Five Dems in Iowa Agree: 'No' to Single Payer System; Kucinich Takes Them All On

[RangerRK]

"They all decry the plight of the American people and then they turn around and promote the very system which is driving people towards ill physical and economic health, bankruptcy and death: the for profit health insurance system," said Kucinich. "They do not believe they can get a consensus for change in Congress, yet there was no demonstration of any intention to change the system, despite the fact that 47,000,000 Americans have no health insurance and another 50,000,000 are underinsured."

"There is a national movement in support of HR 676 backed by tens of thousands of physicians, hundreds of union locals and community groups, 77 members of Congress and many state political organizations," said Kucinich.

"This event was not a debate. It was an audition to determine who would work the hardest to protect the interests of the private insurance companies," said Kucinich. "By that measure all on the stage earned the affection of the insurance industry. If I had been on the stage AARP would have had to spend millions more lobbying Congress to keep a for-profit system in place. Instead they heard from Senators Clinton and Edwards who both want to force Americans to buy private health insurance policies. They call their plans universal. They are giving Americans a universal shaft...

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,182798.shtml

"What we have now is predatory capitalism,
which makes the American people a cash crop for the insurance companies."
Dennis Kucinich

[Vinca]

1. Universal shaft - he got that one right. nt

[rjones2818]

2. We should be able to expect better from Dems,

but money trumps common decency it seems.

Go Dennis! :woohoo:
http://dennis4president.com
Choose Peace!

[liberalnurse]

3. America already is a cash cow for

the insurance companies. Have been for years! That's why they are so rich and powerful. Reasonable concepts Do Not Rule....power and money do these days....We have to negotiate to make any progress. I want change and improvement.....to get that I will barter. I owe that to those who have less than I do. An "All or None" plan of thinking just will never get us anywhere but where we are today.....

[redqueen]

10. Barter?

Where has that worked before? Where in history have settling for half-measures ended up in eventual triumph?

[Greyhound]

12. Replying to return after a reasonable amount of time to see if there is

ever a response.

You already know where I stand.

[liberalnurse]

13. It has not been attempted "yet".

Half-measures are better than none. We just don't have a power-base to beat the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. We will never gain on them by screaming, begging or marching...We are not big enough as a collective.

[redqueen]

14. Sure it has. And it dies.

When you're dealing with an enemy (in this case, the insurance companies)... compromising with them will never do anything but prolong your misery.

We DO have the support for massive change. It would be tragic if instead of striking while the iron is hot... triangulators were able to sell us out for nibble-around-the-edges reform. Not so tragic for those who enjoy insurance now (which is why I think so many still support the front runners despite their kowtowing)... but for those waiting for help, it will be disastrous.

[RangerRK]

15. "compromising with them will never do anything but prolong your misery"

exactly like the Bush Administration and what we are experiencing now...

[Greyhound]

47. Just how do you think we got to this sorry state?

By compromising and bartering. The problem is that it is always one-sided and that equals capitulation, not compromise.

You claim to be a nurse, look back at what has happened to your own profession in the last 25 years, where is the give on the other side? The company you probably work for has increased its profits year after year, has your pay been raised a comparable amount? Have your working conditions improved?

We are in a war, it's about time we started fighting it.

[EFerrari]

4. K&R

[TahitiNut]

5. "This event was not a debate. It was an audition ..."

He got that right. All five were kissing health insurance industry ass.

[polichick]

6. "Predatory capitalism"

Great term that describes what's wrong with America on so many fronts.

[againes654]

7. I would like to hear what the

Hillary supporters have to say. I am sure they can spin it in some way.

[Macchendra]

8. Malpractice payouts had been Flat while Malpractice Insurance Skyrocketed...

The insurance industry cripples medicine from both sides: doctor and patient!

[RangerRK]

9. Shift from treatment to prevention

I think changing our system would create a shift to prevention. Right now, doctors barely look at the cause of an illness, they just prescribe drugs to throw at the problem, often with side effects of their own. Take the profit out, and perhaps Doctors would focus on preventing the illness in the first place, nutrition, etc.

[postulater]

22. It's not the Doctors who are making a killing

that's one reason so many doctors are in favor of universal coverage.


See this article: <http://www.chiroweb.com/archives/25/20/17.html>

"According to a study published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine,1 the total amount spent on pharmaceutical promotion was $29.9 billion in 2005, up from only $11.4 billion in 1996. In excess of $25 billion of that was spent to influence medical doctors, hospitals, etc., and more than $4 billion was spent on direct-to-consumer advertising. This is a 330 percent increase over the same period.

A recent study published in the August issue of Pediatrics provides the proof. In 2004, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) released a clinical practice guideline on the management of acute otitis media.2 The guideline included the “endorsement” of a wait-and-see option, rather than the immediate use of antibiotics.

