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Senate to Take up Bernie Sanders Single-Payer Health Plan Wednesday
WASHINGTON, December 15 - The Senate on Wednesday will debate for the first time in American history a proposal to create a single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care system.
"In my view, the single-payer approach is the only way we will ever have a cost-effective, comprehensive health care system in this country," said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose amendment will come before the Senate.
The Sanders Amendment would provide health care and dental coverage for every American, save money, and improve health care results.
"One of the reasons our current health care system is so expensive, so wasteful, so bureaucratic, so inefficient is that it is heavily dominated by private health insurance companies whose only goal in life is to make as much money as they can," Sanders said.
The 1,300 profit-making private insurance companies administer thousands of separate plans and waste about $400 billion a year on administrative costs, profiteering, high CEO compensation packages, and advertising. Health care providers spend another $210 billion on administrative costs, mostly to deal with insurance paperwork.
As a result, the United States spends $7,129 per person on health care, almost double the amount spent by nearly any other industrialized country. Nevertheless, 46 million Americans lack health insurance, 100 million Americans cannot access dental care, and 60 million Americans do not have access to primary care.
Sanders acknowledged that his amendment would not pass. "As a result of the power of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, this amendment will not pass or even get very many votes. Nonetheless, given the view of millions of us that a single-payer approach is the only way this country will ever provide comprehensive, cost-effective health care to all its citizens, this is an important step forward.
"At the end of the day - not this year, not next year, but sometime in the future - this country will come to understand that if we are going to provide comprehensive quality care to all of our people, the only way we will do that is through a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system, and I am glad to be able to start that debate by offering this amendment."
To read a summary of the amendment, click here.
To read the amendment, click here.
Contact: Michael Briggs cell (202) 557-1935
57 Comments so far
Show AllOBAMA, SENATORS, REPRESENTATIVES: JUST(LY) DO IT!
SANDERS: YES WE CAN! NOW!!
This is it folks, this is the path...
Call your senators now! Tonight, because the debate won't last long. I wonder if it will even run on C-Span
I do think some people have been treated unfairly by big insurance corporations but there would be just as long a list of people mistreated by big government. I would prefer trying to find a private company I believe I can trust than only having one choice.
Why is business always described as only caring about making money? It would be more accurate to describe them as only caring about creating products that people want so much that they will spend their money on them. Some people are actually very passionate about their products. I think the shareholders are only concerned with money but that's at odds with the people who are actually running the company and creating the products and services that the company offers.
You would not have just one choice under a single payer plan. You have limited choice with the corporate plans. With the government administering a single payer plan you have total freedom to choose any doctor or heath care provider. That is real free choice. Insurance corporations have the task of making profits for their stockholders. The quality of the health care provided in secondary.
The question before us now is not really about health care. It is about democracy. The vast majority of the people of this nation want a single payer system---Medicare for all. If we had a functioning democracy there would be no controversy. The representatives would vote as advised by their constituents. It is clear that our 'representatives' really represent their contributors, not their constituents.
In order to attempt to get some degree of democracy in our nation, it is imperative that you never again vote for an elected official who goes so clearly against the wishes of the people. We don't want the ongoing wars and we don't want to give trillions of our tax dollars to the crooks on Wall Street. Representatives who voted against the will of the people be voted out of office.
The law requires businesses to act in the best interests of shareholders. If I buy stock in an insurance company I don't want them to sell policies to high risk customers. If they do the law allows me to sue them.
While the for-profit model works for many products and services, medical insurance is not one of them.
If you ever worked for a multi-national corporation, you would never have a question. Money is all that matters to them.
I worked for two of multinationals and what you said is so true it should be carved in stone.
ATLAW writes: "Why is business always described as only caring about making money? It would be more accurate to describe them as only caring about creating products that people want so much that they will spend their money on them."
I just fell out of my seat. Ha Ha Ha ha ha ha. You have a good sense of humor. Companies care about people. That is a good one.
I know that Wallmart pays their workers so little so that they can spend quality time at food pantries. I know that Union Carbide made the Indians happy, at least the ones who didn't perish in the Bhopal disaster. I know that the Wall Street CEO makes 100s of millions of dollars so that he can give the beggar on the corner a quarter. The only reason that auto companies fight tooth and nail against any regulation to increase MPG is so that the minimum pay gas attendants can get a job. And the environmental destruction is just a theory.
