Americans Are DYING: Universal Health Care Should Be Something We Can All Agree On

[McCamy Taylor]

Divide and Conquer is the Republicans favorite tool. When you represent the financial interests of the top 0.5%, you have to have a lot of tricks up your sleeve to remain in power. One of the tried and true strategies is to throw the Democrats into an arena and pit them against each other like gladiators, and then pick off whatever is left standing.

Americans are dying in Iraq. Americans are dying from the effects of polluted water, air and bad food, drugs and toys. American infants are dying before they even have a chance to be born from rising infant mortality. And, according to this article from the New York Times, since 1980, when George Bush Sr. made his infamous hostages for votes deal to steal the election for Ronald Reagan, poor and minority Americans have been dying at an increased rate over their more affluent brothers and sisters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/us/23health.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

New government research has found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades.

Life expectancy for the nation as a whole has increased, the researchers said, but affluent people have experienced greater gains, and this, in turn, has caused a widening gap.

Snip

In 1980-82, Dr. Singh said, people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most deprived group (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7 years), and it continues to grow, he said.

After citing (and highlighting) the usual litany of “blame the victim” excuses such as poor lifestyle choices, the NYT considers another possibility:

Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, rejected that idea. Professor Krieger investigated changes in the rate of premature mortality (dying before the age of 65) and infant death from 1960 to 2002. She found that inequities shrank from 1966 to 1980, but then widened.
“The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she said. “From 1966 to 1980, socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.”
The creation of Medicaid and Medicare, community health centers, the “war on poverty” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all probably contributed to the earlier narrowing of health disparities, Professor Krieger said.

The article also mentions several studies which show that Blacks and Whites treated under identical circumstances---for instances at the VA---will receive different care, with Whites more likely to receive preventive care or screening than Blacks which could contribute to longer survival.

First, I would like to address the issue of poor lifestyle choices. It is true that living under the burden of income disparity in an affluent society is linked to a variety of health problems including depression, suicide, domestic violence, alcoholism,, drug abuse, increased risk of death by homicide. However, if you go online to the CDC and look back at longevity rates in 1950---before medical science had any treatment for coronary artery disease and myocardial infarction, the big killers of Americans, you will see that Blacks and Whites at age 60 had almost identical life expectancies. (see page 193)

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus06.pdf#027

Now consider that African-Americans lived under even greater disadvantage in 1950, with more limited access to educational opportunity in many parts of the country, with restricted job and voting rights and diminished income earning potential compared to Whites. If income disparity and life style factors were the sole cause of the current discrepancies in life expectancy, you would expect that the problem would have been even more pronounced in 1950. However, a 65 year old Black man and a 65 year old White man in 1950 could both expect to live to be 78 years old. Something happened in the meantime. I believe that Krieger is right. What happened is that medicine found ways to treat heart disease and cut down on deaths from heart attack, but Blacks---and the poor---do not reap the same benefits from this medical technology that Whites---and more affluent Americans do. (As a side note, another possibility to consider, which I will not elaborate upon here, is that medical research, which has been proven to have a bias in favor of men over women, may also have a bias in favor of treatments that work better for people of European origin than African origin. There is no reason to assume that the mechanism of heart disease formation in people whose ancestors came from different geographic regions of the world is identical and that identical treatments work the same for them. Just as we are now learning that there are differences between the cardiac biology between men and women, we may find that there are subtle but important difference in the pathophysiology of heart disease of Asians and Native Americans and Europeans and Africans---including people from different parts of Africa.)

Go to page 197 of the CDC document, and you will see that Blacks and Whites had almost the same death rates from heart disease and cancer in 1950, but the rate of heart deaths for Whites has fallen more than it has for Blacks, and the rate of cancer deaths has risen more for Blacks than for Whites. The rate of respiratory (smoking related ) cancer deaths have risen at about the same rate, suggesting that there is not a significant difference in smoking related mortality.One possible cause for increased cancer deaths in Blacks is the tendency to build toxic waste dumps and factories near African-American communities. This article from Ms. magazine is just one of many that you can find online about the topic. If you are not familiar with the issue, I encourage you to read up on it.

http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2007/thedirtysaga.asp

Regarding causes of death that are related to the despair associated with income disparity, homicide death rates for Blacks first increased but then decreased over the last 50 years, consistent with an improvement in socioeconomic status with the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. This improvement may also reflect improved legal status within the U.S. Death from MVAs (motor vehicle accidents) , a marker for “dangerous” or risky behavior like DWI, are the same for the two groups, suggesting that theories that Blacks have lower life expectancies because they do not value their lives or health are pure bullshit. Whites continue to have two and half times the suicide rate of Blacks at age 65 another sign that self destructive behaviors are not increased in the African-American community.

I think you can see where I am going with this. There has been a tremendous improvement in medical science since 1950. Back then, if you had a heart attack, you crossed your fingers and hoped that you survived with enough cardiac muscle left to keep you alive. Now, if you have blockage in your arteries, and you have insurance and a doctor who thinks to screen you, they can open those arteries with a balloon, get you on drugs to clean out the cholesterol deposits, lower your blood pressure and your heart’s work load, thin your blood to prevent clots, help you lose weight and exercise---and you will die of cancer or pneumonia at 80.

However, that will only happen if you have health insurance, and if your doctor thinks that you are a good candidate for preventive treatment. If you are one of the 40 plus million Americans without health insurance, you will show up at the emergency room after six hours of “indigestion”---at which point the cardiologist that they drag in will hope and pray that you have enough cardiac muscle left after this heart attack to keep you alive.

Two things have to happen to narrow the life expectancy gap. The first is a no-brainer. Everyone in the United States needs health insurance in order to get preventive health care before heart disease has a chance to develop . That means universal health care. If people wait for the first MI to sign up, people are going to die. (The second is much more difficult. The income disparity gap must be narrowed. The best way to accomplish that is through improvements in education. But, as I will discuss below, as long as states' budgets are consumed by health care spending, there will not be enough for education, which will keep the poor poor.)

