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Published on Friday, August 7, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
The Health Care Debate Has Only Just Begun
Now that the era of “change” is upon us, in the form of health care reform, it's enlightening to watch the process unfold.
Actually, enlightening may not exactly be the right word. How about excruciating? Or infuriating? Or, how about we just admit we are not graced to live in an era when the words substantive, progress, and health care are ever likely to be inked with anything Washington's elected representatives manage to accomplish.
As Obama's health reform initiative confronts the reality of the beltway culture that is Washington, it's clear that real health care justice will not come easy to the United States. But why should this be a surprise? In contrast to the 1960s when Medicare and Medicaid were first introduced, U.S. health care today is primarily less a social service than just another investor-driven sector of America's hyper-capitalist culture. The days when religious non-profits, stand-alone community hospitals, and independent physician offices were the norm are long gone. In most major markets, two or three hospital organizations dominate the local health care scene. The nation's largest hospital corporation, HCA, for example, owns 278 hospitals and freestanding surgery centers. In turn, Wall Street equity firms lurk behind the scenes of most large hospital corporations.
Likewise, select health insurance companies now dominate most major markets. WellPoint and UnitedHealth Group, for example, alone sell insurance to some 67 million Americans, according to recent Senate hearings. It's well established that such private insurers have dumped enormous administrative waste into the system. They also take out a lot lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars in pay, bonuses, and stock options on high-paid executives.
But how many more times do we have to go over all this before things change? How many more tragic stories have to be told about sick people denied care by insurance giants? Or great arguments made about the value of single-payer? How much injustice exactly do we as a nation have to endure before our health care system lives and breathes in service to the universal right of every person to the best care possible? But then the resistance to health care reform has never been about rational argument or even ideology. It's about entrenched financial interests who cannot be expected to give up a good thing without a fight. No doubt Congress’s ability to parse even the mildest vision of reform shows they’ve got that fight covered.
That's not to say the insurance industry is opposed to all health reforms, especially if under new legislation tens of millions of uninsured Americans become legally compelled to buy some form of insurance. In return, the industry might go along with new restrictions on their ability to deny coverage for “preexisting conditions” or medical history. Still, they continue to oppose any form of “public option” insurance. It’s debatable now whether this component of “universal coverage” will even survive in the final legislation, or offer coverage worth anything if it does.
Of course, none of this has stopped the cuckoo right from portraying Obama's health reforms as "socialistic." But if conservative ideologues want to envision Bolsheviks manning the HMO help line next time they call to make a doctor's appointment, let them. The more daunting reality is that it is going to take an extraordinary mass political campaign if the American health care system is ever going to catch up with an industrialized world that has long recognized health care as a public resource similar to education or fire protection.
What makes such a humanitarian goal especially daunting in the United States is not just the crazy talk resistance of far-right Republicans. The other obstacle to progress is the endless genuflecting before corporate power on the part of the Democratic Party leadership. Tellingly, Obama has admitted single-payer health care would probably be the best health care system, if we were starting from scratch. Instead, Obama wants to promote a more socially palatable version of the existing health care system while preserving the industry's profits. This is another way of saying the President is not about to risk his political career on some “wild plan” to root out the scourge of private insurers and investment firms who are ruining health care.
In place of the current wheeling and dealing among Washington lawmakers that now defines health care reform, imagine instead if Obama called upon the roughly 13 million voters who enlisted as the grassroots base of his presidential campaign to rally on the steps of Congress and demand comprehensive universal health care reform. Unfortunately, despite the grassroots vigor of his presidential campaign, a mass action campaign for health care justice does not appear to be on Obama's to do list for anytime soon.
In contrast, right-wing zealots appear more than ready for mass action, as Democratic supporters of health reform recently learned when confronted by shouting mobs opposing “socialized medicine” at town hall meetings. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), and others have accused health insurance lobbyists and GOP activists of orchestrating these hooligan hootenannies.
Whatever the dismal particulars of the legislation to emerge from Congress, there is growing public recognition that health care should be a universal human right. Indeed, support for single-payer is far greater now than during the early 1990s when President Clinton pushed his version of reform. There's also far more healthy grassroots activism and discussion taking place.
Accordingly, it is safe to say that the debate over the future of health care justice in the United States has only just begun.
Actually, enlightening may not exactly be the right word. How about excruciating? Or infuriating? Or, how about we just admit we are not graced to live in an era when the words substantive, progress, and health care are ever likely to be inked with anything Washington's elected representatives manage to accomplish.
As Obama's health reform initiative confronts the reality of the beltway culture that is Washington, it's clear that real health care justice will not come easy to the United States. But why should this be a surprise? In contrast to the 1960s when Medicare and Medicaid were first introduced, U.S. health care today is primarily less a social service than just another investor-driven sector of America's hyper-capitalist culture. The days when religious non-profits, stand-alone community hospitals, and independent physician offices were the norm are long gone. In most major markets, two or three hospital organizations dominate the local health care scene. The nation's largest hospital corporation, HCA, for example, owns 278 hospitals and freestanding surgery centers. In turn, Wall Street equity firms lurk behind the scenes of most large hospital corporations.
Likewise, select health insurance companies now dominate most major markets. WellPoint and UnitedHealth Group, for example, alone sell insurance to some 67 million Americans, according to recent Senate hearings. It's well established that such private insurers have dumped enormous administrative waste into the system. They also take out a lot lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars in pay, bonuses, and stock options on high-paid executives.
