Single-payer advocate on Colbert Report Tuesday night

[eridani]

Great. We have to listen to comedy shows to get actual news.

Dear friends,

On Tuesday, July 21, at 11:30 pm EDT, watch Dr. Aaron Carroll talk about single-payer health reform on The Colbert Report, the Emmy award-winning satirical television program on Comedy Central.

Dr. Carroll is a board member of Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org), an organization of 16,000 physicians, medical students and health professionals who support single-payer national health insurance.

The episode with Dr. Carroll will also be available online about 24 hours after the initial broadcast at www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/full-episodes/index.jhtml (Episode #
is 5097). It will be rebroadcast on the Comedy Central network on Wednesday, July 22, at 2 a.m., 9:30 a.m., 2 p.m., and 8:30 p.m.

Dr. Carroll, who is an assistant professor of pediatrics in the Children’s Health Services Research Program at the Indiana University School of Medicine, published a study last year showing 59 percent of U.S. physicians now support national health insurance, a jump of 10 percentage points from just five years earlier.

In an opinion piece, Dr. Carroll writes: “There are now more uninsured people in the United States than at any time since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in the mid-1960s. … These numbers represent extraordinary suffering, unnecessary disability and premature deaths — at least 18,000 deaths per year, according to the Institute of Medicine. …

“There is one sure-fire way to make these numbers come down. It worked for seniors in the 1960s and it still works for them today. You may hear politicians demonizing government-run health insurance, but you will hear none run on a platform of eradicating Medicare; nor will any turn it down for themselves when they turn 65. Call it whatever you want: National health insurance, Medicare-for-all, ‘single payer’ or socialized health insurance; it doesn’t matter. Research shows that Medicare-for-all could save enough on administrative waste (over $350 billion) to cover all the 47 million uninsured and improve coverage for everyone else. A single-payer national health insurance system is the only way to drop the number of people lacking health insurance to zero.”

Rep. John Conyers Jr. has introduced a bill in the House, H.R. 676, that would implement a single-payer system; the bill now has 85 co-sponsors. Recently Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a single-payer bill in the U.S. Senate, S. 703.

Watch Dr. Carroll on The Colbert Report!

Physicians for a National Health Program
29 E. Madison St., Suite 602
Chicago IL 60602
[phone]
www.pnhp.org