However, the same insurance industry that fought tooth and nail in 1993-4 to save its empire is not going down without a fight this election season, either. Here is SourceWatch with a mini-summary just to remind those who have forgotten or those who are not old enough how the nation’s first efforts at universal health insurance were torpedoed by a slick propaganda campaign.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Coalition_for_Health_Insurance_Choices

To drive home the message, CHIC sponsored a now-legendary TV spot called "Harry and Louise," which featured a middle-class married couple lamenting the complexity of Clinton's plan and the menace of a new "billion-dollar bureaucracy." The ad was produced by Goddard*Claussen/First Tuesday, a PR and election campaign management firm that has worked for liberal Democrats, including the presidential campaigns of Gary Hart, Bruce Babbitt and Jesse Jackson. According to Robin Toner, writing in the September 30, 1994, New York Times, "'Harry and Louise' symbolized everything that went wrong with the great health care struggle of 1994: A powerful advertising campaign, financed by the insurance industry, that played on people's fears and helped derail the process."

Other tactics used by shills like Rush---people were told they would be jailed if they tried to see a doctor of their choice. If they called 1-800 numbers for “information” they were forwarded to their representatives office and encouraged to tell their reps to vote “no” on Clinton health care. Focus groups liked the Clinton plan if it was described to them but when it was presented as the “Clinton plan” they said it would never work, because the media had told them over and over that it would never work and would lead to health care disaster.

And of course, the classic strategy that the right wing uses when battling any attempt to alleviate disparity in this country is to tell those in the middle class that they will be forced to do without so that someone poorer than them can get something they do not deserve. The Reagan “welfare queen” strategy. See, here she is in New Orleans, surrounded by her "attendants", the quintessential American welfare queen, White, elderly and disabled with a police escort, because she is such a menace to society.




This is Divide and Conquer at its worst. People with insurance obtained through their jobs were (and still are) told that they will lose this “free” benefit and be forced to pay higher taxes to get substandard insurance for themselves----and to pay for insurance for dead beats.


In Who Really Pays for Health Care? The Myth of “Shared Responsibility” by Ezeckiel J. Emanuel MD, PhD and Victor R. Fuch, PhD in the March 5, 2008 issue of JAMA ]The authors argue that employers do not pay for health insurance and employees do not get “free” health insurances benefits---no matter what their employers or unions tell them. They analyze wages and insurance costs in the U.S. and show that as insurance premiums have risen, wages have fallen. When employers no longer pay insurance premiums, wages rise. Employers have enjoyed increased profit per employee over the last 30 years, even as health insurance premiums have risen, but at the same time, employees real wages have declined----because employees are paying for their own risen health care costs, not their employers.

The authors go on to talk about the cost to state governments , where health expenditures are typically the largest single factor contributing to rising taxes and deficits which make it difficult for states to adequately fund education systems. Since Medicaid, SCHIPS and state funded public hospitals and clinics are supposed to be the safety net for those who do not have “employer sponsored health insurance”, the current system is exacting a heavy toll on states and hurting our children’s future.

In addition, by giving people with employer sponsored health insurance the illusion that they are getting something for “free”, it creates a powerful disincentive for them to support a national universal health care program that would relieve their states from their current burden and insure the 40 million who lack insurance and set up a health system based upon prevention. “Getting Americans invested in cost control will require that they realize that they pay the price, not just for the deductibles and copayments, but for the full insurance premiums, too.”


We see the same thing happening again this year. The economy is at the top of American’s lists of concerns, and health care is right up there with mortgages and jobs. Every Democrat has a health care plan, but instead of banding together to tell the country why its needs universal health care, the two remaining Democratic candidates are trying to scare America. “Don’t choose my opponent’s plan. That one will send you to jail” (Shades of Rush Limbaugh!) “If my opponent really believed in universal health insurance, he would make it required, like Social Security. Maybe he doesn’t really believe in Social Security.”(Who’s a better Democrat? The one who doesn’t ask who’s a better Democrat).

Imagine the health insurance industry’s delight. They do not have to run Harry and Louise ads. The Democratic campaigns will do it for them. They do not have to make universal health insurance controversial. The primary has already accomplished that goal.

And who pays for a few votes for one candidate in one primary or a few more caucus goers for the other? Millions of people, mostly hard working but middle and lower middle class Americans, lots of them White but a disproportionate number of them Black and Latino and unmarried mothers with small children who were so sure that they would get health care in 2009 or 2010 and who now have to wonder if it will be 2012. Or maybe never, because who knows how long Democratic control of Congress will last?

It is OK for Democrats to argue like a pack of rabid hyenas during the primary. It is what they do. Yeah, we know that Karl Rove and the MSM are baiting us and that DU is filled with Freeper trolls lighting fires, but the Party will survive. But can we please agree that some things are too important to trash? Like health care for all Americans? Because we are dying without it.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. It's not like we have no models to follow

There are many countries with successful public health programs that have worked for years. And I interpret the right to this from the words of the Declaration about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". If "life" is an unalienable right, then so is universal health care.

[mrreowwr_kittty]

3. It's also kinda hard to pursue happiness when you don't have adequate health care.

Puts a crimp on your liberty too.

[leftofthedial]

2. I've just spent the longest and worst three weeks of my life embroiled

in the American "health care" system. This for-profit crap isn't even civilized.

People have been getting sick and dying for as long as there have been people. We have allowed stinking capitalists to turn that process into the longest, most draining, most expensive possible process. It's so utterly perverse that it is beyond comprehension.

[N4457S]

10. But...

...considering what we've spent on the war and the depleted state of our dollar and the entitlement commitments that already exist, it isn't realistic to expect things to change anytime soon.

There's no way to provide universal health care for three hundred million fucking people when we're already up to our asses.

That's the bottom line.

Democrats can't even get their shit together long enough to decide who they're going to run for President. Just how do you think they'll be able to put together government health care that everyone will sign onto?

It WON'T happen.

[McCamy Taylor]

15. Yes, we can! We can always sign them up for Medicare as a stop gap.

The system is already in place. Doctors will love seeing some Medicare patients who are not a million years old for a change.

[juno jones]

42. But there are very few doctors or clinics that accept medicare

And they have waiting lists for regular treatment sometimes years long. I've been to one lately as an emergency. A sign on the wall warns emergency patients that they had better be in pain and must wait for an opening. You can only be treated for one problem at a time, which is really harsh if you have a bunch of stuff going on and we know most chronic illness doesn't happen in a vacuum. I'm sure the care at those clinics, although staffed by some of the most concerned people I've ever met, does not compare to the care in facilities that take premimium insurance.

Another poster on this subject awhile back suggested that all hospitals and clinics that take any public money whatsoever should be required to take medicare and medicaid. I agree with that and also think the candidates should include mandates on such facilities to take these insurances. Otherwise we're going to wind up with a two tiered system that is going to be everything every critic of socialized medicine ever dreamed of.

