doesn’t matter whether those cries come with tears of frustration, tears of sorrow, tears of joy, or tears from pollution.

Jobs can be created by promoting smart energy solutions to global warming. The planet can be helped without sacrificing people’s livelihoods.

Finding common ground for mutually beneficial results isn’t new, of course, but in a political climate made volatile – venomous — since Bill Clinton defeated the first President Bush in 1992, it’s refreshing.

Finding common ground for mutually beneficial results is effective, in downstate Illinois as well as nationwide.

Finding common ground for mutually beneficial results is accelerating – hopefully in the nick of time.

As the sign said at the mass demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999: “Teamsters and Turtles, Together at Last.” Read the rest of this entry »

Some Peoria County voters and election judges remain concerned with the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting machines, but the devices don’t have some of the problems targeted by a new bill in Congress and will only be helped by some of its provisions.

Despite reported and suspected problems here and nationwide, it’s unlikely that Peoria will change its use of eSlate, 440 of which were purchased for about $1 million. However, a 10-year pact between the county and Hart is just for maintenance.

In Congress, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007 (H.R. 811) would:

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When U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election, some progressives wondered: Did his decision stem from the difficulty of once more legislating by collaboration and compromise without the dominance of controlling both houses of Congress (indeed, all three branches of the federal government), or the difficulty of trying to be a part of cleaning up the colossal mess the Bush administration has made in the last six years?

Further, will Democrats accept the dismissive generalization that the 18th Congressional District is a “safe” Republican stronghold, or dedicate resources to a viable candidate?
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For Peoria and much of urban and suburban Illinois, the Farm Bill and agriculture policies seem mildly interesting at best, like crews of kids detassling rows of corn or a field of beans going gold, or a truck bed overflowing with produce out of a Thanksgiving cornucopia card.

However, the Farm Bill being debated this month on Capitol Hill isn’t abstract or irrelevant, and doesn’t just affect farmers and taxpayers. Rural communities, nutrition, health, hunger, the environment and much more are affected by the measure. Read the rest of this entry »

Even as President Bush in June vetoed Congress’ bill funding embryonic stem-cell research, a new study circulated showing that 61% of Americans support such research – just one of many positions that contradict the conventional wisdom that Americans are fundamentally conservative.

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