ThinkProgress is devastated and heartbroken to hear that the health of our dear friend and colleague Elizabeth Edwards has deteriorated, as she wages her courageous battle against breast cancer. A long-time advocate of universal health care, Elizabeth transformed a personal medical tragedy into an instrument for social and political change after her initial diagnosis in November 2004. In the process, she gave voice to the millions of Americans who were left behind by our health system.

With her trademark courage, activism, and strong sense of justice, Elizabeth directly confronted the inequalities of the American health care system and the politicians who perpetuated them. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Elizabeth — a regular contributor to the Wonk Room throughout the health care reform debate and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress — took to our blog and challenged conservatives for releasing a health care plan that would have excluded millions of Americans who suffered from pre-existing or chronic conditions. “Why are people like me left out of your health care proposal,” Elizabeth asked Republicans, pointing out that market-based proposals would leave millions of Americans “outside the clinic doors” and allow insurance companies free reign to continue excluding sicker beneficiaries.

Through congressional testimonies, public speeches, blog posts, and countless television appearances, Elizabeth emphasized the human and moral dimension of the health care debate. She pressed lawmakers from both sides of the aisle to pass a law that not only offered insurance to those who went without it, but did so at affordable rates. After all, nine out of every ten people who sought individual coverage in the current system “never got it,” Elizabeth reminded the protectors of the status quo. “People who have had cancer are denied coverage and those who get cancer run the risk of simply being dropped by their insurer for any excuse that can be found.” Elizabeth also highlighted the inequality facing women, who pay more for health insurance than men because they can potentially become pregnant.

Elizabeth was indispensable to the Democratic push for health care reform not only because of her persuasiveness and breadth of knowledge, but also because of her dedication to extending the health benefits she herself enjoyed to every American. In spite of her ailing condition, she inspires a sense of strength in all of us. She has viewed access to health care as an urgent issue that every American could agree on. And as she wrote in the aftermath of the death of her friend Tony Snow, “lots of people who valued the same things Tony did — a family well-loved and work well-done — have died and will die of colon cancer, those who have preceded Tony and those who will follow him.” But “can’t we start with something easy on which we can agree?” she asked, suggesting “that no one should die of a disease we can find and stop?” Thanks in part to her tireless efforts, that vision will become a reality.

You can read an archive of her work at the Wonk Room here.

Last night, CAPAF Senior Fellow Elizabeth Edwards appeared on The Daily Show with John Stewart to discuss her new book Resilience and health care reform. Edwards stressed the importance of restoring competition in health insurance markets noting that at one point, “the President of UnitedHealth made so much money, that one of every $700 that was spent in this country on health care went to pay him”:

It’s really important, and this is the part I’m afraid will get negotiated away. We have to have a public provider. That is, instead of buying your insurance from United Health Care, or from Blue Cross. You could actually pick a government provider. The insurance companies are against it because they don’t want that competition. And because they’re afraid of the threat of the competition they’re already saying we’re going to cut prices, we’re going to make this so much easier to get. Just the threat, so imagine what the reality will do. We will actually have health costs that could work.

Watch it:

Indeed, as a new report by Health Care for America NOW points out, “profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly-traded health insurance companies in 2007, rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007, from $2.4 billion to $12.9 billion.” In 2007, the chief executive officers at these companies collected combined total compensation of $118.6 million — an average of $11.9 million each.”

Competition from a new public health care plan would require private insurers to negotiate prices on behalf of their enrollees and not just pass along ever-growing health care costs to beneficiaries in the form of higher premiums. Insurer opposition to the public health option is an attempt to protect industry profits, plain and simple and in the coming health care debate, policy makers will have a choice to make: design a system that promotes the general welfare, by providing Americans the choice of a public option, or protect the monopoly of private insurers and continue redistributing as much income as possible to private industry.

Insurance companies will seize on anything to increase insurance premiums, and gender is no exception. An article in today’s New York Times points out that insurance companies rate-up individual insurance policies for women, forcing us to pay much more than men for identical coverage.

Since the individual market offers a raw deal to those who actually use care, women — who use maternity care and are more likely to have certain chronic diseases — may have a harder time finding affordable coverage than their male counterparts. A 30-year-old woman pays “31 percent more than a man of the same age in Denver or Chicago” and in Iowa, “a 30-year-old woman pays $49 a month more than a man of the same age.”