The system is in place, but it must be expanded and enforced if we are ever going to accomplish anything.


edit to add: Reading the rest of the thread, I agree with you on much of this :)

[McCamy Taylor]

52. MOST doctors and all hospitals take Medicare. Bush is trying to hurt Medicare to kill universal

health care. I have a journal here and at Daily Kos about it. "The Attack on Medicare, An Attack on Universal Health Insurance" The plan is to cut providers reimbursement to the point where no one will accept Medicare---and then when seniors start telling horror stories about their Medicare, the nation's private health insurers will be "safe" from a national universal health insurance based on Medicare.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/8/12/12568/1643/766/370457

Medicare funds are being diverted to expensive for profit HMOs which cherry pick the healthy and use fraudulent practices to sign up people who do not want to be on them. Here is another journal I wrote:this about the rip off that is "Medicare Advantage Plans" (sort of like the Dept of Defense that is really the Dept of War) about how the Bush administration overpays private insurers to cherry pick the healthy elderly for Medicare HMOs---even as it keeps cutting reimbursements for traditional Medicare, trying to destroy it.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2358331


Then there is this about how Blue Cross Blue Shield's HMO products are being resurrected with capitation and provider exclusion in an attempt to prepare to game the system in advance of universal health insurance (as opposed to universal health care), the essential points I make in this diary are that the HMOs that the insurance companies offer as their only low cost option under universal health insurance will 1. use capitation to cherry pick (since doctors have ways of driving away sick people that the insurance plan can not employ) and 2. they will (illegally) restrict the number of providers on their plans to drive away sick people. Insurance makes money by collecting premiums from the well and keeping the sick off their plans. Period. Etch this in your brain somewhere when you consider the unholy union of private health insurers and universal health care.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/6/15512/48168/238/470651


If all the nation's insurance premium dollars (reduced) are bundled into Medicare, the program will remain solvent. Just cut out the profit and waste of private insurance and start some public health initiatives aimed at disease prevention and we can begin to reproduce what they have in France, Canada and other civilized countries.

[Bluenorthwest]

35. The British system

Was put in place during the economic nightmare of the post war years. Utterly depleted, lacking in many basics. And yet they established National Health Service. Are the Brits that much smarter than us? They can do it during bad times but we need better conditions?
The British knew that NHS was part of how to get out of trouble and make the nation strong again.

[Jackpine Radical]

14. The system is working as intended.

It is intended to leave you commoners--useless eaters, as GHW Bush so aptly termed you--broke and ill.

[walldude]

63. What's even more perverse is that people actually

think it's a good system.

My family has been without Health Care for 2 years now. We have been lucky so far. This is why I will vote for any dem except for Lieberman..

[enlightenment]

4. Excellent essay. Kudos.

Now let's see how long it takes for the "universal health care won't work in America" crowd to show up. I'm not sure exactly who they are, but they pop up every time this issue is raised on DU. I suspect they are fortunate enough to be employed with employer paid or - at the least, employer subsidised insurance that affords them the coverage they need . . . and have bought into the very propaganda you mentioned. Or they're the young ones who don't see the need for insurance and are happy to haul out the "if I can make it, so can you" and "America is the land of opportunity - if you don't make it, it's your own fault" mantras. Or maybe they're the free-market crowd that are terrified that the socialist boogieman is going to reduce their personal profit-margins.

There are none so blind as will not see - and there are a lot of them on DU (who will now all deny it, of course, and tell me that if I can't offer a solution I have no right to complain.) ;)

[Orwellian_Ghost]

5. We should be in the streets

Health care is a right not a privilege.

We fear our government instead of the other way around.

K&R

Good piece.

[truedelphi]

6. IT is a travesty that we are not in the streets abt this.

And the RW talking machine is saying how awful Bush's bill regrading ensuring pharaceuticals for the elderly is.

Yes it is awful - but the part of it that is awful is the part that has made it possible for Big Pharma to inflate their costs a thousand fold and then bill the governemnt.

how is it that the pharmacy in Cuba could give Michael Moore and his selected group of 9/11 rescue workers the meds they needed - for under $ 5??

[McCamy Taylor]

17. Drug companies RAISED the prices of the drugs seniors used.

They would not have been able to do that had the gov't kept the right to collective bargain. All the drug companies as one raised their prices together---that means they conspired, since you would have thought that one of the makes of cholesterol lowering agents would try to get a jump on the competition by cutting prices. So much for free market. We the taxpayer pay corporate welfare for Pfizer and United Health.

[eridani]

7. We will only get it by pushing from the bottom

Either Clinton or Obama can be pushed in that direction; McCain definitely cannot.

[madamesilverspurs]

8. What a happy day it will be

when there will once again be a noticeable difference between insurance and extortion. . .

[wolfgangmo]

59. Insurance agent = bookie

The only difference between my insurance company and my bookie is that my bookie pays off if he loses the bet.

[JohnnyLib2]

9. In the top 3 of my priorities. Highest, dependending on the day.

:thumbsup:

Recommended.

[Diclotican]

11. McCamy Taylor

McCamy Taylor

As a european I am just baffled, and can not in any way believe that a country as your, can not afford a public health care system.. As an "liberal" of sorts, I cant understand, even if I try, why a country letting people be ill, dye or be handicapped for the rest of their life, if it is possible to get medical help, and to get people well...

In the most of Europe, and indeed in many other parts of he world, a public health care system are something the government have been working for decades. Even in country where the healtcare system are overworked, and under staffed they have some sorts of health-care... Africa, Asia (for the most part), Europe and South America all have a public healt care. Some free of charge.. other you have to pay a little part. In some the health care system are being payed by the taxes alone, on others you pay some of the bill, when you are sick, or have other medical needs... Even in many poor country, they do have a health-care system. Or at best try to have it...

But in UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. the whole concept of a collective healtcare system are something you are so afraid about, because it, as many say it, smell om socialism.. And if the case is coming up, they are complaining, that our "socialist health care system" are broke.. And would be the end of our welfare system. Many believe that the only way "we" would survive, is to go the american way, and broke down the health care system all together, and let the private take the reing... I say NO. It cost a lot, to have a health care system who are public, and paid by the taxes you pay every month. But it is much better to have a health care system you need, then to be powerless if your insurance company are deciding that your illness are something they don't want to spend money on.. Even if you have paid in premium for the last decade or two... Difficult cancer, difficult medicals need.. And then you are out of the system...