But how many more times do we have to go over all this before things change? How many more tragic stories have to be told about sick people denied care by insurance giants? Or great arguments made about the value of single-payer? How much injustice exactly do we as a nation have to endure before our health care system lives and breathes in service to the universal right of every person to the best care possible? But then the resistance to health care reform has never been about rational argument or even ideology. It's about entrenched financial interests who cannot be expected to give up a good thing without a fight. No doubt Congress’s ability to parse even the mildest vision of reform shows they’ve got that fight covered.
That's not to say the insurance industry is opposed to all health reforms, especially if under new legislation tens of millions of uninsured Americans become legally compelled to buy some form of insurance. In return, the industry might go along with new restrictions on their ability to deny coverage for “preexisting conditions” or medical history. Still, they continue to oppose any form of “public option” insurance. It’s debatable now whether this component of “universal coverage” will even survive in the final legislation, or offer coverage worth anything if it does.
Of course, none of this has stopped the cuckoo right from portraying Obama's health reforms as "socialistic." But if conservative ideologues want to envision Bolsheviks manning the HMO help line next time they call to make a doctor's appointment, let them. The more daunting reality is that it is going to take an extraordinary mass political campaign if the American health care system is ever going to catch up with an industrialized world that has long recognized health care as a public resource similar to education or fire protection.
What makes such a humanitarian goal especially daunting in the United States is not just the crazy talk resistance of far-right Republicans. The other obstacle to progress is the endless genuflecting before corporate power on the part of the Democratic Party leadership. Tellingly, Obama has admitted single-payer health care would probably be the best health care system, if we were starting from scratch. Instead, Obama wants to promote a more socially palatable version of the existing health care system while preserving the industry's profits. This is another way of saying the President is not about to risk his political career on some “wild plan” to root out the scourge of private insurers and investment firms who are ruining health care.
In place of the current wheeling and dealing among Washington lawmakers that now defines health care reform, imagine instead if Obama called upon the roughly 13 million voters who enlisted as the grassroots base of his presidential campaign to rally on the steps of Congress and demand comprehensive universal health care reform. Unfortunately, despite the grassroots vigor of his presidential campaign, a mass action campaign for health care justice does not appear to be on Obama's to do list for anytime soon.
In contrast, right-wing zealots appear more than ready for mass action, as Democratic supporters of health reform recently learned when confronted by shouting mobs opposing “socialized medicine” at town hall meetings. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), and others have accused health insurance lobbyists and GOP activists of orchestrating these hooligan hootenannies.
Whatever the dismal particulars of the legislation to emerge from Congress, there is growing public recognition that health care should be a universal human right. Indeed, support for single-payer is far greater now than during the early 1990s when President Clinton pushed his version of reform. There's also far more healthy grassroots activism and discussion taking place.
Accordingly, it is safe to say that the debate over the future of health care justice in the United States has only just begun.
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43 Comments so far
Show AllIf meaningful health care (& insurance) reform isn't enacted in this cycle, things will settle down for another 15 or 20 years, during which time Americans will continue to not get access to adequate health care, while they get their hard-earned bank accounts drained by insurance, drug, and hospital corporations.
Hamster's right. Things will just get worse. If something isn't done this time around it's going to be the end of America as we know it.
By the way, the Dems should come up with an equally powerful slogan to counteract the righties' constant mantra of "socialized medicine". How about using the term "corporatist medicine" or "fascist medicine" to describe what we have now and what we are likely to have if nothing is done. Language is everything.
While both your terms would be accurate, their connotations just bring us down to the same level of those who would unduly toss around the name of socialism as an object of scorn. There's another easy term we could use that I think also hits the nail on the head: Republican healthcare. Remember, our current healthcare system is Nixon's baby, and every democratic president since then has tried (and, it appears, will have failed) to bring us proper national health care. There are few groups in America today that I think have less credibility than the Republicans. Let's hang this albatross around their necks, where it belongs.
"As Obama's health reform initiative confronts the reality of the beltway culture that is Washington ..."
Much too narrow. The reality that is being confronted is the most fundamental sponsored representation underpinning of the entire U.S. political, financial and ecomomic system.
Health care, or more accurately the health "insurance" industry, is merely one symptom, albeit a very important one in terms of public interest. It, more than most, makes obvious the plain fact that U.S. "democracy" is a total sham, that narrowly restricted voting "choices" are mere endorsements of established oligarchy, and that the only "citizenship" that really matters is corporate personhood and financial bribes. If that's democracy, you'd better hope that real fascism never arrives.
The monied interests this article refers to are playing the red card. Red as in red scare and red state. The same people who said that the democratic majority voting was "mob rule" are now using mob rule to obtain for AHIP what AHIP might not be able to obtain with just money.
One could surmise by my posting name that I am as angry as they are. Yet, clearly, I am not acting on behalf of a party or an industry, and I am not trying to intimidate and silence opposition. I do not have millions of dollars and corporate media to advance my message. While the frustration, fear and anger being expressed at the town halls is real (most of it resulting from the bank bailout before health care even came up), the channeling of it is top down, not bottom up.
