We Need A National Health Care Plan Now!
August 2nd, 2009
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
Thousands of Americans are dying every day and millions suffer needlessly because the Republicans and conservative Democrats, a.k.a. the Blue Dawgs, have been in the pocket of big business and their lobbyists, the for-profit insurance companies, for many years.
I could have died two days ago, if not for a little money in my pocket and a thorough search for a cheap clinic all the way on the other side of town. A major molar up under a bridge abscessed on Thursday, but I got to the clinic in time to get antibiotics and pain killers prescribed, and an appointment on Saturday morning to have it pulled.
A tooth infection like that can kill. I know of people who died waiting too long for treatment. The infection eventually creeps into your blood, and no modern antibiotic will kill it at that point.
Not many free-lance journalists or Web publishers these days have health insurance, because the cost is astronomical for an individual to buy into the for profit plan.
We need a government, public option, just like our do nothing representatives in Congress from Alabama, who all oppose the health plan on the table in Washington right now!
All the major news organizations are posting stories on the health care debate now, but our lead story at the moment is an AP story, running under the headline:
Political Distortions Rife in National Health Care Debate
Confusing claims and outright distortions have animated the national debate over changes in the health care system. Opponents of proposals by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats falsely claim that government agents will force elderly people to discuss end-of-life wishes.
To see how this distortion trickles down to the masses of people who don’t share our hyper Web browsing skills and depend on local newspapers and TV for news, here’s an instance from the dinner table tonight.
“I’m hearing that if Obama’s plan passes, seniors will be hurt the most. Medicare won’t cover us anymore. It will require us to tell a government bureaucrat our living will.”
According to AP’s analysis of some of the distorted claims seniors and others are seeing from Republican opponents of the bill:
CLAIM: The House bill “may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia,” House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio said July 23.
Former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey said in a July 17 article: “One troubling provision of the House bill compels seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years … about alternatives for end-of-life care.”
THE FACTS: The bill would require Medicare to pay for advance directive consultations with health care professionals. But it would not require anyone to use the benefit.
But even the AP story doesn’t clear this up.
This is not Obama’s plan anyway. He offered general guidelines for health care reform, and let Congress come up with the specific plan and the bill authorizing it. If John Edwards or Hillary Clinton would have won the presidency, chances are we would have gotten a specific plan with a national, single payer system. Whether Congress would have passed that is unknowable, but a lot of us out here would like that option to be on the table.
The for profit insurance companies have been killing Americans for years by charging too much, denying claims for “pre-existing conditions,” and refusing to cover people who are already sick. That’s not a health care system. It is a money making scheme.
While most of the countries in the rest of the modern, developed world, including little old socialist Cuba down south of here, cover everybody. In fact, in most of the developed world in industrial democracies, they widely use all kinds of measures to prevent certain health problems, like cavities in teeth.
In capitalist America, the goal is not to prevent cavities. It is to get rich filling them.
Next time you go to the dentist, ask your doctor if he or she supports some type of health care for those who have none. The honest, smart ones will say yes, because they know the system is skewed right now and it will help the entire system to get everybody covered. It will help the deficit too, big time. No more paying for emergency room visits for the indigent.
The greedy ones will say no.
Find out what kind of a person you have working on your teeth. Is your doctor really trying to help you with your health care? Or, is he or she just trying to make the big bucks off your health problems?
If they say no, you should exercise your god-given American right — to change doctors.
Oh, and by the way. Nothing in this health care plan so far drafted by Congress will do anything to make you change doctors. If the company you work for changes plans, they might have an effect on you. That’s not the government doing it. If you work for a corporation, you are already under their control.
If McCain-Palin had been elected, the for profits would already be figuring out ways to use the human genome to deny you coverage based on your genes, if you have a proclivity for certain illnesses.
If we don’t pass something now, we may never get another chance in our lifetimes. It’s now or never. Do you want to live? Or potentially die unnecessarily?
If you want to live, call up your Congressman and fight for health care reform. It probably won’t do much good in Alabama, but what the heck. Do it anyway…
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August 3rd, 2009 at 8:35 am
This just in via e-mail:
The Republicans are making a full-fledged effort to derail health care reform for perceived political gain. They have outlined a “Trojan horse” plan aimed at deflecting criticism of their “vote NO, do NOTHING” policy. However, when you “cut to the chase”, the Republican proposal for health care reform is quite simply to let poor people suffer without medical care and to die prematurely. The Republican philosophy is that the “free market” is the best means for rationing health care. This means, if you can afford health care, you can attain health care. If you can not afford health care, you must do without health care. Health Care is nothing more than a service provided by a fancy spa or a meal at an up-scale restaurant. If you can afford it, “go for it”, if not, do without. This dishonest and hypocritical Republican philosophy must be exposed.
Republicans opposed Medicare and Medicaid. These programs are “government run” health care which, according to Republicans, our country can not afford. These programs interfere with the doctor-patient relationship. [Do not worry about the interference of private insurers in the doctor-patient relationship.] Medicare and Medicaid, according to Republicans, must be secretly undermined and allowed to wither and die. This will lead to more “personal responsibility” on the part of senior citizens and the economically disadvantaged. After all, Medicare and Medicaid are programs dragging our country into destructive “socialism”. Unless Republicans are completely dishonest hypocrites, they have to believe that the Veterans Administration and Department of Defense health care systems are even worse because they truly are “government run” health care. The VA and DOD doctors are actually paid a salary by the government which obviously makes them “socialists”. The Republicans, if logic prevails, must believe that VA and DOD systems have to be reformed out of existence. This will make our injured veterans and military personnel more “personally responsible”.