Our system are not broke, even that it are by no way perfect. But I would have our tax founded health care system any day, before the system you in US have. Where you are up to your own and where you may not get the medical help you need. Because your insurance company decides that your illness are not worth it.. And if half the stories that are coming out sometimes.. Then i would say I am proud to be able to pay my taxes, to have a public health care system who work, rather then have a private health care system I would never manage to pay for...

I just cant understand why the US are so afraid of public founded health care.. This is something I just cant understand, and I am not given the information from the american I know... It is just to confusing for my little european, liberal Head I guess:eyes:

Diclotican

Sorry my bad English, not my native language

[JanMichael]

16. I agree completely with your post.

We should have single payer healthcare yet because of our apitalist overlords weont't.

Sadly those who oppose non-violent revolution (that is making a egalitarian loving and nice society) are making violent revolution inevitable.

[Diclotican]

58. JanMichael

JanMichael

I guess that sooner or later, when enough american are feeling the pain, and the need to get a single payer health care is important enough, for the most of the american public, then you get that... Even if it means that capitalist overlords would be thrown away....
But as long as enough american pay into the fiction of private health care, then you would get over 40 million without healtcare, and you would have more and more without basic health care.. You know that the infant rate are on the rising in US. And much of it is because illness that would be treated routinely, would not be treated before it is to late...?
The same way it is in many 3 world country... where health care is not the case at all..

Diclotican

Sorry my bad English, not my native language..

[McCamy Taylor]

18. We pay twice as much person for piss poor quality health care in the US

Our problem is not that we do not have enough money to take care of everyone. We have too much money. Our problem is that we give it all away to hospitals, durable medical goods makers, drug companies, insurance companies and other members of the Medical Industrial Complex which eats up 15% of our GDP---twice as much per capita as Switzerland, the next most costly country in the world (England, France and Canada spend even less per person) to leave 40 million people out and have health care standards that make us a laughing stock in the industrialized world---high infant mortality, low life expectancy. We waste our money on overhead and CEO profits and expensive treatments for diseases that could have been prevented for pennies if people had access to doctors before they reach Medicare age. BY insuring people only after they reach the age of 65 we ensure maximum profits for the MIC and maximum sickness and disability for Americans.

[Jackpine Radical]

12. What are you on about?

Excess poor population, beyond the numbers necessary to serve as organ donors for their betters, is an unnecessary and maybe even dangerous commodity to have hanging around. They need to be thinned out, and this is a cost-effective way to do it. The real problem lies in letting the press point out all that stuff about discrepancies in lifespan and whatnot. It's good to do the studies, so we can see the programs are working as intended, but the findings should be kept confidential; there is no reason to stir up the masses by letting them know about the results.

[Xenotime]

13. It's the only thing that will save us.

[Clear Blue Sky]

19. There are ways to make it work.

It can work but only if it is a well thought plan and properly communicated to the public. Otherwise it's just a political football used by both parties to rally their base and produce political gains.

[McCamy Taylor]

20. It WILL work. The Bush administration is attacking Medicare to attack Universal Health Care

I have posted about this in my journal. Bush administration efforts to drive doctors off Medicare by cutting rates so low that providers can no longer afford to take new patients or even see existing ones while paying Medicare for Profit HMOs (falsely dubbed Advantage Plans) outrageous sums of money to cherry pick the healthy elderly and fraudulently sign up people who do not want to be on these plans and lie to people that they can continue seeing their old doctors when they can not----moves like these will give Medicare a very bad reputation in the United States in the next few years. People will look at the crimes and excesses of "Medicare Advantage" which the Bush administration has tolerated and they will say "Boy, you can not trust the government." They will look at traditional Medicare and the way that providers have abandoned the system that will not pay its bills under Bush and they will say "Boy you can not trust the government".

This is all part of the plan to make people fear universal single payer health care modeled on Medicare which is the simplest, cheapest and most efficient model. Medicare has lower overhead than other insurance models. It has a nationwide system in place with codes for billing, diagnoses, procedures. Almost all providers are now enrolled. It would be very simple to start collecting premiums and providing coverage to additional Americans. The premiums are relatively low and the new Americans covered would be much less sick than the traditional over 65 year olds. This would keep Medicare solvent.

But it would also eliminate the ungodly overhead and profits which the health insurers reap by collecting premiums from healthy people and denying care to the sick.

[N4457S]

23. That's...

...exactly what it is and what it has been since 1948.

Do you really think the AMA and the insurance companies would allow all that power to be taken from them?

It'll never happen.

[McCamy Taylor]

25. This AMSA (American Medical Student Association) critique of AMA's

statement of policy on health care reform is also useful in judging the candidate's suggested plans. Keep in mind that Congress will pass the legislation, so consumers can lobby Congress.

AMSA is a much more progressive body than the AMA. This document makes some very good points.

http://www.amsa.org/uhc/response_AMA.cfm

Overall, the AMA proposal is vague and open-ended. It does not address key health care issues such as prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions or reforming Medicare to allow for the Department of Human and Health Services to negotiate on the cost of prescription drugs. This proposal fails to improve and expand the successful elements of our current healthcare system, such as Medicare, Medicaid, the VA system, and S-CHIP, which ensure healthcare for many millions of Americans with an overhead of under 5 percent. Instead the AMA supports the inefficient health insurance industry which has not proven effective. The AMA also does not address the factors responsible for our overly expensive healthcare non-system. If our goal is to create a system that provides affordable, comprehensive, quality healthcare for all, then this plan proposed by the AMA is not the solution.

As a physician myself (family practice) I would advise people to be leery of the AMA on health policy. Physician's groups, in my experience, are often reactionary, voting for Republicans because of knee jerk ideology and for economic reasons. This is not true of certain primary care specialty groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics or the American Academy of Family Practice which tend to be more liberal than physicians as a group. But, for instance, the Texas Medical Association, repeatedly endorsed George W. Bush for president even though he repeatedly overturned patient protection against HMO legislation as a governor and president for which doctors had lobbied.

AMSA, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the American Public Health Association are a safer bet if you want a source you can trust.

[wolfgangmo]

60. speaking as a clinic manager ...

I would love universal health care.

The thought of only one insurance form and only one entity to deal with for appeals is ... appealing. Ahem.