In the contest between Obama's need to pass a bill, any bill, and the insurance, hospital and pharma industries' need to pass a profitable one, even if it means hurting the country by exploiting the angst of the right to do it, it seems that my minority voice has no chance of being heard.
While I have complete sympathy for the genuine outrage on the right, I have none for the GOP. They got us here to this miserable state. It was the deregulation, the dismantling of democratic institutions, and all the former media mobs -- the shout downs on television that got us here. Too bad the Right is better at shouting others down than self criticism. The Left and Right have more in common than what holds us apart, but for the country to come together, the Right would have to take some responsibility for its part in creating the healthcare system we have today. If they don't want socialized medicine, then withdraw the 60 cents on the dollar currently coming from the government for healthcare. Cancel Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration and all the other programs. Let the hospitals close and the pharma companies go bankrupt, because THAT is what the free market demands. It's easy to pretend you're a John Wayne kind of free marketeer so long as you can hide behind the status quo.
If that is not the kind of freedom the Right is demanding then ask yourselves "who benefits" after you get your satisfaction of town hall outrage. When you still don't have a job with benefits, or your job's benefits keep you from even getting a cost of living increase, will you proudly proclaim that no one has pried this failed system from your cold, dead hands? What a victory for you, for us.
Could not agree more that the outrage is coming more from the bailouts than health care and that the Right is using it and channelling it. They would foment race war if they thought it would get them back in power.
Unfortunately, there is no other locus of leadership. Those in power have seen to that.
A real free market approach that would destroy Big Pharma and many hospitals (because demand would fall) yet benefit us is ours for the taking. Demand that state medical societies prosecute only for harm to patients and ethical violations. Demand the FDA allow health claims that are backed up with data. (remember when they declared cherries a drug and banned any speech about their health benefits?) Demand the FDA puts back on the market all the supplements they have removed for no reason but that they would be competition for Big Pharma. People and physicians would gradually move to natural medicine/nutritional medicine/functional medicine because it works and costs way less.
As time would pass, we would be saving hundreds of billions due to what we prevented. I don't think many people realize how much illness would be prevented if everyone were screened for Vit D status (they're working on "analogs" that can be patented. now, you can get 8 months of a therapeutic dose for $25 which includes shipping if you can't get it locally). Or, if, instead of passing out Tums, Prilosec, Nexium like candy we tested for gut pH and provided digestants. (the majority of people treated for "too much stomach acid" actually have too little--See: "Why Stomach Acid is Good for You" by JV Wright, MD and L Lenard, PhD)
All I'm saying is health care reform requires radical revision, not tinkering. When we treat root causes of illness, rather than symptoms, everygody wins.
It is so strange that prevention is not even talked about in this debate. Yet, it is the cornerstone of health! I wholeheartedly agree with your comments regarding supplements. To go a step further I believe it all starts with food. Until we largely convert to a real organic form of food production, we are just throwing our health dollars away, regardless of public or private health insurance options. An organic food supply supported by widespread usage of natural supplements would cripple the almost evil influence Big Pharma has on this country. Not all synthetic pharmaceuticals are "bad", but many appear to do more harm than good on the human body and exert negative consequences on the overall environment. Trace amounts of many different pharmaceutical drugs are routinely discovered in our waterways, causing damage to these ecological systems.
Harris sez: "... imagine instead if Obama called upon the roughly 13 million voters who enlisted as the grassroots base of his presidential campaign to rally on the steps of Congress and demand comprehensive universal health care reform."
***
That's rather difficult to imagine, given that Obama would not allow one (1) voter to "the table" to promote the cause of single-payer.
Very well said Pitchfork.
re "the beltway culture that is Washington" on healthcare, war, environment or any other major issue, the two party duopoly now operates in blatant criminal corruption consistently being the handmaidens of corporate greed and power. Polls indicate a large percentage of the disempowered citizens see that Congress is corrupted and useless to them. But the duopoly-plutocracy has the electoral system rigged, bought and paid for. This reality was visible in the 1960s, but then people were organized to take to the streets, lecture halls, military bases and every other possible venue to demand change. That's what will be needed again, as clearly electoral change has become near impossible.
The U.S. economy depends on continual warfare now, which means money goes to any kind of weapon production--in this case, Big Pharma, or drugs or stem cell-related products, that could be more devastating than nuclear weapons. That is why we will not have single-payor or "government-payor" care anytime soon. This is a hot area because of recent discoveries in neuroscience. Check out Thomas Metzinger's “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self,” (Basic Books, 2009):
When certain processing stages are elevated to the level of conscious experience and bound into the self-model active in your brain, the become available for ALL your mental capacities. Now you experience them as your OWN thoughts or urges to act—as properties that BELONG to you. They appear spontaneous because they are the first link in the chain to cross the border from unconscious to conscious brain processes; you have the IMPRESSION that they appeared in your mind “out of the blue,” so to speak. The unconsious precursor is invisible, but the link exists. The fact that the conscious experience is just a SLIVER of the process in the brain, and since THIS fact does NOT appear to us, we have the robust experience of being able to spontaneously initiate causal chains. This is the appearance of an agent. The brain is blind to its own inner workings.
The science of the mind is now beginning to reintroduce those hidden facts into our ego tunnels.
