Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Progressive Community
The press releases posted here have been submitted by
America's Progressive Community
For further information or to comment on this press release, please contact the organization directly.
Most Popular This Week
Today's Top News
|
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE |
|
Medicare-for-All Doctors Arrested Outside Obama-GOP Meeting
'There is a better health plan, Mr. President'
WASHINGTON - January 29 - Rising to President Obama's challenge in his State of the Union address that others come up with a better approach to health care reform than his own, two Maryland physicians who advocate for a single-payer program stood on the sidewalk this morning outside the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel, where the president was meeting with House Republicans, and held a large banner reading, “Letting you know: Medicare for all.”
After refusing to move across the street, the two physicians were briefly taken into custody by law enforcement officials, issued a citation and then released.
One of the two was Dr. Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician and congressional fellow for Physicians for a National Health Program, an organization of 17,000 physicians who support a single-payer system, who is trying to deliver an open letter to the president calling on him to meet with her and other Medicare-for-All advocates.
Joining her was Dr. Carol Paris, a practicing psychiatrist and fellow PNHP member from southern Maryland.
In a letter to Obama, Flowers notes how surprised she and others were when single-payer advocates were excluded from the early stages of the discussions on health reform. She and Paris were two of several physicians, nurses and reform advocates who were arrested at Senate Finance Committee hearings last spring for standing up and asking why the Medicare-for-All option was "off the table."
Flowers writes: "I am asking you to meet with me because the solution is simple. Remove all of the industries who profit off of the American health care catastrophe from the table. Replace them with those who are knowledgeable in designing health systems and who are without ties to the for-profit medical industries. And then allow them to design an improved Medicare-for-All national health system."
Flowers then itemizes the advantages of adopting such a system, saying that it would cover everyone, save thousands of lives, relieve medical debt, control costs, help the economy, and restore the physician-patient relationship. Obama himself is on record noting only a single-payer plan would provide universal coverage: "The truth is unless you have what's called a single-payer system in which everyone's automatically covered, you're probably not going to reach every single individual."
The full text of Flowers' open letter appears here. Both she and Dr. Paris are available for comment.
6 Comments so far
Show All2003: Single-payer. 2008: Single-brayer. 2009: Single-prayer. 2010: Single-betrayer! And so it goes: BOWEL (Barack Obama's Worth Ever Less) Movement. Down and OUT: 2012! Only 1085 days To GO!
Thank you to these courageous doctors. When will our congress and president listen and provide us with what is needed?
Government-run healthcare is desirable but not needed. After all, US grocers cut each other's throats in price wars that are not provoked by a "Public Grocer".
Antitrust legislation and forced competition made kerosene, airline travel, phone rates, etc, markedly more affordable.
Let's demand that the healthcare clepto-cartel be subjected immediately to the full brunt of antitrust legislation and that federal and state antitrust agencies be given more personnel and additional bite!
It would be wholesome to see demobliRat senators and representatives scramble live in front of the cameras to justify shamelessly, explicitly, and incoherently that they want to protect from *free-market competition* the obscene profits of their beloved healthcare leech cartel.
And let's call for binding legislation to be phased-in every 12 months to bring down --*before* obama's first term will be over-- the healthcare cartel's share of the GPD to below 10% and the cartel's profit margins down to those of garden-variety grocery retailers.
Simple, automatically triggered increases in the taxation of the outrageous profits extorted from the nation by the clepto-medical complex would do the job, with the extra revenue going to preschool and elementary education, Medicare, Medicaid, preventive healthcare, and infrastructure improvements especially in rural states.
After health-care-profiteering will become non-profitable, the predatory "entrepreneurs" and reckless "just here for the money" doctors will abandon the healthcare field and the government will have to become the only provider.
A "public option" at this point, or "medicare for all", will be neutered in Congress by the same by-bribe-only demobliRat congressmen who designed, and/or went along with, W's medicare "drug benefit" that threw humongous amounts of money at the pharma industry.
No healthcare reform proposal should be discussed anymore that does not address explicitly the true bottom lines of the healthcare problem which are:
i) the ~20% share of the GPD that the healthcare leech cartel (insurances, hospitals, doctors, etc) already have, and that is about to expand even more thanks to the "reform" being concocted these days by by-bribe only demoRats.
ii) the fact that the healthcare leech cartel delivers very little health and health care for the humongous amount of GPD it swallows every year.
iii) the huge cost to the USA's national economy of having so many people getting "health care" through emergency rooms where health problems are treated only after they become much harder to treat and where costs will remain ultra-expensive even if healthcare profiteering is forbidden.
Making central to the healthcare-reform debate such hard benchmarks and measures that connect transparently to the truly important bottom-line issues will make it impossible for by-bribe-only demobliRat senators and representatives to equivocate further around pseudo-issues and obfuscate the public when defending the illegitimate interests of those who bribe them in order to parasitize the nation.
Last but not least, when confronted with questions about such hard benchmarks and measures, the few progressive push-over senators (like sanders) and the venal-progressive ones (like byrd) --and people like Krugman-- will not be able to hide anymore behind tear-jerking statements like "the bill gives health care to another 20,071 rural grandmothers with pre-existing conditions" while they keep mum about the increase of the healthcare leech cartel's share of the GPD to 30% which they are now supporting.
Great. Comprehensive single-payer national health insurance addresses all of your "true bottom lines."
dearest erplus,
i love you !
I read Dr Flowers letter. It's brilliant. So if she can't get in to see the prez and get those 20,000,000 voices heard, then I guess we'll just have to ask those millions to join us in DC and shut down that stupid moronic town for all their stupid moronic decisions and continuations of the BuSh regime....