The year the guideline was released, 88 percent of medical physicians believed this recommendation was reasonable. That number slipped a little to 83.3 percent by 2006. But when asked if they were using the wait-and-see option, only 15 percent of medical physicians answered in the affirmative. When asked why they didn’t use the nondrug option, 83.5 percent stated that it was because the parents of the children preferred the antibiotic route. If you’re a drug company, that’s mission accomplished.

But wait, there’s more. Another recent study demonstrated that the risk of a 7-year-old child suffering from asthma is significantly increased if they are given antibiotics in their first year.3 This turns a base hit into a home run. With one simple prescription, the drug companies have turned selling one or more courses of antibiotics to a small child with an earache into asthma medication for life!"

[RangerRK]

24. interesting

Thanks

[redqueen]

11. That's why he's the ONLY Dem I will support in the primaries.

I'm not about to compromise... not now!

This is when you vote your conscience... there's no other choice for me.

[superkia]

19. That is exactly how I see the primaries, not the time to give in.

[Greyhound]

16. K & R

Once again Dennis nails it in plain terms anyone can see.




Click my banner, it goes to a good cause and shows where it comes from.

[Whisp]

26. yep. now all he has to do is a Move.On move

and get that media attention he has not been blessed with so far. If he had more/equal air time I have no doubt he would be the winner. But the deck is already stacked by the royality.

[Greyhound]

36. You bet it is, they have been particularly blatant about keeping his massage

out of the public awareness, refusing to let him speak in debates until most of the audience has tuned out, editing him out of photos, etc.

[judaspriestess]

17. "They are either too afraid or too compromised"

they are to afraid to lose their political careers cause all they give a shit about is themselves.

What do they care, they have the best health insurance in this country.

[zalinda]

18. So with DK's plan, you put a million people out of work

so you can have single payer insurance. Where will these people find work? Do you have jobs to offer them? And it's not just those who work in the insurance companies, it's all those who work in the doctor's office filling out the paper work. Do you fire them state by state, or all at once?

How will all those millions of people, now on private health insurance get government insurance? How will this be accomplished? Fire the people in the insurance industry and then transfer all of those who have policies to government policies? The logistics of this move is massive. It is vastly easier said than done.

Sometimes the logic on this board is so skewed, it bewilders me. So far the only plan that makes sense is Edwards'. You make the private insurance companies compete with the government plan. Any person can opt for public or private plans, if you think public plans are beneath you, you can have a private plan. But, most people will look at what they get with a private plan, and what they get with a public plan and choose which is best for them.

In this way, you starve the private insurance companies out. They lay off people gradually, so there isn't a huge influx of unemployed people into the already tight job market. You also have people dribbling into the public system, instead of slamming millions into it at one time. This is the most common sense approach.

zalinda

[RangerRK]

20. They can be retrained

They can get jobs repairing our infrastructure and working to help the environment with Kucinich's Global Green Deal.

[zalinda]

28. Yeah, sure, I can see all those women now

swinging a pick axe. Meanwhile, who is going to feed their families.

zalinda

[redqueen]

21. Where are you getting "a million people out of work"?!

That's some truly desperate truthiness there!

:rofl:

[zalinda]

29. You don't think so?

Try all the paper pushers not only in the health insurance offices, but hospitals, labs and doctors offices across the country. You may not like health insurance companies, but they employ a lot of people. What do you think there is only a thousand people working for them? How many people do you think it takes to do paper work for 200 million people? Or is your world really that tiny? The CEO's of the companies are the bad guys, not the peons who work for a living.

zalinda

[redqueen]

33. What makes you think insurance companies will disappear?

A parallel system is the anser, NO ONE is proposing to do away with private insurance entirely... that's just another right-wing/corporatist-dem-wing bullshit talking point.

[zalinda]

34. What the hell are you talking about?

DK is talking about doing away with private insurance entirely....single payer. That's why I think Edwards is the best, it is a parallel system, and if a private company wants to stay in business, he has to compete with the government program. If it doesn't, it goes out of business.

And thank you for insulting me, it must make you feel really important.

zalinda

[redqueen]

35. Insulting YOU?

Where did I do that?

And no, you've been misinformed on Kucinich's plan. Might want to double check your source on that.

That's a huge fucking "mistake" to make.

[zalinda]

40. Why? Kucinich doesn't have a chance

in hell to win the nomination, unless Clinton, Obama and Edwards drop out, and even then it would be a tough sell.