Of course, Republicans do not support funding for the National Institute of Health [NIH] research to find cures for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy and other diseases because the country can not afford it and this leads to government run health care.
This Fall, while railing against government run health care, hypocritical Republicans will inevitably line up for Center for Disease Control [CDC] influenza inoculations.
According to Republicans, excess medical testing is totally attributable to the threat of malpractice lawsuits. Doctors and hospitals simply have to practice “defensive medicine”. The fact that doctors and hospitals earn more from the “fee for service” payment model is not relevant. There is no greed in the medical profession. All medical professionals are altruistically motivated.
According to Republicans, the only real excess costs in the current system of medical care are the costs associated with caring for undocumented workers who occasionally get sick or injured. These costs must be eliminated. The costs associated with hospital advertising departments, TV drug ads and private insurance mailers are just a part of the “free market” at work. Every insurance company executive certainly must earn at least $5 million per year. Golly, they are just trying to help the sick and injured.
According to Republican religious extremists, if poor people suffer and die prematurely, it is God’s will. After all, the only reason that some people are economically disadvantaged is that they are not favored by God. If God liked you, you would not be poor and you would not get sick or injured without money.
Very truly yours,
J. Martin Booth
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:05 am
Ideally, a universal coverage plan would be operated by some kind of independent trust or cooperative that could resist both the corporate agenda and the bureaucratic agenda. The best model for a trust would be the one proposed by left-libertarian Randal O’Toole for national parks and wilderness areas.
Independent NGOs chartered and mandated to serve various public interests are the way to go for any number of services presently provided, or proposed to be provided, by government.
The reason for that, in my opinion, is that just as much as corporate elites have agendas that do not involve serving the public, so too does the top of the federal bureaucracy and most elected politicians, notably the 535 Byzantine courtiers who sit in Congress.
Cooperatives and independent trusts accomplish the two things that have to be accomplished to make social programs and services truly serve all the people: (a) they are removed from political and corporate influence; and (b) by having independent boards of trustees or directors, accountable to the “clientele” of the service, they are many times more likely to succeed.
Any other plan or scheme will eventually look a lot like Medicare or Amtrak and fall way, way short of achieving its goal, which in the case of health care is true universal coverage.
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:18 am
The French, the Germans, the Canadians and the Cubans seem quite happy with government health care.
I say screw the corrupt insurance companies. Give us national health care now!
But it won’t happen, because Obama is trying to play bipartisan and protect the for-profit market.
We all get screwed again…
August 3rd, 2009 at 2:38 pm
The for-profit health insurance industry represents one of the best arguments for the cooperative/public trust approach that I’m suggesting.
There are 50,000 lobbyists in Washington. Not all of them corporate, of course and certainly not all insurance lobbyists, but likely at least a few thousand. They are the people who actually see members of Congress, and their staffers, on a regular basis, not constituents. They are the people who, thanks to the power-corruption system in DC, get heard when legislation is being drafted.
In order to get a working universal care plan into operation, an end run around those lobbyists is necessary. A dive play, a run up the middle or even a long pass will not work. They’re ready with the best defense available: money and lots of it.
The end run of a cooperative/trust plan would have much greater chance of success – lobbyists would be caught off guard and not prepared to defend that end run. And, as I opined in another reply, this type of plan keeps corporate and political interests as far away as possible.
Different countries have different political and cultural environments. Health care has been nationalized for a long time in France and Germany, so it’s impossible to know whether the French or Germans are really happy with a one-payer system or it’s just a matter of their never having experienced anything different.
As for the Cubans, it’s impossible to know since they haven’t had free elections in quite a number of decades – even before Castro, the unlamented Batista was an authoritarian autocrat. I.e., what the Cuban people may actually want is unknown. And any survey taken in such an environment would likely not be scientifically valid.
Universal care, yes. Run by a Byzantine, corporately-corrupted political establishment in Babylon-by-the-Potomac, no.
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:30 pm
How about objective, eye-witness experience, interviewing people from one end of Havana to the other?
Yes, me and Spider Martin did that…
Forbidden Sister City
Ending the Cuban Embargo Could be a Boon for the Southeastern Economy
By Glynn Wilson and Spider Martin
http://www.southerner.net/v3n1_2002/cuba.html
August 4th, 2009 at 9:18 am
I believe every citizen should have the same health care package we, the taxpayers, provide for our congress. If its good for them, it would be good for us all. We are the only employers on earth that provide better health care for our employees than for ourselves. We should change that.
Universal health care for all would spark a strong economic recovery. Thousands of new hospitals and clinics would have to be built to handle the demand for services. That would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in finance, construction and health care. To pay for it we could terminate the Wall St bailout and tax lobbyists and political contributions. We also could cut our defense budget by half and use that money to rebuild our infrastructure and still spend more than anyone else in the world on defense.