Laura Flanders meet Michael Moore.

Yes, Michael Moore makes an extremely effective movie about health care. Wendell Potter, a former CEO of an insurance company, tells Congress about the rapacious nature of the insurance companies. And still our politicians refuse to listen. As I mentioned in Robert Naiman's article today, if those on the right can organize and demonstrate because they apparently feel that it is quite fine that 18,000 Americans die each year because they do not have health insurance or, in the case of Ms. Sutton, have been unfairly treated by the insurance companies, then one has to wonder why those on the left have not taken to the streets and to Washington, D.C. to tell the politicians in this country that health care in this country, as it is in every other advanced industrialized country, should be considered a right and not a privilege.

What in the world are they waiting for? And why is it that the politicians in this country do not give a damn how the insurance companies have treated people like Crystal Lee Sutton?

So Crystal Lee Sutton joined the ranks of those 45,000 who died because of our private insurance-based healthcare system.

Frankly, this is a stupid, simplistic piece. As has already been pointed out, Michael Moore made a very powerful film about the widespread suffering caused by the health insurance industry and the mainstream media largely yawned. He made another movie undermining the Second Ammendment and won an Oscar. Go figure. Robert Greenwald is about to release what looks like an even harder attack on the health insurance privateers. I'm not holding my breath while I wait to see it get the sort of serious mainstream coverage it deserves.

The fact is, millions of Americans all over the country are organizing and fighting for health care. Just about every Nurses' organization in the country is doing the equivilent of a Norma Rae every day, as are Physicians for a National Health Plan. It has all been blocked out by the media. The impact it is having in D.C. less easy to measure. I have seen politicians in my part of the country move further to the left on this issue, even as the corporate owned media tries to spin Baucus' corporate wellfare bill as a "bi-partisan compromise."

It is also a fact that not enough people are speaking out. The only chance at all for defeating organized money is to organize the people. If you aren't funded by a Wall Street backed astro-turf organization, and you are doing activism while desperately trying to earn a living, then organizing a resistance to corporate privateering is a much slower and more frustrating process than you would like it to be. But that doesn't mean it is not happening.

When I hear "liberals" complaining about how the right-wing is out in the streets and the left isn't, I know right away that I am dealing with a person who spends way too much time sitting on his or her ass, getting reality filtered to them through the television set. It isn't so tough to get a big turn out in D.C. when you have 24 hours a day of fascist lies spewing out of the radio, millions of dollars of corporate money and one of the largest Bus Corporations in the midwest on your side. When you have to hold bake sales or benifit concerts to pay for a bus trip to Washington, it's a little harder to make the trip. Not that getting on cable news for standing around the reflecting pool holding signs is the best way to accomplish our legislative goals, anyway.

If you judge the effectiveness of the "left" by how much visibility they get on corporate television and in Hollywood movies, then you are destined to despair. If you want to stop being a helpless victim, get the fuck up and look around your community for people and groups organizing for single payer and/or at least a viable public option that ANYBODY WHO WANTS TO can buy into. Chances are, you won't have to look long to find such people. And if you can't find such people in your community, then that is all the more reason to get active. No army ever won a single battle by sitting around the camp fires, moaning about how they can't win.

Briggs Seekins
briggsseekins.wordpress.com

I'm Canadian.

I choose whatever doctor I want to see.

When I do see a doctor, I pay NO deductible, NO co-pays, no fees at all.

Also, my insurance premiums are $0. That's right NO insurance premiums.

I pay no money to see a doctor whether I'm working or unemployed.

I do pay for prescription drugs and dentists but I have insurance for those.

So far no one in the media has had the balls to say who her insurance company was. WE ALL ARE NORMA RAE!

Silence is Consent.

What about activist, "star" of SiCKO, and single-payer proponent Donna Smith, who's often published at CD?

· Yr Obd't Servant

If playing Norma Rae elevated Ms. Field as a human being, agreeing to play the lead in Not with My Daughter (hope I have the name of the movie right) was definitely her low point. It was pure racism.

If playing Norma Rae elevated Ms. Field as a human being, agreeing to play the lead in Not with My Daughter (hope I have the name of the movie right) was definitely her low point. It was pure racism.

The problem is the future 'Norma Rae' of single-payer healthcare won't get any airtime or front page coverage from corporate America. People are speaking their minds all across the nation, but the MSM refuses to acknowledge them.

Insurance is only part of the problem.