The idea of free will does not exist in our minds alone—it is also a social institution. It is a window connecting us with social practice around us. The assumption that something like free agency exists is a concept fundamental to our legal system and the rules governing societies—rules built on accountability and guilt. These rules are mirrored deep in the structure of our self-model and this incessant mirroring, created complex social networks. If one day, we must tell an entirely different story about what human will is this will affect our societies in an unprecedented way. For example, it would be meaningless to punish people (as opposed to rehabilitating them). RETRIBUTION would then appear to be a STONE AGE concept, something we inherited from animals.
When neuroscience discovers the sufficient neural correlates for willing, desiring, and executing an action, we will be able to cause, amplify and modulate the conscious experience of will. It will become clear that the ACTUAL causes of our actions often have very little to do with what the conscious self tells us.
We now have an information jungle that is increasing each day. It already is reconfiguring our brain. Perhaps our body perception will change as we learn to control multiple avatars in multiple virtual realities, embedding our conscious self into entirely new kinds of senorimotor loopos. A growing number of social interactions may be avatar-to-avatar and we already know that social interactions in cyberspace increase the sense of presence more strongly than higher-resolution graphics ever could. We may finallly come to understand that a lot of our conscious social life has been all along-and interaction between images, a highly mediated process in which mental MODELS of persons begin to causally influence one another.
We already use the the Internet as part of our self-model. We use it for exernal memory storage , as a cognitive prosthesis and for emotional autoregulation. We are learning to multitask, our attention span is shorter and our social rels have a disembodied character.
A related problem is management of our attention. The ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings to those of others as naturally evolved feature of the human braing. Attention is a finaite commodity. Our brains can generate only a limited amount of attention each day.
The advertisement and entertainment industries are attacking our foundations for experience and trying to rob us of our scarce attention. New insight s into the human mind by cognitive and brain science “neuromarketing” is one of the ugly new buzzwords. If I am right that consciousness is the space of attentional agency and if it is also true that the experience of controling and sustaining your focus of attention is one of the deeper layers of phenomenal (experience) selfhood, then we are witnessing not only an organized attack on the space of consciousness per se, but a form of depersonalization. New media may create a new form of waking consciousness that resembles weakly subjective states—a mixture of dreaming, dementia, intoxication and infantilization.
Lives can be ruined because we have not done our homework. The price of denial may rise. Many new psychoactive substances of the hallucinogen-type—such as 2C-B (“Venus” or “Nexus”) or 2C-T-7 (Blue Mystic” or “T7”0 are out on the illegal market without any clinical testing; their numbers will continue to increase.
And that’s just the old problems the homework we never did. In our ultrafast, ever more competitive and RUTHLESS modern societies, very few people are seeking deeper spritual experience. They want alterness, concentration, emotional stability, and charisma—things thatr lead to success. In the rich societies of the world, people are growing older than ever before—and they want not just quantity but QUALITY of life. BIG PHARMA knows this. Everybody has heard of modafinil, and perhaps that is already with us in the Iraq war; but there are at least 40 new molecules in the pipeline. There is hope and alarmism is not the right attitude, but the technology is not going away.
Big Pharma, circumventing the border between legal and illegal substances is quietly developing new compounds; they know that cognitive enhancers will reap them hefty future profits from “nonmedical use.” For instance, Cephalon, maker of modafinil has said that 90 percent of prescriptions currently are for off-label used. The spread of Internet pharmacies has given them new ways for distribution and new tools for mass testing potential long-term effects.
Modern neuroethics will have to careat a new approach to drug policy: The key question is: Which brain states should be legal? http://apocalypse-blues.typepad.com/
Now this is something to ponder. I am going to look into the book also. It would seem that what is really behind the curtains of consciousness and awareness are not what we have thought it to be. Really good post.
A little research would show anyone how absolutely hopeless it is for us to expect any real reform regarding healthcare. Take a look here at the contributions Max Baucus received from special interests related to healthcare during this campaign cycle and you'll have absolutely no doubt whatsoever where his vote will go and who he is really fighting for. And guess what? It ain't YOU!
He is completely in the pockets of the healthcare and insurance companies as you can see from the list below. It is a list of the amounts of money he received from his top five individual contributors and his top five industry contributors during this election cycle.
INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS:
Schering Plough Corp. $76,200.00
Goldman Sachs $47,900.00
KK&R Investment Corp. $47,000.00
Amer. Intrn'l Group $46,750.00
Aetna, Inc. $45,250.00
----------------------------------------
TOTAL: $263,100.00
INDUSTRY CONTRIBUTORS:
Securities and Investment $842,150.00
Lawyers/Law Firms $685,604.00
Insurance $552,575.00
Pharmaceutical and
Health Products $506,313.00
Health Professionals $497,641.00
----------------------------------------
TOTAL: $3,084,283.00
GRAND TOTAL: $3,347,383.00
We need to understand that it is the special interests who are literally paying for the votes of our representatives through their "lobbying" which should be more accurately termed "bribery."
When Max Baucus convened a group of supposed interested parties to discuss healthcare reform, certain individuals were deliberately excluded. Does this give you a hint about his real intent??? There's no hope for anything like a "public option" (the very best option) when we have a congress full of people like him.
The average American's voice doesn't have a chance in the face of this unfair system of paying for votes, which is exactly what lobbying is all about. I firmly believe that lobbying should be declared a criminal offense and labeled what it really is: BRIBERY!!!