But Senator John McCain refuses to end this discrimination. McCain’s plan would make it even easier for insurers to cherry-pick the healthiest individuals who use the least amount of care. When asked why he didn’t support leveling the playing field and preventing insurance companies from covering only the healthiest and cheapest Americans, McCain replied that insurance companies should be able to decide who they cover and what they charge:

Q: Why not level the playing field, prevent insurance companies from cherry picking and let them compete on a level playing field?

MCCAIN: Because then I think then we would be mandating what the free enterprise sytem does and that would be, obviously, something I would not approve of.

Watch the ad from Health Care For America Now!:

I have often argued that buying health insurance is not the same as purchasing a refrigerator or a microwave. Health insurance is not another consumer good for which everyone pays the same price. Sick people are more expensive to insure than healthy people, the old accrue more cost than the young. For this reason, Senator John McCain’s belief in the dysfunctional and discriminatory individual market is fundamentally at odds with the point of health insurance, which requires that we share risks and pool costs.

Insurance companies should not be allowed to use a woman’s ability to become pregnant as an excuse to charge women more for health insurance. Unfortunately, by deregulating the individual market, Senator McCain would give insurance companies a free pass to continue charging women more for their health care.

Today, in her testimony before the Subcommittee on Health, CAPAF Senior Fellow Elizabeth Edwards strongly criticized so-called consumer-driven health care models for erroneously equating health insurance with other consumer goods.

“We’re not selling toilet paper here, we’re not selling televisions, we are selling an essential part of people’s lives and it needs to be thought of that way,” Edwards noted:

Deciding between the costs and benefits of various cancer treatments like chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery will simply never be the same as choosing between purchasing a Dodge, Pontiac, and Lincoln.

Indeed, individuals who can’t afford a luxury vehicle can downsize to an economy standard, rely on public transportation, or carpool when necessary. But no such crutch exists for health insurance. Americans who don’t have access to insurance can’t piggy-back off of another plan, and, as a result, forego preventive care, allow chronic diseases to go untreated, and postpone needed treatments.

Consequently, “137,000 people died from 2000 through 2006 because they lacked health insurance, including 22,000 people in 2006.” Americans who “lack health insurance will spend about $30 billion out of pocket on medical care this year, but others — mainly the government — will end up covering another $56 billion in costs.”

But plans in the individual market do little to lower health care costs for Americans who actually use care. “The individual market is notorious in its poor provision of coverage,” providing insurance “as long as you stay young healthy” and jacking-up premiums or conducting another round of medical underwriting once sickness strikes. For insurance to have any value, “it needs to cover the treatments and services people need and deserve.” Any comprehensive reform, Edwards argued, must strengthen the role of the group market and “address health care for all and cost containment simultaneously”:

The question is not whether we can afford to ensure that all Americans have health coverage. The question is whether or not we can afford to leave people behind.

Edwards recalled the story of an uninsured single mother who whispered to her that she needed a cancer screening but couldn’t cover its costs. “As she whispered in my ear,” Edwards concluded, “she is [now] whispering in yours.”

This post is reprinted from Newsweek. See the original column here.

Tony Snow has died. A young man (with my next birthday being number sixty, I am entitled to the folly of calling a fifty-three year old “young”), with a facile mind, an easy smile, and a quick wit; a man who had a perpetual twinkle in his eye when he was doing what he he born to do; a man who loved his wife and his children; a man who loved politics and maybe a little more loved the verbal sparring that comes with politics well-played; a man who desperately did not want to die. And when he died, I cried. I know I cried not just for him, but—filled with fear—for myself as well. The diagnoses of our cancer recurrences (“recurrences” being one of those misnomers we simply endure) tumbled out upon one another by days, and I felt—and feel— connected to a man who loved what I loved, although we came to nearly every argument from opposite corners of the ring.

Last week—when Tony was still alive and I was not so afraid—I rode my bicycle in a small Fourth of July parade at the beach to which we have gone for close to two decades. When I got to the celebration and stepped off the bicycle, an older man approached me. I hope you are doing well, he said, and then he added—oddly, it is more often the case that people do feel obliged to confess the gap between us—”although we don’t agree on much of anything.” I thanked him for his good wishes and then I added—as I often do—”and I suspect we agree on more than you think.” He smiled, I smiled, and that was that. And then Tony died. And I thought more about the things on which we agree and the things on which we disagree. And as with my parade companion, I suspect Tony and I agreed on more things that we might have guessed. Read more