“I Prefer Single-Payer, But …....."

[slipslidingaway]

http://www.healthcare-now.org/i-prefer-single-payer-but/

"....That the voice of single-payer (SP) has been blacked out nationally (documented by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) also makes our blood boil. It’s as if our movement doesn’t exist. But it does. There are hundreds of grassroots SP organizations all across the country engaging in public activism and protest, we just don’t get press.

Only John Conyers single-payer legislation, HR 676, The United States National Health Care Act, fundamentally restructures health care, guarantees it to the entire population (the undocumented, too) and is fully funded. No other piece of legislation is as comprehensive. How many Americans know about this amazing, life-transforming bill that delinks employment from insurance and abolishes the despised health insurance industry? Has there been a front page story or major magazine interview with Congressman Conyers? There’s been virtually no stories about labor’s support for HR 676, despite the fact it’s been endorsed by 554 union organizations in 49 states and by 130 Central Labor Councils. But we heard plenty when Andy Stern, the president of the SEIU sat down with Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-mart to discuss solutions to the nation’s health care crisis. Those two are experts on providing health care to workers? What about the nurses and doctors who support single-payer and got dragged out of, and arrested in Max Baucus’s senate hearings in Washington, DC? If doctors and nurses had been arrested for any other political issue it would have been the lead story in every newspaper and online edition. Doctors and nurses never deliberately get arrested — that’s news!


....But what is truly disgusting is how the “progressive” left has caved so quickly and cravenly, given up the fight for single-payer and support for HR 676. They have become the indignant foot soldiers, apologists and spinmeisters for Obama’s piece of shit legislation. They are betraying what they absolutely know to be true: the private insurance industry must be evicted in order to provide health care to everyone and end the fiscal crisis the multiple-payer system creates. Even the insurance companies know that according to revelations by Cigna whistleblower Wendell Potter. He reports the implementation of a single-payer health care system is what keeps the billionaire CEO’s of insurance companies and Karen Ignagni, the high priestess of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), awake at night cowering in fear and forced to spend 1.4 million dollars a day to make sure it doesn’t happen. They don’t fear a public option despite their protestations; they accept that due to the depth of the crisis, a few token compromises are in order to stay in business. It’s chump change and in exchange for perhaps losing a little market share, they’re going to get a mandate that legally obligates every person to buy their priced-to-make-profits “insurance products” or be financially penalized. If the Obama bill subsidizes the uninsured going into private plans, that’s millions of new customers to extract profits from and a transfer of taxpayer dollars into insurance industry coffers. The Massachusetts mandate madness gone nationwide.

....This is a debate over fundamentals and ideology, not tactics on how to get to a single-payer system, despite Holland’s insistence it’s the other way round. Single-payer supporters aren’t fighting for a health care system designed to keep corporate killers predations in check, ensuring their honesty or “fair competition.” Why would anyone want to do that? Our movement is fighting to get rid of an industry that puts profits over patients once and for all and we have the audacity to believe we can do it.

We haven’t given up and we haven’t sold out.

It’s both better and honest to stand up and get arrested fighting for a piece of legislation you know will end unnecessary death and human suffering than to crawl and “advocate fiercely” as Holland is for a piece of shit legislation he knows will not."

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. In what other countries do health insurance companies decide national

medical policy?

[SharonAnn]

2. Yesterday on R. Limpballs show, a caller said "they say that the U.S. is not No. 1 in health care

and that's a lie! We know that we're the best in the world. Why else does everybody come here for medical care? I can't believe these liars out there saying that we're not No. 1 in health care."

And of course, the host of the radio agreed with him and then went on further to explain how we're the best.

Frightening.

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. If America is #1, then why do Americans get drugs from Canada,

go to Mexico for cancer treatment, and fly to India for surgery?

The US DOES have the best medical care that any obscenely wealthy person can buy.

[John Q. Citizen]

4. The drug companies have made it illegal to import prescription drug from Canada. That was

in the Medicare part D legislation.

many people do go to foreign countries to obtain operations they can't afford here though.

[slipslidingaway]

5. Good question, tells us something about our priorities :( n/t

[slipslidingaway]

6. Thanks for the recs :) n/t

[Uncle Joe]

7. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, slipslidingaway.:thumbsup:

[Laelth]

8. Hear, hear! n/t

:dem:

-Laelth

[bvar22]

9. HR 676 (Medicare for ALL) has 85 Co-Sponsors in The House.

That is a significant amount of support, but I wouldn't know about the 85 co-sponsors if I didn't haunt DU because
the celebrity "Centrist" Democrats and the Media have agreed to NOT tell the American public.

[slipslidingaway]

10. They really should allow this plan to be scored by the CBO and

stop silencing SP advocates, the Democrats would be in a better position to push a strong public option.

Unfortunately the corporations have too much say in legislation.

[Uncle Joe]

11. Kicked for the night crowd. n/t

[slipslidingaway]

12. Thank you for the knr and the k :) n/t

[slipslidingaway]

13. kick nt