Health Care

Rep. Dennis Kucinich appeared on CSpan recently. I found myself asking why Kucinich is in such a philosophical minority in Washington when everything he says addresses the serious economic and physical realities grinding down the American citizenry. Kucinich speaks with passion, clarity and empathy.

Kucinich admits that Obama received an “unmitigated mess” from George Bush. But he contends Washington is now too paralyzed to restore justice. He warns that we can’t afford to get gridlocked by partisanship. “The country is collapsing!” he declares. Kucinich maintains that health care is one of a three-pronged crisis. Our broken political system is not providing jobs, universal health care or saving homes for its citizens.

Our administration and Congress are not holding insurance companies accountable for the price gouging happening and even profoundly escalating right now. Kucinich believes the proposed health care bill has a CENTRAL FLAW. It is LOCKING IN PRIVATIZATION. There is no process for control of premiums. Kucinich’s rhetoric does not hold back. He calls this government a “cash cow” for corporations. It is providing corporations such as insurance companies with a “license to steal.” At one point he warns of us becoming “slaves on a health insurance plantation.”

If anyone starts giving you a hard time about “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good” and how important it is for our Congress people to go ahead and hold their noses while they vote for the President’s Trojan horse of a health care bill in the name of incremental progress, consider some serious warnings made by Dr. Marcia Angell (first woman editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and currently a lecturer at Harvard Medical School) in a recent Bill Moyers' interview.

Dr. Angell asserts this bill is a step in the WRONG, not right, direction. She laments the profound lack of leadership shown by the President for health care reform. She warns that this bill would pour hundreds of billions of dollars of public money into health care companies in the next decade. At the same time, our hapless citizenry will be forced to pay whatever exorbitant rates will be levied by avaricious, profit making insurers. Given the obscene, record-making profits 4 of the 5 largest insurance megacorporations made last year, in these very troubled times for the rest of us, Dr. Angell’s warning deserves serious consideration:

Dr. Angell:

Fighting for the wrong things and too little, too late. He [Obama] gave away the store at the very beginning by compromising. Not just compromising, but caving in to the commercial insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry. And then he stood back for months while the thing just fell apart. Now he's fighting, but he's fighting for something that shouldn't pass. Won't pass and shouldn't pass.

I find myself more and more bewildered and angered over the total disenfranchisement of Single Payer-Expanded Medicare for All advocates in the official national health care reform conversation.

A recent article by Robert Kuttner is entitled “The Cure That Dares Not Speak Its Name.” The cure for our broken health care system implied by Kuttner? Anti-commercialism.

Every other industrial nation has a system of health care coverage that offers universal coverage. Kuttner points out as examples Canada with its single payer program, England with its National Health Service and Germany with its non-profit insurance plans. In an international scoring of quality health care, we rank a pathetic 37th and yet costs for our system are 5% more of the GDP than the second costliest system's.

Make sure to watch it all the way through

Related: Healthcare by the numbers

Leno’s single payer “Medicare for All” health bill passes Senate

Yay!

Posted by Stranahan on youtube:

I'm a former Obama supporter. I'm just totally fed up with reversal after reversal and lie after lie from President Obama on health care.
 

2009—The PDA Year in Review

http://www.counterpunch.org/redmond12232009.html

Helen Redmond in a scalding analysis of presidential and congressional (especially on the part of supposedly “progressive” Democrats) betrayal of the US citizenry with the health care fiasco now being hypocritically and dangerously heralded as “historic reform” writes:

“Millions believed Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to create a humane, affordable and inclusive health care system and rein in the copious abuses of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. On the campaign trail, Obama proclaimed these corporations were greedy and more concerned about profits and patents than the needs of patients. Some thought because Obama was a former supporter of a single-payer system, he might just enact it when he won the Whitehouse. How wrong they were.

No one could have predicted how much influence and control over health care reform President Obama would give to the very corporate interests killing and bankrupting the American people, and who just a few months earlier, had fiercely attacked and called out by name. No one could have predicted the scale and scope of the sell out. It is truly astounding given the soaring rhetoric of before and the cruel and sleazy reality of now.”

“The cruel and sleazy reality of now."

I worked for Obama at the eleventh hour. I was one of the 80 million who responded to his invitation to hope. What he is doing right now along with a corporate-prostituted Congress? It is cruel and it is sleazy. It is anti-democracy. It cries out for citizen awareness, outrage and pushback!