Currently, like many medical practices we provide care and then try to bill insurance. Payment is delayed and then denied. Why? Because the form was not filled out correctly, or the wrong form was used, or because we changed our mind, or my favorite - because that treatment is experimental. We just got a denial today saying that a standard treatment that has been taught in medical schools for the last 40 years is considered experimental? Experimental?

Holy crap. And here is the kicker, for every delay that the insurance company creates they get ANOTHER 6 months to pay. We have patients that we stopped seeing 3 years ago and we STILL haven't seen a single dime from the insurance companies.

Our clinic is now going to stop accepting insurance. Patients who are insured can see us, but they have to pay cash. We cant survive any other way. Sad but true.

Many doctors feel the same way. The AMA is NOT speaking for us. And the insurance companies definitely do not.

Call us a clinic for universal care.

[defendandprotect]

21. Miss Edwards and Kucinich harping on this issue --- though Obama mentioned it today ---

NOT the same however, as having all three hitting on it ---

[Thepricebreaker]

22. Actually I think we should have Hybrid care.. Basic free healthcare and you buy catastrophic insur..

If everything is free . we wait 5 months for important major surgery... like most countries with unv. health care.

Give basic free health care.... the sniffels, colds, the flu, birth control, etc...

If I have cancer, etc.. I want IT TAKEN CARE OF NOW not when the gov approves it..

[McCamy Taylor]

26. This is a myth. Important care IS NOW. What waits is elective elbow arthroscopy.

In the US if you have platinum level Congressional insurance you can have tons of absolutely unnecessary medical work done on your body--tomorrow. Your orthopedic surgeon can get an MRI of your joint for no particular reason and then go ahead with arthroscopy for minimal symptoms and then pronounce your minimally painful joint free of disease---and the American people have just paid that bill. Not your employer. The cost has been factored in to the cost of doing business for whoever pays the bills, which means sooner of later we the consumer pay it.

There is so much medical waste, so much cosmetic surgery that gets billed as medically necessary---stomach tucks for "skin rash" breast reshaping for "shoulder pain" unnecessary neck and back surgery to pad the claims after car wrecks and a bunch of radiology tests that duplicate other tests or which are done for defensive reasons---one of the things that we will see when there is universal single payer health care is malpractice arbitration so that everyone who is hurt gets help instead of one in 100 getting a jackpot and everyone else getting nothing.

And do not forget that in the US we spend a fortune on dying. We pay a high cost for futile care for people who have no chance at all of surviving the last heart attack or stroke but who are kept alive on a ventilator in the ICU for days because Medicare will foot the bill. This is easy money for hospitals. They know that they will not be held accountable for the death. Obviously 100 year old Miss X who came in without a pulse and brain dead was not going to make it. All they had to do was shock her heart, put her on a vent, insert some tubes and start billing Medicare ten thousand a day while they looked around for some relatives to ask what they should do.

The waiting time for cancer surgery, heart surgery is the same in universal health care countries if not better, if you consider that here people without insurance often ignore chest pain or a breast lump because they can not afford to see a doctor.

[Amonester]

27. How about paying for 2,000 ICBMs instead of 6 times more...

(to start with)? (Just an example of the absolutely CRAZY WASTE of taxes on "6 times more than it would take to blow up this entire planet once and for all," since 2,000 nukes would be enough... why "produce" (and maintain...) 12,000? Why not "invest" in everybody's HEALTH as much as possible? Why "bloated military budgets which total more than all countries in the rest of world COMBINED? WHY? Surely NOT because of PARANOID CEOs...)

[wolfgangmo]

61. Name the country that makes you wait for necessary major care.

I dare you.

It is a myth that there are countries with universal care which make you wait for major surgery. Name one.

Granted they do make you wait for elective surgery.

Stop drinking the koolaid.

[warren pease]

24. The only industrialized, rich (sort of) country...

... in which the combination of poverty and lack of medical insurance are capital crimes.

Lots of reasons for continuing this insanity -- besides the obvious bottomless gold mine that comes with the territory in the profit-based combination joke and tragedy -- but the main ones, imo, are:

Social control: Dependence on employer-based insurance keeps people doing shitty jobs, and keeps them insecure enough to make sure they don't get all uppity about workers' rights or safe conditions or raises or better benefits or -- christ help us -- union organizing. The standard stuff employers used hire union busting law firms to straighten out. Now it's a self-regulating system, with the peasants policing their own behavior to keep their shitty jobs, rapidly and substantially declining wages measured in real purchasing terms, and a dwindling list of bennies that usually includes lousier medical plans with each passing year. So the feudal system is working well here in the land of the free.

Soon, the penalty for being poor, non-white and uninsured will probably include weeks in stocks in the public square getting pelted with rotten vegetables, debtors' prisons, record numbers of home foreclosures (oops, already got that one), the death penalty for late credit card payments... The possibilities are endless.

Racism/xenophobia: Keeping the ni**ers down, as Randy Newman wrote decades ago. By defining health care as a privilege to be bought by wealthy whites rather than a basic human right for all, it's possible to continue to inflict the wonders of this privatized con game on a broad base of "others," whose sins against the free market invariably include some combination of being non-white or poor or chronically sick or physically disabled or mentally ill. And when they're really lucky, they can go five-for-five on a single poor, sick human. Ahhh... the sweet smell of success as the American profit machines grinds up and spits out anyone without sufficient funds.

So expensive, privatized, for-profit medicine helps carry on the grand American tradition of targeting specific demographics for special abuses. And the crowning touch: these groups get to watch an endless stream of fat, rich, white republicans on TV blame them for getting screwed by fat, rich, white republicans.

The fear of the red stain: Every time somebody in a position of power and equipped with an electronic soapbox starts arguing in favor of single-payer, universal-access health care, out come the PR manipulation experts and advertising slime creatures to beat the familiar drums against "socialized medicine." Americans, being largely incapable of separating PR bullshit from facts, fall for this crap every time.

In addition to adding another means of social control, keeping the old red menace alive helps in the current Bushean campaign against intelligence and enlightenment.

"Old Europe," by which Rumsfeld meant too civilized to join the coalition of the coerced, is a dangerous place because it's a functional alternative to US orthodoxy condemning all social programs and the various forms of democratic socialist governments that use tax revenue to improve peoples' lives rather than murder women and children thousands of miles away.

So I think those are three very good reasons why a world-class, not-for-profit, single-payer health care system is beyond anything even remotely conceivable in the current version of America -- driven as it is by the constant babbling of wingnuts in all forms of mass media claiming support for the kind of "fuck off" libertarianism Ayn Rand was so big on.