The information provided in this posting is available as it relates to all of our congress personnel at www.opensecrets.org.
The Cold War has been over for almost 2 decades, but Cold War insanity hasn't. "Socialist" is still a dirty word in the much of the US even though almost every American is a socialist to some extent:
Most support public schools, i.e., government institutions staffed by government employees. Most support public parks, prisons, police, and libraries.
Yet the world's going to come to an end if we got...God Forbid!...socialized medicine.
The GOP and the medico-industrial complex have been able to stoke this irrationality to build what appears to be genuine grassroots opposition to any change in the US health care "system".
Meanwhile, the Demos won't touch their grassroots with a 10-foot pole. Obama's in there cozy with big Pharma and big Insurance, but single payer advocates aren't even in the room, let alone at the table. (And, as we know, single payer like they have in Canada isn't socialist -- the doctors and hospitals aren't public employees. To get true socialized medicine you'd have to go that Stalinist gulag...England.)
It's a little depressing to see Obama following almost the identical path that led to Bill & Hillary Clinton's health care fiaso.
I agree. Obama's no socialist. To bad!
Re dfairley August 7th, 2009 1:00 pm
As you observe, "...almost every American is a socialist to some extent..."
Yes. In addition to the schools, roads, and so on that you mention, apparently they're also okay with socialized bank failures and three socialized wars (or more, when Africom becomes fully operational and a plausible pretext can be cooked up).
FrankS:
Thanks for compiling the list of Sen. Baucus's political donors.
A few more tidbits to underscore the dysfunctionality of our political system, which represents corporate interests, not voters:
--Baucus, the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who will have a disproportionate say in shaping healthcare reform, was elected by Montana voters who comprise 0.3% of the American electorate.
--Ninety percent of his political funding comes from out of state.
Re JoeTWallace August 7th, 2009 3:17 pm
Interesting tidbits, and deeply disturbing that this type of carpetbagging is so widespread yet so poorly understood.
As much as I admire Bernie Sanders, I refuse to donate to his campaign on the principle that if the people of his own state can't get it up to reelect him, maybe they know something this non-Vermonter doesn't.
Obviously Big Pharm and the insco scammers (who can outbid us all) don't share my principles.
It really gets a bit wearying seeing posts like the one below that focus on Baucus and the Blue Dogs as the chief villains of the tawdry health-care melodrama--or farce--now unfolding on the stage of Congress. Obama, Waxman, Kennedy, and the usual "liberal" suspects are just as responsible for sabotaging the only serious reform--single payer--as any Blue Dog or Republican.
The alarming unraveling of serious health reform is not a parable of wicked Blue Dogs or Republican elephants. The proper zoological classification of the Beltway menagerie of both parties is money-hungry piggies--including the so-called liberal Democrats who have spawned these farcical, nonstarter public-option shams.
Obama is selling out to the HMOs and Big Pharma by endorsing an approach that retains their chokehold on this dysfunctional, unraveling health-care system by guaranteeing that the shriveled pub op, with its lack of public funding and need to charge premiums and imposed deductibles, will present no challenge to the HMOs.
The only beneficiaries of the mainstream Democratic plans are the HMOs and Big Pharma.
For extensive documentation of this reality, see the covery story of the latest issue of Business Week: "The Health Insurers Have Already Won" (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_33/b4143034820260.htm?chan=magazine+channel_top+stories)
All the big players in Congress--mainstream Dems, Blue Dogs, and Republicans alike--agree on that important principle--keeping their paymasters in business. The apparent infighting is just quibbling about how best to bamboozle the American people while sticking it to them.
For those who stubbornly cling to the notion that the magical phrase "public option"--no matter how shriveled and enfeebled by Democratic accession to lobbyist demands--makes the forthcoming pseudo-reform bill worth supporting, please acquaint yourself with the realities behind the consumer fraud known as "public option":
http://www.pnhp.org/blog/2009/07/20/bait-and-switch-how-the-%E2%80%9Cpublic-option%E2%80%9D-was-sold/
For further education on the reasons that only nonprofit Medicare for all will solve this nation's healthcare crisis, see any of the following:
www.pnhp.org
http://www.1payer.net/
www.singlepayeraction.org
http://www.healthcare-now.org
http://www.guaranteedhealthcare.org/
Most comments denigrating single payer national health care systems seem to come from people without personal experience with such systems or a vested interest in our current system. Numerous studies have established that single payer national health care systems cost about half of our system while providing better health care as measured by outcome (infant mortality, longevity, hospital mistakes etc.). My family has personal experience with health care systems in England, Germany, Norway and USA from living in those countries. I would not hesitate to choose any of their systems over ours (USA). It is difficult to understand why systems demonstrated to be better than ours are not seriously considered here in the USA. Are we that misinformed, brainwashed, uneducated, dogmatically tied to capitalist philosophy (that in this case is failing), not as smart as citizens in other countries, or is it that it was not invented by the self-proclaimed greatest nation on earth. Most likely it is that our politicians are bought off by the healthcare, insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
A viable health care system must also be decoupled from ones place of work like the rest of the world. This will help make our industry more competitive, and encourage employee mobility into new economic activities to help spawn and expand new businesses.