Nearly 200,000 a year die from preventable medical mistakes
According to Medical News Today:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/11856.php

This is over twice the rate at which American GIs were killed during WWII by the Germans and Japanese combined!
----------------
And nearly 800,000 a year die from modern medicine itself
(even when done correctly, modern medical techniques kill)

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed.htm

By this reckoning, medicine itself is the leading cause of death in the US -
more die from medicine, than from heart disease or cancer.
-------------
About half of all doctors admit not reporting unethical, unprofessional, or impaired practice by their colleagues:

http://healthcare-economist.com/2007/12/04/
nearly-half-of-all-us-doctors-fail-to-report-
incompetent-or-unethical-colleagues/

If you are a patient, know that your doctor may very well see protecting his colleague from being caught doing something wrong is more important than your welfare.
-----------------

Much is written about our dysfunctional health care financing system.
But the medical community itself is pretty dysfunctional too.

We can do better.
Kick the bad doctors out of medicine (and the bad nurses, and bad administrators)
They deserve no stinking tenured protection for simply graduating from med school,
doing residency, and completing the license exam.
We can find better people to train and do their jobs.

The arrogance of medical professionals is the biggest impediment to their improvement.

I'm concerned the unethical medical culture that US doctors today have grown used to will take a while to get rid of - it's deep in the personality of people who are used to having their well-entrenched views respected.

There should be zero tolerance toward physicians who don't live up to their ethical obligations. If there are school districts that hold kids to strict zero tolerance about abusing drugs, we should hold physicians (who have so much more power and are given so much more trust), to strict zero tolerance toward abusing medical ethics.

We need to invest power in people who AREN'T doctors, nurses, or health care professionals of any sort, and are not in any way beholden to that industry. Those whose expertise is basic understanding of medical ethics need to be given teeth to strip doctors of their licenses, have the willingness to do so, and the backbone not to stray from that purpose. Zero tolerance - if high school kids should be kept to it, doctors should be too. Overseeing torture, or training Chinese doctors in organ transplants to help make their Falun Gong executions more profitable, are simply the tip of a huge unethical iceberg in American medicine. Doctors supervising doctors is like kids supervising kids. Doctors DON'T collectively have their act together well enough for that.

Take ALL doctors off their own licensing boards!
Put people there whose first interest is patient welfare!

There was a story that appeared on Huffington (?) about a woman who found out years after her insurance company already knew, that she had lung cancer. The bottom line being that the insurer had no plan on paying for treatment and was, presumably, hoping she would die before she figured it out; I heard about a woman who had been going repeatedly to her Kaiser clinic with complaints and requesting Xrays only to be told that it wasn't necessary. Her husband eventually got fed up and took her to another doctor (flew her from the Big Island of Hawaii to Oahu) to get Xrays done there. Turns out she had lung cancer, quite advanced. She died a week ago.

Sounds like another death panel at work. It certainly saved Kaiser a bundle by not treating her initially, because the poor woman died rather quickly.

I think if we were able to compile these stories nationwide, a very sinister picture would emerge. Our "health" insurance companies have a systematic cost-saving practice of killing off their customers before they can cost them (the insurer) any real money.

We can't afford a public option? I say we can't afford not to have one. Removing profit from the health care delivery formula is the only way to make it just, moral, and adhere to the ideals of the Hippocratic Oath.

Waiting for Norma rae. The days of the hero/savior are over. The belief that we are not our own savior, is the problem. We are that hero. We are that savior. We are the second coming. The enlightened savior does not give us something that we already are in possession of. He or she points out firstly through intellect. Then when our minds are still, and open , without directed thought, we can "receive" confirmation of these truths. not verbal conformation but the transmission of the experience of essence or consciousness awake to it self. in truth there never were any heros, just those who played the role because we insisted on it.

It was the unions that got workers health care that was affordable because more people along with the employer put money into the account that provided the funds to pay for the health care the employee needed . Why don't Americans understand that A Single Payer System is what we need to keep health care costs down. All Americans put money into the general account along with the Government budget allocated for health care which will cover the costs of controlled medical expenses. It will not add nearly as much to the deficit, if it adds anything,to heal Americans, as it cost to wage the many wars that waste blood and money killing people and destroying infrastructures around the world.

Oh, about the same time progressives get a real progressive president, and journalists with a back bone toward truth telling instead of obfuscation. One thing we know for sure: it aint going to be Flanders.

Where have you been, Laura? Health care does have its Norma Rae, only it is a man. His name is Russell Mokhiber and he runs a project called Single Payer Action (singlepayeraction.org).

He was the one who lead the ultimate Norma Rae Moment: the days when several doctors and nurses plus himself stood up in the Senate chambers and called upon the convened Max Baucus health care hearings to give single payer advocates a seat in the discussions. They were arrested for their efforts. If that wasn't a cardboard sign in the air Norma Rae moment, I don't know what is!

Why don't you invite him on your show so he can tell you about what his citizens movement is doing and what actions it plans for the future? I think you will be glad you did.