There's just no good, politically expedient reason to interrupt the flow of mega-dollars from the peasants to for-profit medicine's pockets. And there are millions of reasons not to, each one a beautiful green dollar bill paid as legalized bribes to various candidates of both parties by their bosses in corporate America to bankroll their campaigns.


wp

[McCamy Taylor]

28. 4th reason: disease farming. No health care until 65,then universal single payer government Medicare

Think of what this means. Americans are allowed to get to the ripe old age of 65 with as little preventive are as possible, There is a whole phony scientific industry devoted to doing bogus research designed to prove that sweets, snacks, colas, alcohol, tobacco are good for you. Exercise is discouraged by the recreation that is offered--TV and computers. We get fat and unhealthy and live in pollution and get no prevention because our insurance does not pay for it even if we have insurance.

And then, the minute we turn 65 we all have single payer government health insurance called Medicare So, single payer universal isn't even unAmerican. What is unAmerican is trying to insure people when they are younger, when diseases could be prevented rather that treated.

By having this unlimited single payer universal government health insurance at 65 for people who have been encouraged to wreck their bodies---or grow healthy crops of diseases---the Medical Industrial Complex assures itself that it will be able to sell plenty of artificial joints and lots of operating room time and hospital bed space and anesthesia and medications and heart valve replacements and coronary artery splints and more medications and home oxygen and nursing home beds and the list goes on and on....

The current system is set up to make us unhealthy so the MIC can make a profit off of our misery.

[newfie11]

31. The doctors lobby will fight this tooth and nail

They hate the thought of socialized medicine/universal health care (or whatever you want to call it) as much as the insurance companies. As far as medicare, the clinic I go to is not accepting any new medicare patients. Talk about a crock. Blue cross, etc they will take. This is in South Dakota

I am in the medical field and have seen medicare patients receive less quality care from doctors. Here is just one example. I saw an elderly woman sent home with one lung completely fluid filled because the surgeon refused to come in for a medicare patient. She was have great difficulty breathing but was told to go home and come back in the morning. This was in Illinois. HELLO this sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On the subject of waiting for long periods to be seen if under universal health care. I worked in a hospital that was doing open heart surgeries for Canada. Canada had a backlog so the worked out a deal with the US and paid 100%. This was in Michigan. There are ways to get patients treated. Everyone of those patients I asked said they would in no way trade their health insurance for what the US has.

I wonder if some of the poorer countries such as Africa have health care because the US is paying for it.

We cannot continue this farce we have now. The ER's are crammed full because people cannot afford to go to a doctor.

[Thothmes]

33. Why do you think that Doctors

will not take any new medicare patients. The family practice clinic I use will not take any new medicare patients. If you are a patient there before being medicare eligible they will continue to treat you, but no new medicare patients are accepted.

[newfie11]

36. Because Medicare will only pay a certain amount

If the clinic accepts assignment they cannot charge over what Medicare says the procedure should cost. It is usually much lower than the cost would otherwise be and changed every year or so.

[wolfgangmo]

62. And why does medicare have to do that...

Because right wing lunitics from Ronnie Raygun up to our current occupant have cut funding and then told them to balance the budget.

They have no choice but to cut payments. Those clinics would accept new patients in a heartbeat if the payments returned to reasonable levels.

We pay twice as much per capita for medical care in the US than any other country does. If we put some of this toward people instead of profits, it could be wonderful.

[DangerDave921]

40. Canada

So you agree that Canada has a backlog that requires patients to go to the US for treatment. And yet you want the Canadian system to come to the US? Where will patients go when we have the inevitable backlog in the US?

[Lars39]

44. At least Canada worked towards a solution.

[DangerDave921]

47. So points for trying?

But their solution still needs a US bail-out. How is that a solution?

[Lars39]

48. It beats being personally $60,000 in the hole because you don't have insurance

or have piss-poor insurance like a good portion of US citizens.

[DangerDave921]

49. I disagree. eom

[newfie11]

51. again that was in 1988

[newfie11]

50. That was in 1988

As far as I know that is not the case now. The Canadians I have talked to in the last year also say their health care may not be perfect but it is a hell of a lot better than what we have in the US. No one in Canada has to file bankruptcy due to health problems.

[wolfgangmo]

64. Troll alert.

Danger Dave has been driving without his helmet again.


They send them down here because it is cheaper to send someone across the border that across the country. Canada is huge and has a very tiny population. They don't have clinics that specialize in some procedures in all areas of the country. Why wouldn't they send them to the closest clinic and save some cash? They do the same thing with drugs too


What Canada has is cost containment and efficiencies. Maybe we should try it.

[Luminous Animal]

68. Wait times a myth

http://www.todaysseniorsnetwork.com/waiting__time_myth.htm

[warren pease]

38. Good points, and re pinko commies, socialized medicine and the body (parts) snatchers...

... I've always thought the it’s absolutely astounding how the subversive evils of socialized medicine for people aged 64 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds are magically transformed into an untouchable entitlement program when the clock ticks one more time.

But then you think about what socialized medicine actually is and it ain't single-payer; it's only one form of single-payer and it's not what we're advocating for the US.

If you have the time, here's an article on single-payer I did for Online Journal a couple of months back, part of which tries to separate those two concepts. Here's the relevant section:

The insurer as friend and savior
Distraction also helps produce the suspension of critical thinking required to believe in the most illogical premise of all: that America has the best medical care system in the world and has achieved that lofty position because the most voracious, profit-hungry, inhuman corporate institutions routinely ignore their very reason for existence, as well as a file cabinet full of SEC regulations and case law precedents that demand a publicly held corporation pursue profitability with single-minded, sociopathic disregard for basic human values. This is nothing less than a case study in the impossible, but it's the core tenet of the great American health care fairy tale nonetheless.

So are these corporations portrayed in media and pop culture as the enemy, as one would expect? Of course not; they're the solution. The US, unique in the world in its child-like belief in corporate good citizenship, expects these rapacious profit machines to completely abandon their chartered mandates requiring them to churn out ever more money for their stake-holders and, instead, act in the best interests of their customers.