The bottom line, born out by facts and not emotions or dogma, is that single payer national health care systems work better for more people at lower cost than our for profit system.
exactly :
the WORK BASED "private insurance system" and patchwork of social security and medicaire upon retirement "having accumulated appropriate quarterly hours by years of work"
is the ONE thing that BLEEDS american industries .
just look at Ford, Chrysler, plenty of once "american icons" of industry -- which , due to THEIR own initiation of "work-based benefits and insurance" generations ago to PICK and CHOOSE healthy workers as incentive towards "competitiveness in the business"
now have suffered the BLOWBACK of their OWN monstrous schemes...and it's bitten them dry. rather than make them "more competitive" out of the QUALITY of their business ...it just turned them into PROXY businesses for the Insurance corporations, pharamaceuticals, etc.
they created the monstrous "private work based" insurance system that , like a parasite, took over their own businesses and bankrupted them.
AND enslaved americans and their own businesses to the INSURANCE corporations and "health providers".
RESULT?
a population that is lacking in creativity, intelligence, freedom to be better human individuals, and FEARFUL of their own "insurance" and INSECURE in their "security".....
along with businesses in the same predicament and fearing that they themselves will cease to exist.
and a population that is nothing much more than glorified "service providers" , paper pushers, customer clerks, and more and more like serfs mostly doing jobs that are devoid of joy and fulfilment. ..whose noblest aspirations are to have their "few minutes of fame" or recognition , wherever that might be...and then to find it - become nothing more than poorly paid NARCISSISTS who over-estimate THEIR own importance in this world, because they STILL believe they are
EXCEPTIONAL for living and "working" in america the great land of freedom and "choice".........
what a mess of a civilization.
"the WORK BASED "private insurance system" and patchwork of social security and medicaire upon retirement "having accumulated appropriate quarterly hours by years of work"
is the ONE thing that BLEEDS american industries .
just look at Ford, Chrysler, plenty of once "american icons" of industry -- which , due to THEIR own initiation of "work-based benefits and insurance" generations ago to PICK and CHOOSE healthy workers as incentive towards "competitiveness in the business"
now have suffered the BLOWBACK of their OWN monstrous schemes...and it's bitten them dry. rather than make them "more competitive" out of the QUALITY of their business ...it just turned them into PROXY businesses for the Insurance corporations, pharamaceuticals, etc"
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What a load of BS. The unions pressured all those companies to promise more goodies to workers than their "labor" was worth. Some people had great paying jobs while it lasted . The unions helped run their companies out of business and now the taxpayer is ensuring they stay solvent.
I'm sure everyone on wallstreet is going to be amazed and the dumbass pol hacks are going to shout "SEE SEE" when GM claims a profit for this quarterly period.
Well of course they are, the govt just finished shoveling money from the taxpayers to them. Then the govt virtually offers to give everybody $4500 to buy a new car.
Encouraging cash strapped consumers to ditch a pefectly operational car for a new car payment is sheer stupidity at best.
The debate ought to include the re-broadcast on a regular network (CBS, ABC, or NBC) of Bill Moyer's Journal -- the episode with Wendell Potter.
So few people watch PBS that it could be broadcast every night for a month on that network, and I bet only 2% of TV viewers would ever see it.
This show is already in the can. It is "shovel ready". Won't someone see that it gets viewed by a larger audience?
"Top Blue Dog Boasts: We Killed Single Payer Health Care"
So what do we do now? Draw straws to see who takes these sadistic creatures out?
"White House Confirms: Deal With Big Pharma Bars Price Negotiations"
Obama just sold his people 'down' the river.
"Rahm Warns Liberal Groups: Stop Targeting Dem Senators"
Now we're being threatened by an Israeli citizen?
The Dems are fumbling the ball again on Health Care. The last time they screwed up we got 12 yrs. of a right wing Congress and 8 yrs. of A fascist Bullyboy Pres.
The Dems are not 'fumbling the ball again on Health Care'. They never were for health care---they are for profitable health INSURANCE!! Bill and Hillery had that big conference on ideas for health care and only invited HEALTH INSURANCE PEOPLE. No health care professionals, no organizations working in the public interest and no public input---just INSURANCE CORPORATIONS!
And now Obama says he wants a 'socially platable version' of health care and will not say that it is best for our society to have health care---not health insurance. Obama is taking care of the insurance bastards and the hell with the people of the nation. His plan is WORSE THAN WHAT WE HAVE NOW!
Seaglass is concerned that after Clinton we got a right wing Congress and a fascist bully boy pres. Like Clinton was any good? He who got us 'the end of welfare' (the end of the New Deal guarantee of food, clothing and shelter for all of our children), NAFTA (the end of manufacturing in the United States and the out sourcing of all of our jobs) and then, to top it off, he repealed the Glass Segal act that separated the regular banks from the Wall Street gamblers and caused the current collapse of our ecomomic system.