War makes peace.
Hate makes love.
Corporate Profit make poor people feel less hungry.
Corporations are legally required to put shareholder return ABOVE ALL ELSE. LEGALLY REQUIRED. Corporations are a different entity from your local mom and pop store or a small company run by someone with a dream to make a difference. Corporations exist to exploit people and resources in order to make a few people wealthy. PERIOD.
If you cannot afford health insurance without your employer (which includes most of us), you really have no choice should you lose your job. Thus, you have to sing and dance to their tune. I'm sure people that are denied treatment are very, very 'passionate,' about their products, just not in a favorable way. Please wake up.
Jason:
If you were to get the UK system you wouldn't get "health cards" at all. You'd get treated simply by needing treatment. Only in America do people have to carry cards for stuff; it's a basic sense among Americans that nobody has any natural rights at all, they have to "earn" them and then apply for a card to "prove" that they have "earned" them. It certainly keeps a lot of bureaucrats happy because that's the kind of pettyfogging minds bureaucrats have, too, but it isn't cost effective.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Thank you Sen. Sanders for your truly independent stand!
Let's get behind him and flood Washington with calls, faxes, etc. Let the Senate know we're watching and will hold them to account.
Excellent, put all the filthy corporate boot-lickers in the Senate on record. This will be a handy list for future generations looking to have an enjoyable piss on the graves of some long dead, corporate-owned politicians from America's early-21st century dark ages.
As for all those voting this down Wednesday: know that your 'No' vote is going down as a mark of eternal shame, you servile, vainglorious scumbag!
Can anyone name another Senator besides Bernie, who should not be tarred, feathered and paraded through the streets to face the contempt and scorn of the people?
I can't.
"socialist"
No, but I do rather think that quite a few belong in an care center for the mentally feeble.
I was just watching Rachel Maddow interview Tom Harkin (Iowa) and found myself saying "Oh, Shut the fuck up!" to this man who I had once admired as a "progressive".
Obama IS LIEberman IS Bush.
I think that all politicians should be forced to wear suits like NASCAR racers do.. It would
clearly show on the suit who the bastard has taken money from.. When they give a speech they
would show on their lapel how much the insurance company "donated to them".
The Amerikan people give enough money to this Fascist government that we should not have to
compete with the corporations for the attentions of the elected.. I think that if we must buy our
country back from the corporations I would be the first in line to donate.
It always amazes me how cheaply these guys buy these politicians for.
Or of course we could take the lead of the French..
Some one has got to be accountable in this country besides the small time punks that this society takes great satisfaction in jailing;and letting war criminals roam the golf courses.
I saw Harkin on Maddow also, and concluded there is an absolute correlation between serving in the Senate and going along to get along. Harkin is as hypnotized by "the Process" as any of them. They labor and obsess over insurance reform (there is not even the pretense of health care reform) for a fucking YEAR non-stop, and ultimately are willing slaves to anything at all that comes along, no matter how empty and meaningless. It's a "great bill", despite ALL evidence to the contrary, all such evidence being toxic to these zombie-like "progressives." They simply MUST believe in the goodness of their worthless legislation. Otherwise, their time spent passing this crapola would seem . . . worthless. And they can't allow THAT!
I didn't catch Harkin, but the mind-set you describe is depressingly familiar. Barney Frank is an egregious example.
They have disappeared into the political/corporate/businessperson hive-mind-- strung out on amoral, anasthetic Power that reduces every question to a political calculus. They define "realism" as whatever accords with their debased pragmatism of expediency.
I'm a fan of scathing, caustic wit myself. But beneath the cheap shots, when castigating protestors and dissenters Frank reveals how completely he's lost touch with humanity. His messages are curt variations of "resistance is futile" and "you will be assimilated".
Frank expresses the latter fate prescriptively; on more than one occasion, he's castigated disgruntled citizens by ridiculing them for wasting their (his) time with futile activism instead of going home and writing their Elected Misrepresentatives, or finding candidates who support their ideas instead of bothering HIM.
I know Frank is a tangent here, but to me he's a vivid example of how politicians have completely morphed into hive-mind, Pod-Person elitists unable or unwilling to think outside their gilded box.