And I don't do right wing talking points, since I never listen to them, but apparently you do.

zalinda

[scarletwoman]

37. This is just another version of the "preciptious withdrawal" strawman argument.

It's really sad that so many people not only fall for it, but promote it as well.

sw

[redqueen]

38. Yup... another pitiful strawman.

But no... with so many people not only buying it but also spreading it... I guess it's a pretty impressive strawman, really, as strawman arguments go.

:crazy:

[NashVegas]

30. Bullshit! We Have Put TONS of People Out of Work In the Name of Progress

Moving to paperless offices: puts people out of work.
Automating tasks: puts people out of work.
Consolidation: puts people out of work.
Outsourcing: puts people out of work.

What makes insurance industry workers so special that they get protections where hundreds of thousands - millions - of Americans did not get?

[warren pease]

31. Private sector layoffs = public sector opportunities...

Who do you think is going to administer a new single-payer system? The mice in the walls of Medicare headquarters?

Whether single-payer ends up being an extension of Medicare or a brand new system, they're going to need to greatly increase staffing to deal with the very same kinds of paperwork issues. And they're going to be biased in favor of people with that kind of experience. Now where would such a talent pool exist?


And re parallel private/public health care systems: This is outlawed in Canada (although not really enforced as far as I can tell) for the specific reason that the rich will usually opt for private coverage and their favorite docs, who may or may not be the best around at their particular specialties, will move into private practice to keep their best customers.

So you rapidly get back to a two-tiered system in which the rich get better care than the rest of us -- which is exactly what we're trying to avoid this time around. In America, according to a late-'90s Tufts University study of health care risk factors, poverty is the single most dangerous risk factor – ahead of genetic predisposition, bad habits, dangerous jobs, extreme sports and poor diet combined. In other words, the rich tend to recover and the poor tend to die.


There's also an intangible that a correspondent from Canada calls the democratization of health care. Here's an excerpt from a note he sent me on the subject:

"One time I needed a chest x-ray. ...while I was waiting in line (took about 15 minutes), I noticed my federal MP (member of the House of Commons, equivalent to a US congressman) also waiting in line in his suit next to the usual lineup of people in jeans and t-shirts or whatever. He didn't jump the line, didn't think of pulling rank on anyone and was content to hang out until his name was called like everyone else.

"That's perhaps the greatest benefit, in my opinion, of a single-payer universal health care system – it's as near to fully democratic as it can be (given that folks with money and/or education generally tend to be able to take better care of themselves). In that way, it helps bind together all strata of society in very real and very important ways."


Now there's a picture you'll never see in America: a member of Congress waiting in line with the commoners for his turn at the doctor's office. Here it's generally understood that the rich, the powerful and the well-connected have access to better quality health care than what's available to the serfs, and that's accepted by many as just another perk to which America's modern feudal lords are entitled.

Personally, I've had enough of this crap. The rich can damn well line up with the peasants and see the same physicians and get the same quality of care. Or they can move to Dubai, which would be a textbook case of good riddance.


wp

[eridani]

43. Sorry, but the private insurers will compete by denying claims

--and while they are doing this, they will be draining the pool of health care dollars. The government, providing care to all comers, will not be able to compete except by raising taxes, which is not going to be easy to do.

Why do people persist in talking as if anybody can know jackshit about how good a given private insurance plan is? The only way to find out is to get expensively sick, and that isn't going to happen to many people. Therefore most people will stay as ignorant of what their coverage really is as they are about whether or not their local fire department is any good.

BTW, the insurance job that requires the largest number of warm bodies is the job that is actually productive in a real world sense--processing claims, which will still need to be done regardless of how insurance is paid for. If the government is the insurer, it can flat out forbid that any of these jobs be offshored.

[TahitiNut]

45. That'd be funny if it wasn't so misguided. Who will fill the jobs caring for 50 MILLION more people?

:nopity:

The clue phone is ringing: Nearly 50 million people are getting almost no health care - and another 50 million are UNDERinsured.

Maybe that baccalaureate RN might decide to move back into providing direct care instead of pushing paper in Administration? Maybe that clerk who, according to the 'drill,' refuses to cover the policy-holder for treatment (as a cost-saving measure) might get paraprofessional training and climb aboard the other end and help offer that care?

If ANYONE thinks that jobs won't be CREATED by (finally!!) providing health care services to people without coverage, they haven't been paying attention.

[Greyhound]

50. Is this the "logic" that pervades your thought processes in other areas of your life?

In the first place you are only thinking of this one issue in a vacuum, as if nothing else will happen with this plan. Providing actual health care to an additional 100 million people will create many positions in itself, please, as well as improving the care provided to the rest, will take care of most of the people who's time is currently wasted, see TahitiNut's reply.

Next, you might try reading the actual bill that sits in congress, with 77 co-sponsors and the endorsement of over 14,000 doctors and hundreds of union locals and community groups, right now, it lays out exactly how this will be implemented.

