What if Everyone Had Medicare?

By Henry Abrons
San Francisco Chronicle

Replacing our dysfunctional patchwork of private health insurers with a single, streamlined system of financing, would save about $400 billion annually in unnecessary paperwork and bureaucracy. That’s enough to cover all of those now uninsured and to provide every person in the United States with quality, comprehensive coverage, writes Abrons.

The land of national health care

An ambulance from Britain's National Health Service (Graham Richardson)

By Mike Marqusee
Socialist Worker

DURING THE three years I’ve been in treatment at Barts for multiple myeloma, I’ve given thanks many times to Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) and the people who built and sustain it. Since I grew up in the United States and still have close friends and family there, I’m acutely aware of how different things might have been.

Contracting a serious illness anywhere is occasion for anxiety and uncertainty. But in the U.S., anxiety and uncertainty are multiplied many times over. People who only know the NHS may not realize what they’re being spared.

Obama Democrats vs Tea Party Republicans: Fake Fight over Fake Reform

By Bruce A. Dixon
Black Agenda Report

There are real fights and there are fake fights, engineered to distract attention away from the real deal. The shouting match between Obama’s Dems and the Tea party Repubs is one of those fake fights. The health care legislation passed by the Obama Democrats is incomparably worse than anything they could have passed right after the presidential election, and significantly worse than anything Democrats could have passed at midyear 2009. The president and his minions have delayed as long as possible to guarantee the worst, not the best bill for patients, and the best deal possible for Big Insurance, Big Pharma and Big Medicine.

Slaughter House Rules: How Democrats may ‘deem’ ObamaCare into law, without voting

New York Democrat Louise Slaughter chairs the House Rules Committee

Wall Street Journal Opinion

Nancy Pelosi: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” [Vote first, read later?]

The (Louise) Slaughter House Rule is a procedural ruse to let each House vote on a different version of a bill, resulting in some arbitrary hybrid, defeating one of Madison’s core checks and balances.

We’re not sure American schools teach civics any more, but once upon a time they taught that under the U.S. Constitution a bill had to pass both the House and Senate to become law. Until this week, that is, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi is moving to merely “deem” that the House has passed the Senate health-care bill and then send it to President Obama to sign anyway.

Paraguay, Honduras and Barack Obama

By William Blum
Anti-Empire Report

What would it take for free health care to reach the shores of the world’s only superpower?

During his campaign for the presidency of Paraguay, former bishop Fernando Lugo promised to bring health care to the millions unable to afford it. A month after Lugo took office in August 2008, the Ministry of Public Health and Social Welfare (MSPBS) gradually began to make some public health services free, waiving fees for office, outpatient and emergency room visits. Later, hospital admission fees were eliminated, along with charges for intensive care, post-op incision care, treatment in an infant incubator, oxygen therapy, surgery and other services. In 2009, fees were removed for diagnostic tests in all specialties, and for dental and ophthalmological services. Almost all public health services in Paraguay are now free of charge.

Money Sure to Keep Healthcare [Scam] on the Agenda

Insurance goons are working with Big Pharma, for whom the White House pimps a “health insurance reform” agenda that corporate media deceptively tells the US is “healthcare reform.”  Center for Public Integrity advises that 3/4 of a billion lobby dollars were spent in 2009 alone. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) adds that progressives plan to rally and protest for the next six years until the insurance bailout becomes law. Obama’s plan will legally mandate health insurance for poor people who can’t afford it. Meanwhile, I got my ambulance bill – for driving me three miles and refusing me oxygen or anything for pain, $750.  ~ Ed.

By CREW

It’s too early to say how the messy, protracted health care debate will end. But one thing is already clear: It’s generated record lobbying expenditures. And like health care itself, the lobbying battle over health reform just keeps costing more.

Health-care-related lobbying and TV advertising have easily cleared the half-billion mark, topping $700 million in 2009, according to political money and ad tracking experts. Much of that went to pay for an army of lobbyists that numbered 4,525 last year, reports the Center for Public Integrity — eight for every member of Congress.

Joe Klein’s Fatuous Fantasy

By Michael Collins

Time Magazine’s Joe Klein is having an allergic reaction to free speech and public debate. The title of his latest column says it all:   The Left’s Idiocy on Health Reform. It’s an ex cathedra pronouncement from a made man at one of the nation’s oldest media properties.

What’s got Joe so worked up?

A Healthy Economy

By Robert C. Koehler

“This amendment starts from the premise that health care is a human right, and that every citizen, rich or poor, should have access to health care, just as every citizen has access to the fire department, the police or public schools.”