· Yr Obd't Servant
Al Franken
Thank you Senator Sanders for your truly democratic stand!
Finally ! As for whether the amendment will pass or not, I say just give it a go. The electorate needs to know which senators support health care for all versus the ones who don't. Go Bernie ! :)
colonist
I feel so deprived! I live in Texas and have absolutely no one representing me. Thanks to Bush and Delay we're stuck in the wilderness.
We must change our method of Senatorial representation. This country has changed since the Constitution was written; we now have fifty states and mass instant communication. We are living in the horse and buggy age when the small states can dictate to the more populous states. The minority is ruling the majority. N'est ce pas?
When Schumer and Gillibrand vote no, I'll tell them they've lost my vote in the future.
Those are my senators, too. They really have no excuse for voting against single payer--I work with "Single Payer New York" and know for sure that single payer has overwhelming support among registered Democrats in our state, and believe it is preferred by the majority of independents. They have nothing to lose as far as electoral power by voting for it--only campaign bribes and future bribes when they retire to private industry. In Gillibrand's case, I'd argue she puts herself at risk by refusing to support it. Tasini is running against her in the primary and he is strongly single payer, and there is a large, state-wide single payer movement that will work hard for him this spring if Gillibrand refuses to do the right thing. The Democratic Party Committee in Gillibrand's own county--Washington County--endorsed single payer. She is firmly against the will of her party and her region if she votes against this bill, and I will be emphasizing that to her staffer very shortly.
Briggs Seekins
briggsseekins.wordpress.com
I think that : should the country survive in some form as a tolerably well-organized (which means JUST and benevolent) society - bernie sanders is right:
that circumstances will eventually force the issue so that NO ALTERNATIVE can be possible, no matter how strongly the "for profit" people try to control things as they have so far.
on the other hand :when or if the USA arrives at that point, "in the future" - as sanders says, americans might look back and say:
"HOW COULD WE HAVE BEEN SO STUPID FOR SO LONG?"
With a Democratic Congress and President this amendment should have been the starting point of debate. However, the Democrats (and Republicans) are corrupt and bought out by corporate America and special interests.
Tell you senator,
single payer or single term.
And mean it.
Isn't there a third way beside nationalized single payer and the total financial free-for -all we have now?
Aren't the regulated utilities pretty well run and pretty cost effective at providing services or resources?
I do think Medicare for all could work well, but maybe there are other choices here.
There are anti-trust laws on the books already that should 'keep them honest' like single-payer is said to, if we better-regulated the now-free-market health care system to form a fair-market system.
Decades ago, the economist Samuel Bowles eloquently described how health care does not meet the four conditions needed for successful free market:
1) There is not ease of entry and exit from the market for buyers and sellers - When you need health care, you often can not wait to shop around. Similarly, becoming a doctor or other healthcare worker is not easy, and hospitals are not quickly opened or shut.
2) Perfect information is not perfectly available - As a patient with even a non-emergency illness, there is not time to learn the intricacies of health care science so as to be prepared to negotiate prices.
3) We can not assure lack of collusion between buyers and between sellers - Medical science requires extensive co-operation between healthcare providers - collusion is always possible, and organizations like the American Medical Association have seemed to most to be the best way to deal with the complexity of licencing, but necessarily range into collusion between sellers.
4) We can not practically have large numbers of buyers and sellers in each local health care market - Hospitals are big compared to patients, and necessarily so, I believe.
We will always want police in the streets, umpires on the field and someone looking over the health care system to make it work right and affordably, because this method of designated responsibility excells in large groups of busy equals with unequal power to coerce each other.
Single payer could work, but regulated utilities have also worked well in similar circumstances.
Brian Cady
Every dime, every penny that goes to a private "insurance" company is wasted.
Somewhere between 30 and 40% of premium dollars go to non-medical recipients, including PR firms whose job it is to persuade us that this is a good idea.
Does this really make sense to you?
lol single payer will NEVER pass, not after the millions the insurance industry has spent bribing senators and congressmen in the last months. Don't waste your phone call, this is just more political theater from Democrats.
Even if it passed both houses, Obama would veto it, citing some bullshit about "deficit neutrality" or another made-up word.