Wake up gang. The Democrats and the Republicans are working together to screw us all and kill the planet so the rich can get richer.
that's about it, in a nutshell.
the us congress and governance is, as henry ck liu of asiatimes online said of capitalism,
" not about a few bad apples "
"it's the BARREL OF APPLES that is ROTTEN".
it's not about a few "bad big banks" or " a few investment houses that are bad "
it's BIG BANKING that is BAD - and INVESTMENT banking that is BAD
it's not about a "few businesses that are bad corporations"
it's CORPORATISM for profit that is bad.
it's not about the "excesses of privatization"
it's PRIVATIZATION of necessities for living that is bad.
it's NOT even UNfair "profitmaking"
it's really abotu PROFITMAKING that is bad.
it corrupts everything around it eventually.
capitalism teaches that without "private profit there is no progress or enhancement of life"
how is private profit enhancing the lives of BILLIONS sacrificed for the PRIVATE profit of a few?.
how is wealth accumulation by the few enhancing the lives of the many sacrificed for the sake of that wealth accumulation for the few?.
the ONLY "trickle down" of this economic system and philosophy is not really the "technological progress for mankind"
but in how it is used to DENY decent lives to the many by the few . and the trickling down of SUFFERING of the many for the sake of the few.
This giveaway to the ruling health insurance industry looks like it will end up being the mother of all regressive taxes. Workers earning between about $15000 and $30000 will be especially hammered by one of the World's most regressive taxes in history. If you earn nothing or almost nothing, you will probably be better off assuming you get Medicaid, although it is well known that Medicaid is substandard health care. But if you are truly poor, it appears that at least you won't be forced to spend yourself into future homelessness.
Lower income workers who know they are at risk for homelessness if they give all their money to the insurance companies would actually be very wise to simply refuse to pay the Worlds' All-Time Most Regressive Tax. If you end up homeless after paying huge sums to the health insurance mafia, your health will go to hell in a hand basket so fast that whether or not you have health insurance becomes beside the point.
I recently read a Medical Journal article about how quickly the health of homeless individuals goes south. Roughly speaking and on average, a homeless person ages almost a month for every day of homelessness.
Its getting to the point, with the economy collapsed and politics in the cess pool, that about the only thing left in America to hope for is the Chinese pulling the plug on the dollar and/or on boosting the prices of what they export. Both of these things appear to be inevitable, but it is very difficult to even estimate when they will happen. There are a lot of things like that in Economics: you know what is going to happen unless things radically change, but you can't accurately predict when.
But when things such as that happen, the economy will collapse even more completely than it has so far, and at that point only insane people will want to continue the failed system.
When the money becomes worthless, the whole country will have to "start from scratch," and only then will it be able to set up a health care system which is halfway decent. In the mean time, we have more misery, more preventable death, more bankruptcy, more unemployment, and many other scourges too numerous to mention to look forward to.
In such an environment you need to, as some have written here, derive your happiness from within yourself, and you need to get your sustenance from your family and your community. You can't be depending on a failed far right society to acknowledge your value and your accomplishments. Believe it or not, its possible for an individual to survive and be happy even in a failed society. Its tricky, but hardly impossible, or even all that difficult, if you are smart.
To garlanddegreeff:
Wow!!! Great post. Sounds like Big Pharma is our Brave New World, where off-label use of synthetics is just soooo much more fun than what Mother Nature produces.
Helps explain why the willow trees are disappearing...
Medicine then ceases to exist, to be replaced by patent-enriched drugs. Human homeostatis ceases to exist, as the pioneering Michael Jackson's early death can attest.
Alienation not only becomes the permanent norm, it is socially induced through costly, but profitable, pill popping and the resultant required surgeries.
The capacity to create complexity, creates complexity.
-30-
Flood insurance for home owners is only offered by the government, because private insurance companies won't do it. Ask the opponents of single payer health insurance who are home owners if they are also willing to give up this socialized program, and how their mortgage holder would feel if they did.
"imagine instead if Obama called upon the roughly 13 million voters who enlisted as the grassroots base of his presidential campaign to rally on the steps of Congress and demand comprehensive universal health care reform."
Hilarious! Obviously O'Bamba won't call on any grassroots to rally for single payer because that goes against the will of his elite masters. The question is why don't those 13 million who helped O'Bamba's campaign take the initiative themselves to rally on the steps of Congress? The answer is that they are doing just fine, thank you. They don't want single payer healthcare because that torpedos part of the elite establishment they are dependent on for their opiates. O'Bamba supporters never wanted single payer healthcare. They only want to shift the public dole away from the military over to the type of godzilla enterprises they prefer to be involved in and benefit from, including the private healthcare rackets!
he won't because he already threw them under the bus...and is already planning on how to make them "forget" THAT - for the next election -- to USE them all over again. he'll dangle his "change is nearer THAN EVER..just find me another 13 million grassroots to help US ensure democrats have a 90 senate vote majority, and the house 200 vote majority"......
before he'll throw them ALL under the bus again.
Jeez, where are all the right wing trolls coming from? Obama's "13 million supporters" "don't want single payer?" Believe me, they do, almost without exception. All those Organizing for America people you see out there collecting signatures for Obama support single payer. It's just that they haven't broken with their dreams of Obama yet.
And that post about how good care used to be for indigent people before Medicare! That's insane! There was essentially no care for the poor elderly before Medicare. American life spans jumped significantly because people got access to some basic care after Medicare and Medicaid.
I guess CD is going to have to get used to the ranting and lies of the right, like everyone else in this twisted society.
Oh quit your whining!
You wanted a fascist state to live in. Now you have it.
Enjoy your plastic pleasures while you can.
It wont be here for us much longer. . . fools.