Never mind that those two objectives are locked in inexorable conflict. Never mind that medical insurance is a zero-sum game and, when the insurer pays a claim, that's money grudgingly subtracted from the bottom line. Never mind that the insurance industry employs an army of obstructionists – known ridiculously as claims adjusters – whose main job it is to find some quasi-legal way to "adjust" your claim all the way to $0.00. Never mind the inevitable outcome of those conflicts: that the US isn't even in the top 30 according to the landmark 2000 World Health Organization study. Nope, never mind all that. The industry is our friend and savior, and where would we be without them? Other than healthier and happier, with more disposable income, that is.

As one California psychologist who serves on several managed care rate negotiating teams in the Santa Cruz area told me a while ago, “They have become adept at providing the illusion of health care, while avoiding the messy and expensive reality of having to actually deliver it – to the extent legally possible. And you’d be amazed at what’s legally possible. Most of the time you can’t even sue them so, at some point, the consumer literally has no recourse but to beg for his or her life. Increasingly, those pleas fall on deaf ears as the race to maximize profits obliterates what’s left of basic human kindness.”

So much for the bad news. We now need to examine the nature of single-payer, universal-access health care: what it is, what it isn't, how it compares and contrasts with the US for-profit model.

So what exactly is single-payer and why is it better than what we have now?
Well, surprise surprise, it's not socialized medicine. The federal government won't set up shop in every doctors office and medical facility. Unlike the current system, in which privatized pests occupy a permanent position overlooking every doc's shoulder, governmental bureaucrats won't be making harassing calls to doctors offices every five minutes to second-guess whether a patient actually needs that procedure, or that test, or that prescription.

Let's say your doc has his own small family practice, which he runs as an LLC. He probably accepts payment from a couple of dozen different insurance carriers. Does that mean he works for, say, Blue Cross or Cigna or Aetna? Of course not.

Under single-payer, he would no more work for the government than he now works for an insurance company. He gets paid by the feds, but runs his own business exactly as he has for many years.

So docs and hospitals continue to operate as they always have, although for-profit facilities must convert to non-profits. The truly revolutionary change is that now the feds foot the bill via a progressive tax that hits the rich hardest and the poor not at all.

In fact, if a patient just looks at the outward signs, things are very much as they've always been. You see the same doctors and support staff. You have blood drawn at the same labs. If you're seriously injured or suddenly become ill, you end up at the same ER. You see the same specialists. If surgery is required, the same group of medical professionals handles the entire process – from pre-op to rehab. You find that service is about as fast, or as slow, as ever. And if you want a tummy tuck or nose job, you're still going to have to pay for it out of your own pocket.

The payer changes – from any of hundreds of private insurance companies to a single entity – but the process of providing and receiving medical care remains the same. Actually, it improves because single-payer eliminates the armies of bureaucrats the insurance industry employs in an effort to squeeze the last mil out of every penny by denying coverage or illegally reducing benefits.

Single-payer: the basics
The following is the nature of any single-payer health care system. Simple, direct, universal, free. And having tried the alternative and found it wanting in that it's currently killing around 18,000 people a year (Author's note: it's now up to 24,000 annually) because making gobs of money is incompatible with covering subscribers' medical costs, it seems about time to admit our errors, dismantle the current tragicomedy and move all the way into the 20th Century.
Single-payer means:

One nation, one payer
Everybody in, nobody out
No exclusions for pre-existing conditions
No doctor bills
No hospital bills
No deductibles
No co-pays
No in network
No out of network
No corporate profits
No more medical bankruptcies

I know there's a hell of a lot of confusion around this issue. Hope this helps sort things out.

"Disease farming," or creating sedentary slobs who die of all kinds of lifestyle and diet-related diseases but whose skeletal parts remain useful for harvesting as replacement parts, is a whole other level of insidiousness. However, I don't see much of a market in harvested joints from out-of-shape 65-year-olds. Aside from the wear-and-tear of 65 years, there's the additional stress and compression inflicted on major joints -- particularly hips and knees -- that have to support additional weight and function with little exercise.

One other thing that's closely related occurs to me, though. Advertising's glorification of the American model of sustained poor health could easily lead to subsidization of big pharma via insurance premiums to fund development of classes of drugs that deal with that list of diseases and conditions brought on by the American love of couches, Doritos, crummy lite beer and TEEEVEEEE.

In other words, use Chez Maisson de la Burger Roi and all their kindred swill purveyors to create a base of tens of millions of fat, unhealthy test subjects with all kinds of cardiovascular problems, declare the latest "war" on Disease X, get the public empty their pockets yet again to give pharmaceuticals billions in research money and then act as the guinea pigs and control groups during product testing.

Oh, and then the drug that's supposed to be the primary weapon in the War on Disease X costs $1500 for a month's supply, is back-ordered for weeks and will eventually be busted for creating more medical problems than it solves. Kind of like Vioxx and the rest of that class of anti-inflamation drugs that had the unfortunate side effect of causing heart failure until it got pulled from the market.

Yup, only a bunch of really nice guys in the for-profit medical biz.

And to better serve you, they'll monitor all incoming calls for training purposes, and blah, blah, blah...


wp

[InfiniteNether]

29. Well said, sir.

But, Mr. Taylor, I think you are missing the point. The most pressing question in the minds of millions of Americans is not the tragedy of our healthcare system, but "Do we want a ni**er in the White House?". A far, far more dire concern, indeed.

[McCamy Taylor]

53. Nonsense. Americans want health insurance, a home, a job. Don't care who gives it to them.

[InfiniteNether]

57. It was a joke. But seriously

McCain will get at least 40 million votes. By my calculations, that corresponds to the 29% Bush Cultist demographic of the voting population. You say people want health insurance, a home, a job, and don't care who gives it to them. I say that is correct, provided you are a normal person. I have actually heard people say they would vote for McCain because "he is a war hero". No other reason given. These are people I work with.

[DangerDave921]

30. Death is 100% certain

The world's death rate remains constant at 100%. Even in countries with universal healthcare. You make it seem like death will stop once we enact Uni healthcare.

[Lars39]

32. You must have good insurance and nothing seriously wrong with you.

[DangerDave921]

39. What?

I was just saying that the argument for uni healthcare should not be "people are dying." People are dying everywhere, including countries with uni healthcare. So that's not a logical argument. And it sounds like a scare tactic. Of course people are dying.

[Lars39]

43. People are dying due to lack of healthcare.

[McCamy Taylor]

54. "Life expectancy". Read the journal.