I cannot stand Obama. Can't stand to look at him. Can't stand to listen to him. I have the same visceral dislike of him as I had with Bush.
Me too!
This is the only health care reform that would cost less and help the most people but since this is not the goal of senators there is zero chance of it passing. Thank you Bernie Sanders for wanting to help people unlike the president and his cronies.
it is still time to shame congress into finally subjecting the healthcare companies to very strict antitrust legislation that would force them to outbid each other and to compete in states where only one insurer is active.
even if "medicare for all" and the "public option" are killed by bribed congressmen, nobody will be able to defend the position that market-place laws meant to foster competition should not apply to this cartelized sector of the market place in which competition obviously is not working at all.
let's put the healthcare leeches and their co-bloodsucking bribed politicians on the spot using their own arguments about free markets !
Of all the politicians Sanders is the one that proudly uses the title Socialist. It is impossible to expect anything to come out of this. JenniferB is right that at least the heads will be counted.
And I'm tired of the main-stream propaganda machine repeatedly telling people that they want a public option. Never. I want and have always wanted universal health care. A Universal Insurance Co. Profit Bill is a disgrace, a perversion of reason, a blatant manipulation by the capitalists, and a step closer to fascism.
If Sanders is a real socialist he ought to vote no on the Senate health care bill.
So you are saying he should vote against the bill he is trying to amend with coverage for all?
Amendment withdrawn, now I'm with you Crowsnest.
it is still time to shame congress into subjecting the healthcare industry to standard antitrust legislation to abolish their price rigging and force them to outbid each other.
additionally, as a price to do business and as a service to the nation, they should be forced to compete in states where only one insurer is active.
most importantly, a "reasonable profit" limit should be imposed on them (and on doctors, etc, who facture say more than $200k per year), a limit akin to those nominally imposed on weapons manufacturers when they sell anything to the government.
healthcare is at least as important as national defense. the government needs only to imitate the few tricks that it uses on a daily basis to keep in check (somewhat) the greed of the military-industrial complex.
even if "medicare for all" and the "public option" are killed by bribed congressmen, nobody will be able to defend the position that market-place laws meant to foster competition should not apply to the cartelized healthcare sector for which competition obviously means nothing at all.
let's put the healthcare leeches and their co-bloodsucking bribed politicians on the spot using their own arguments about free markets !
and let's hear what they can invoke to justify that the weapons industry be more heavily regulated than, and not be allowed to be as "profitable" as, the healthcare leeches.
Will it get CBO scored?
Nobody's asking the only question that REALLY matters ...
... what does Joe Liebushman think of this amendment?
Call your Senators now! Tell them if they don't vote for this amendment, you won't vote for them!
After today, we will have a list of the names of those who did not vote for the amendment, and we can use their votes on this issue to replace them with better people in the coming elections.
I called mine and told them to "make it happen at all costs." This is our Single-Prayer Health Plan.
At this point, calling them is moot. For this entire year, most of them "boldly" listened to Big Insurance and rarely to us as their actions have shown. What makes you think that these same puppets will listen now? I think that we would be better off letting them show who they really are and then figuring out which ones to replace. We need pols who will actually listen to the people instead of the same old mediocre lame brains who won't listen no matter what we do.
Besides, they silently cheated us so let's retaliate by silently kicking them out of office. I am on my way to finding a third party progressive independent for Kit Bond.
Very true, as our self-absorbed majority all have good jobs,
nice healthcare and so absorbed in their emotions actually
feel they deserve more, and such a reverse-conscience as to
make them feel guilty if ever they fail to take all
they can take.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are LIFE, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness (and health)
I dont see anything in there about some corporations rights to profit off of the people's sickness
We have a capitalist Constitution which reads, “All men are created equal.”
Greatest líe the world has ever known, as it creates the illusion that we
are all equal to the super-intelligent rich, and that we all deserve to be rich.
The result being capitalism, the unregulated freedom to compete against
those less intellígent, to enrích ourselves upon the gríef of those less
fortunate, and to cause starving children by hoárding excessive wealth.
Truth is, we are all given a different level of intelligence as a test,
to see if we pass our excess down to those less intelligent where
it belongs.
Yesterday was "Bill of Rights Day" which passed un-noticed in our Corporate Aristocracy.