And for a moment last week the fog of jargon and compromise lifted on the Senate floor and a vision of what’s possible hovered over the Capitol. We could do this. We could build this kind of society, not just talk about it. We could begin moving beyond the stuck, scared place that keeps us at odds and fighting one another (and much of the world). We could return to the task of creating what economist Riane Eisler calls “the caring economy.”

AmeriKKKan HELLth KKKare

By John Ervin

Senators, Presidents, Money-Mongers ( and other “Health” Pimps ):~~

This is the most gerrymandered piece of legislative crap, as Joe Bageant said, “No health care debate….Mob negotiations to see which Mob will get the biggest chunk of change.”  You legislators that are supporting this HELLth KKKare Heist are as culpable as the Mobs that are running you.  
 

Pro-single-payer physicians call for defeat of Senate health bill

By Physicians for a National Health Program

Legislation ‘would bring more harm than good,’ group says

A national organization of 17,000 physicians who favor a single-payer health care system called on the U.S. Senate today to defeat the health care legislation presently before it and to immediately consider the adoption of an expanded and improved Medicare-for-All program.

Prescriptions

Lieberman: I Won’t Vote for a Health Care Reform Bill with Medicare Buy-In, Public Option

By Betsy L. Angert

On the eve of what was thought to be, perhaps, a sign of progress in the six-decade long health care reform debate, joblessness mounts. Depression increases. The intensity of illness is on the rise. Few if any can afford to visit a doctor. People are unemployed, under-employed, and if an individual has an income, hours are reduced. There is barely enough to pay the most basic bills, let alone insurance premiums. Yet, staffers have been asked, no told, by business owners, workers must pay a larger portion of their health care coverage. Bosses bellow in unison; with profits down, certainly the corporations cannot continue to offer perks. Medical indemnities are a privilege, not a guarantee. If you feel ill, if you are injured, take two pills and call no one in the morning.

Do not dare telephone the Democrats. They have made their peace with the health care crisis. Republicans will not respond to the cries of a public, and Independents are, as you know independent! The decree; health care reform was dead on arrival.

Public Opting

By Jack Lewis

A friend received her emergency room bill in this week’s mail. She opened it with trepidation, scanning down the complicated billing data to the bottom line. It came to $1.90.

Welcome to the Public Option.

Freedom Rider: Health Care Deceit

By Margaret Kimberley

The health care fiasco has bared the cowardly underbelly of the Democratic Party, which is putty in the hands of President Obama and his co-conspirators in the insurance industry. The conclusion is inescapable: Barack Obama and the majority of the Democrats never had any intention of bringing reform to health care.

Failure by Design – the ‘Public’ Option

Triumph of the Money Party

Michael Collins

Do you know what the “public option” does or who it covers?  If you’ve had trouble finding out, it’s not your fault.  Reading corporate media coverage provides little or no clue.  It’s hardly ever defined.  There’s a very good reason for the lack of clarity and definition.  But first, a brief summary of the public debate that characterizes just about every public debate we have on critical issues.

If you think that the current version of the public option will provide a choice for a government administered health program, you’re right.  If you think that this option was designed for the general public, then you’re wrong.  It will apply to only some of the uninsured, possibly as few as six million citizens.  It’s a kind of public option.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich on Health Care ‘Is this the best we can do?’

WASHINGTON – October 29 – Following a statement on the Floor of the House of Representatives, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement about the latest House health care plan (and see 4-min video below on Ed Schultz Show):

“Is this the best we can do? Forcing people to buy private health insurance, guaranteeing at least $50 billion in new business for the insurance companies?

Public Option Annie (guerrilla musical at AHIP conference)

Common Sense Health Care: Individualism or the Commonweal

copyright © 2009 Betsy L. Angert. BeThink.org

Democrats dance in the streets and declare success. An ABC News-Washington Post poll released on October 18, 2009, found that only twenty percent of the population defines themselves Republican. Progressives assert this result will work in their favor if the public option is to pass. However, the now ecstatic portion of the electorate discounts the “disconnect” discussed in the aforementioned study and also addressed in a Pew Research Center report published only a week earlier.

The US as Failed State

The Super Rich are Laughing

By Paul Craig Roberts

The US has every characteristic of a failed state.

The US government’s current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation.

Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the US relies on terrorism and military aggression.

October 7th is National Call-in Day for Health Care Reform

Call, email, or tweet your Representative at:

http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

Follow @tweetcongress on Twitter

       On October 7th, contact your Members of Congress

                             to enact health reform that:  

Poll Shows Public Wants Medicare for All

By Glen Ford

President Obama attempts to depict proponents of Medicare for all as lefty health care “extremists.” But that’s precisely the kind of “robust” public plan favored by two-thirds of Americans, according to a recent poll. Obama is to the Right of the people, and the GOP is off the map.