Actually had a door to door health insurance salesman ring my doorbell the other day. When I sent him packing, his last words were: "See you in 6 months" I think he meant that by that time mandatory health insurance will be the law of the land and I'll have no choice. On that note, if it is mandated, will it be deducted fom my SS check before I even get it? SS is my only income nd I opted out of Medicare because the $90 per month was to much for me.
Let's just limit the federal budget to 2% of GNP and with the money that people do not pay in taxes they can take care of themselves.
Look, this whole "debate" is being framed by the folks who all want a one world death and slavery system.
Also this whole thing never had anything to do with "health" or "care". Eugenics, euthanasia, abortion, genocide, and other forms of mass murder have been cooking right along in our country and all the world for many decades.
We have government socialized healthcare in the form of Medicare and Medicaid for many decades now. Fabian and Gramscian socialism is the slow turtle gradual kind.
The Obamanator is trying to make giant leaps toward the totalitarian one world death and slavery system on many fronts, not only health care.
What we the people are angry and upset about is not simply one du jour death and slavery issue being served up to us by our evil, not insane, controlled puppet leaders. We are thorougly and seriously disenchanged with the WHOLE SYSTEM of death and slavery for the people of this nation as well as the people of the whole world. (Sorry I mentioned probably a verboten concept -- the primacy of the human being on this planet. We have been saturated by these masters of terror and evil with the "knowledge" that humans have no more right (really less right) to live on this planet than the Mongolian snow leopard.
We individuals in the USA at least have a glimmer understanding of freedom that is based on the Creator endowed unalienable rights of the INDIVIDUAL. We equate collectivism, in all the clever fake issues and fake debates served up to us, with despotic death and slavery for the individual.
Doctors have always had to make life and death decision for patients. Certain kinds of surgical procedures are limited in their availability, and the doctor has to evaluate social factors such as is the person the breadwinner of a family. Will the person take care of their health aftet the operation? Will the person be enabled by the operation to resume gainful employment? It is not a case of anyone who can afford the operation can have it.
In the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and early 70s, we had a good healthcare system in the USA. Indigent patients could receive high quality care through the county hospitals and clinics, a system that doctors donated a portion of their time and services to each week. Also, indigent patients got high quality health care at medical teach facilities and hospitals under the care of interns, residents, and staff physicians and surgeons. The insurance industry was not a big of a factor back then.
Our food, our natural resources, our information from the media, our health care is all manipulated and tainted and controlled by the same brotherhood of darkness.
I stand up for what is right and good and full of truth for every person on the planet, and to me that means having sovereign nation states under the rule of law under God, not nightmare one world death and slavery system
"We will never get Single Payer,"said the organizers of the Obama Health care met up -- because Congress has taken it off the table."--Ho-hum--that pesky Congress. The ones who should be outraged that our democracy has been taken over by corporate interests--the Obama people who worked to elect him--are perfectly OK with our morally corrupt system of governance-- and sure that they can make a compromise with those corporate forces they can live with. Their public plan reform however will be watered down to an unworkable mechanism which will also fail. Meanwhile savings form Single Payer HR676 are not even scored by the CBO. "They wouldn't be as great as you think" the Obama people warn me. How would they know. To stop this all we have to do is elect a few Congressmaen who willl run on Single Payer and throw the BlueDogs out. It will not be the Obama people who do this. I doubt it will be the Democratic party. Big labor has already sold us out to support the "Health Care Reform" that Obama offers. I don't know who will do it or when it will get done but it will happen-- if not in my lifetime. I feel like an Abolitionist must have felt in the 1840's-- arguing against slavery.
wildwood instead of YOU whining organize your family friends neighbors and town to do something about this. they want this to
happen the pitting a yiping against one and other. also
the kkk and other fascist group to stop us from focusing
on who really owns all the resources on this planet.
PEACE OUT.
It beats me why the Democrats in Washington, including our President, have not discovered that there is a simple way to enact a voluntary "public program" without creating a new program. It can be done by lowering the age of eligibility for medicare and medicaid to the date of birth but not mandatory! Perhaps stepwise but unalterably. Although I personally prefer the "reformed" medicare and medicaid to be mandatory, I recommend voluntary because "mandatory" will not pass the Congress soon, if ever. I expect the overwhelming majority of Americans to sign up, not immediately but eventually.
Instead we may get a new, convoluted, byzantine "reform" which already looks more like a "dis-form" in many respects.
If asked by Obama I would recommend that he scrap/veto all present plans and start working on mine and dare the Congress to vote against an expansion of Medicare/Medicaid.
Crowsnest August 9th, 2009 9:04 am..........I think it is good to understand, they only want it TO LOOK LIKE THEY ARE SAVING THE TAXPAYER MONEY as the insurers line up for a bigger share than ever before. They create the illusion of cutting costs. Of course, extending Medicare to everyone would make the most sense. The program is already in place and the administrative costs are very low. BUT, it will not make the most money for the industry. They know the taxpayer is a well that never dries up as long as we stay asleep. Like 9/11..it's just an illusion they create. With most citizens brain dead and susceptible to continued hynosis and suggestion via TV, it's a relatively simple procedure to spin and make the populace believe anything; hence BHO's election (as if our votes mattered...the fix was in ages ago).
"0bama's health reform initiative confronts the reality of the beltway culture"?
In what world?
0's policy IS beltway culture. The confrontation is Demoplicans &am; Republicrat vs what's left of us.