[xchrom]

34. recommend

[Mika]

37. Too bad America doesn't have a Fidel Castro to give us free h-c and ed.

I mean, its not like the Cuban people started a revolution or something to improve their lot. Its not like the Cuban people worked tirelessly from 1959 until now to achieve the goals that they sought. No no no. It was Fidel and Fidel alone.

:sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm:


Before the 1959 revolution

75% of rural dwellings were huts made from palm trees.

More than 50% had no toilets of any kind.

85% had no inside running water.

91% had no electricity.

There was only 1 doctor per 2,000 people in rural areas.

More than one-third of the rural population had intestinal parasites.

Only 4% of Cuban peasants ate meat regularly; only 1% ate fish, less than 2% eggs, 3% bread, 11% milk; none ate green vegetables.

The average annual income among peasants was $91 (1956), less than 1/3 of the national income per person.

45% of the rural population was illiterate; 44% had never attended a school.

25% of the labor force was chronically unemployed.

1 million people were illiterate ( in a population of about 5.5 million).

27% of urban children, not to speak of 61% of rural children, were not attending school.

Racial discrimination was widespread.

The public school system had deteriorated badly.

Corruption was endemic; anyone could be bought, from a Supreme Court judge to a cop.

Police brutality and torture were common.

___



After the 1959 revolution
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43b/185.html

“It is in some sense almost an anti-model,” according to Eric Swanson, the programme manager for the Bank’s Development Data Group, which compiled the WDI, a tome of almost 400 pages covering scores of economic, social, and environmental indicators.

Indeed, Cuba is living proof in many ways that the Bank’s dictum that economic growth is a pre-condition for improving the lives of the poor is over-stated, if not, downright wrong.

-

It has reduced its infant mortality rate from 11 per 1,000 births in 1990 to seven in 1999, which places it firmly in the ranks of the western industrialised nations. It now stands at six, according to Jo Ritzen, the Bank’s Vice President for Development Policy, who visited Cuba privately several months ago to see for himself.

By comparison, the infant mortality rate for Argentina stood at 18 in 1999;

Chile’s was down to ten; and Costa Rica, at 12. For the entire Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole, the average was 30 in 1999.

Similarly, the mortality rate for children under the age of five in Cuba has fallen from 13 to eight per thousand over the decade. That figure is 50% lower than the rate in Chile, the Latin American country closest to Cuba’s achievement. For the region as a whole, the average was 38 in 1999.

“Six for every 1,000 in infant mortality - the same level as Spain - is just unbelievable,” according to Ritzen, a former education minister in the Netherlands. “You observe it, and so you see that Cuba has done exceedingly well in the human development area.”

Indeed, in Ritzen’s own field, the figures tell much the same story. Net primary enrolment for both girls and boys reached 100% in 1997, up from 92% in 1990. That was as high as most developed nations - higher even than the US rate and well above 80-90% rates achieved by the most advanced Latin American countries.

“Even in education performance, Cuba’s is very much in tune with the developed world, and much higher than schools in, say, Argentina, Brazil, or Chile.”

It is no wonder, in some ways. Public spending on education in Cuba amounts to about 6.7% of gross national income, twice the proportion in other Latin American and Caribbean countries and even Singapore.

There were 12 primary school pupils for every Cuban teacher in 1997, a ratio that ranked with Sweden, rather than any other developing country. The Latin American and East Asian average was twice as high at 25 to one.

The average youth (age 15-24) illiteracy rate in Latin America and the Caribbean stands at 7%. In Cuba, the rate is zero. In Latin America, where the average is 7%, only Uruguay approaches that achievement, with one percent youth illiteracy.

“Cuba managed to reduce illiteracy from 40% to zero within ten years,” said Ritzen. “If Cuba shows that it is possible, it shifts the burden of proof to those who say it’s not possible.”

Similarly, Cuba devoted 9.1% of its gross domestic product (GDP) during the 1990s to health care, roughly equivalent to Canada’s rate. Its ratio of 5.3 doctors per 1,000 people was the highest in the world.

The question that these statistics pose, of course, is whether the Cuban experience can be replicated. The answer given here is probably not.

“What does it, is the incredible dedication,” according to Wayne Smith, who was head of the US Interests Section in Havana in the late 1970s and early 1980s and has travelled to the island many times since.

The Cuban people wanted universal health care for all Cubans, and they have it. They pushed for government that represented their ideals, and organized and formed infrastructure that enabled Cubans to create a fair and complete h-c system.

The people of Cuba wanted universal education for all Cubans, and they have it. They pushed for government that represented their ideals, organized and formed infrastructure that enabled Cubans to create a complete and world class ed system, and they have it.

Cubans want to assist the world's poor with doctors and educators, instead of gun ship diplomacy.. and that is what they have done WITH their government, not at odds with their government.



-

[DangerDave921]

46. Yay Cuba!!!

The best country on earth! LOL

How come everyone talks about Cuba being so great, but no one really picks up and moves there? Same thing with Chavez and Venezuela. Or is it just great for OTHER people to live there?

[McCamy Taylor]

55. Pick one, Haiti or Cuba.

[wolfgangmo]

65. Danger Dave forgot to wear his helmet while driving again.

Yo Dave,

I have lived in Venezuela. It was nice. I would move back and may upon retirement. The only reason I left was because I was forced to leave. My work visa ran out and they caught me.

The healthcare was especially good.

Socialized healthcare seems to scare you Dave. Maybe you need a blanket and soother to make you feel better. How about a night light?

[Mezzo]

41. There is only one candidate that includes universal healthcare.

or maybe I should say one candidate left, because Lord knows I miss John Edwards.

[McCamy Taylor]

56. Actually they only do universal health insurance. Both use private insurers.

The real solution is to cut these guys out of the system.Mass. is using the private insurers and even though that state is pretty wealthy, they are having problems with them.

However, I am not going to argue with the Dems running on universal health insurance if it keeps the insurance companies happy, because it can all get worked out later. If the federal government is spending billions extra paying some UnitedHealth CEO bonuses, the federal government will know what to do to cut costs in a pinch.

[LWolf]

66. There is no current candidate that includes universal health care,

and there was only one of the original 8 to begin with.

The rest include various plans to make sure that everyone can buy health insurance.

Only Dennis Kucinich offered universal, single-payer, NOT-FOR-PROFIT health CARE.

As a matter of fact, it's still on offer: HR 676.

Does your candidate of choice support it?

[f the letter]

45. Very very nicely done post.

We really should be able to agree on this stuff by now.

[area51]

67. Kick. (n/t)