(if you need help http://thomas.loc.gov/">go here and enter "hr 676" in the search box and select "Bill number" from the options below)

Once you've done this, you might peruse http://www.dennis4president.com/go/issues/">the rest of his positions and plans and make an informed decision.

[MadHound]

51. You won't have a million people out of work, give me a break

Most insurance companies don't deal with health insurance exclusively, they deal with other forms of insurance and other financial areas. In addition, we will need workers in the single payer system also, and where do you think that they'll draw that labor force from? Oh, yeah.

As far as being hard to implement, first, it won't be as hard as you're trying to scare people into believing, after all, was Social Security, welfare, or other such programs that hard? Secondly, is that really any excuse to deny people single payer care?

I'm sorry, but these are weak reasons for opposing the Kucinich plan, and frankly, the Edwards plan is tepid at best. Much like the Clinton plan, it continues to allow the insurance industry too much of a say in our health, gives them too much money, and is not the long term solution to the problem. Kucinich's plan is not just an excellent program, but it is what the people want. God forbid we give the people what they want in a democracy:eyes:

[slipslidingaway]

23. K&R, is support for the single payer system being ignored...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1869822

[redqueen]

25. Apparently so!

But you know what they say... money talks. http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/sickos-for-sale/candidates/

[porphyrian]

27. Fuck yeah. - n/t

[philly_bob]

32. What if the only way to vote for single-payer is to vote for Kucinich?

Currently I believe a single-payer system is the only way out of this health care mess.

So will I vote for Kucinich in the primary?

I don't know.

[redqueen]

39. I hope you will.

I think he's the *only* candidate championing single-payer.

Startling to think so, considering all we know... but oh well.

[Lugnut]

41. I will

I'm still holding out for Al Gore for whatever that's worth. Dennis is the only candidate who is advocating for a single-payer system and that's what I want. Those who aren't saying what I want to hear can go pound sand.

[tkmorris]

42. I am fairly certain Gore would not support DK's plan

I am a tad confused that you are so quick to rule out all of the current candidates because they don't advocate for single-payer, but you are holding out for Gore.

[Greyhound]

49. Why not, that's what primaries are for.

Most, if not all of us will have to vote for the nominee in the general, but now is the time to vote for the stands and positions that you agree with.

http://www.dennis4president.com/go/issues/">Check out his issues and plans, and make a decision based on that. Voting for someone based on an estimation of "electability" plays right into the hands of the power brokers that are selling us and our country down the river for their, and their contributors, own ends. What it means to you and yours are of absolutely no consequence to them.

[eridani]

44. If you have friends who don't support DK, do NOT let them write your classified ads

If you wanted $5000 for your used car, but would take $3000, these friends would write the ad as "Car for Sale: $3000". Those of us with basic common sense would say "Car for Sale: $5000 or best offer".

Ferchrissakes people! This is the PRIMARY season! Ask for what the majority of the public wants! Even if you'll eventually accept a kitten, keep asking for a pony.

[Ghost in the Machine]

46. I had to K&R just for this:

"What we have now is predatory capitalism,
which makes the American people a cash crop for the insurance companies."
Dennis Kucinich

I might have to make that into a banner..

[HCE SuiGeneris]

53. KICK KICK KICK

I agree whole-heartedly!

[Nimrod2005]

48. K

[tom_paine]

52. Was Edwards one of the five? I didn't watch.

I have to say, again and again, Kucinich speaks thoe truths which desperately needs to be spoken.

That alone is enough to make me give him serious cinsideration in the Mid-Winter Primaries (that is, if a blizzard doesn't strike and sock me in on that day)

[IronLionZion]

54. If the repubes are going to call it socialism, then let's have socialism

let's do single-payer. No matter how much the corporations profit from Hillary's plan, the repubes are still calling it big government socialism and saying that we will have long waits for rationed health care. The fact that you can keep the plan you're on now if you want is completely ignored.

hmm...we should ask for more and then settle for something good. If we want Hillary's plan, then we should ask for Kucinich's single-payer plan. If we want single-payer, then we should ask for a socialized system like the British NHS. We all know how the British are standing in long lines behind the iron curtain waiting for a crust of bread with their government-rationed borscht. Did you see how little they pay for their drugs at their drugstores that only sell drugs and nothing else?

[gateley]

55. For the purpose of this questions I'll accept the

fact of resistance to Single Payer IS "protecting the interests of the insurance companies". What REASONS -- if any -- do those against it give for not supporting it?

Those in favor -- Kucinich and Gravel, if I'm not mistaken -- have given convincing reasons why we should go that route. I'm not sure if I've heard any reasons -- convincing or not -- of why we shouldn't.

Any input?

Thanks!