CHICAGO - Police have arrested seven protesters during a sit-in for single-payer universal health insurance in Chicago.
Police spokesman Officer Robert Perez says the protesters were arrested Thursday on criminal trespassing charges at insurance giant Cigna Corp.'s Midwest sales office.
It was probably a given that the
corporate press would mangle the debate over this year's healthcare
reform legislation, considering their poor showing in the healthcare
debate of the early '90s (Extra!, 7-8/93).
The only questions were when and how.
As one of the Mad As Hell Doctors from Oregon, I had the surprising
good fortune of being an uninvited, but welcomed, guest to the
President Obama's recent meeting in the Rose Garden with "physicians
from around the country." I hand-delivered the following letter to one
of President Obama's aides. I wonder. Has he read it?
October 5, 2009
Dear President Obama,
OK, it was wrong of me to say last week that we should deny healthcare to Republicans except for aspirin and hand sanitizer, and thank you to the many readers who kindly took me to task. It was so wrong. And I withdraw the idea that death panels should circulate through red states searching for the obese and slow afoot, the wheezy and limpy, spray-painting orange stripes on their ankles, marking them for future harvest. That was very, very bad.
In June 2008, I used this space to call on then-Sen. Barack Obama to add economist James K. Galbraith's book, "The Predator State," to his reading list. As an account of the capture of government by private interests, I thought it would make a far more useful guide to contemporary political economy than the market-glorifying texts that were still in fashion in those days.
I don't know if Mr. Obama ever took my advice.
America's shouting match over health care reform has turned completely goofy -- and I'm not talking about confused seniors at teabag rallies getting red-faced with anger after being told by the right-wing scare machine that "government is trying to taker over Medicare." No, I'm talking about our United States senators.
Take Max Baucus. Please! He's the lightweight Montana Democrat to whom President Obama entrusted the heavy job of shepherding health care reform through the upper chamber. It was like asking Tweety Bird to lift a bowling ball.
The White House had to go outside the beltway
to find someone to print a story about the President calling Senators
and speaking positively about a public option. It's great that he said
good things to Maria Cantwell, who already supports a public option.
Ben Nelson too (though he doesn't say that Democrats like Nelson
shouldn't side with Republicans and filibuster a bill, the only Nelson
vote that will matter).
In my 20 years of practice as a family physician, I have encountered dozens of cases where the main contributing factor to a person’s death was the lack of health insurance for most of their lives.
The lack of universal health care is a mass killer in this country.
Nearly 45,000 deaths in the United States each year are attributable to the lack of health insurance, according to a Harvard University study released in September.
My favorite moment so far in the health care debate was when Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona argued against mandating maternity benefits as part of a basic insurance coverage. “I don’t need maternity care,’’ he blurted out. At which point, Michigan’s Debbie Stabenow quipped, “I think your mom probably did.’’
For that matter, so did his wife and daughter. But never mind. We had one brief glimpse into the mind of a politician who doesn’t quite see women’s health concerns as equal to his own.
Major progressive organizations see a golden opportunity to
resurrect the public option, and are preparing a campaign, which will
include television ads in Nevada, to pressure Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid to get on board.
