PHIMG Coalition - Grassroot voices demanding Medicare For All!

When Obama came to my neighborhood this week to press for public support for his health “reform” bill, he wasn’t just greeted by teaparty hecklers. Speaking to a large group of mostly supportive students and local residents at Arcadia University in Glenside, the president at one point mentioned that “people on the left” want “single-payer.” But before he could add that that approach wasn’t going to happen, he found himself drowned out by cheers calling for Medicare for all and single-payer.
That kind of says it all.

I’m with Marcia Angell, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. The Obama plan for health care “reform”, as well as the two versions passed by the House and the Senate, are all devious disasters that do nothing to solve the nation’s burgeoning health care crisis, and in fact, will make it worse.

The only thing to do at this point is to take the whole stinking pile of paper and put it in the compost heap. Kill it.

This whole effort was never about reform from the day last March when the new president called on Congress to begin deliberations on health care reform. It was about catering to the wishes of the big players in the Medical Industrial Complex--the big pharmaceutical multinationals, the hospital companies, the physicians and, most of all, the insurance industry. People and their health care needs had little or nothing to do with this.

That’s why we’ve ended up with proposals that would do nothing to control costs, that would force health young people to buy unregulated, high-cost and high-profit plans that would be money in the bank for the insurance industry, and that would finance any subsidies for the poor by cutting back on benefits for the only group of Americans who currently have a form of single-payer insurance--the elderly with their Medicare.

President Obama began this whole obscene nightmare with a lie, when he said that even though single-payer systems clearly work to open access to all and keep costs down while providing better overall health results in places like Canada and some European countries, they cannot be applied in America “because that would mean starting over from scratch.” He knew when he said it that this was a lie. America already has a well-run and successful single-payer healthcare program in place that is bigger than the entire Canadian health care system, and that’s Medicare, which was established in 1965, and which currently finances the care of 45 million Americans. You just have to be 65 or disabled to be eligible for it.

As Dr. Angell pointed out on a recent Bill Moyers Journal segment, the simplest way to solve America’s health care crisis would be to just start a gradual expansion of Medicare, say by lowering the age of coverage to 55, and then 45, and then 35, until everyone was covered and the insurance industry was pushed out of the health sector. The right-wing couldn’t use their scare tactics about a “government takeover of your medical care,” because the elderly love Medicare, and besides, far from “inserting a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor,” Medicare gives the elderly a freer choice of physician and treatment than any but the most gold-plated private insurance executive health care plan.

Add your comment

When Democratic elected officials say Single Payer or Medicare for All isn't politically viable they really mean that the Democratic Party won't be politically viable if they make a serios go at single payer. This is because they will lose all the campaign donations they get from the PROFIT Driven elements of our healthcare system.  It's not a secret that the Democratic party is addicted to cash from the very elements who are destroying our healthcare system - big pharma, big investor-owned hospitals, and the insurance company jackals.

But the cost of all those contributions goes farther then not supporting Single Payer. They had to BURY single payer. No CBO score, no debate, no votes.

Why? If Congress had taken a serious look at Single Payer they would have widely publicized the selling points of single payer, and exposed the beltway consensus plan for the expensive joke it is.

Single Payer:

1. Saves billions in eliminated waste. $180-300 billion a year. That is money that will not need to be raised in new taxes. Single Payer is the most fiscally conservative reform plan there is.

2. Single Payer gives 100% of Americans a Cadillac plan. Not tied to your employer. No deductibles, no copayments, no guessing what is covered or what is not covered, no need to consult a list of providers to see where you can go. No claim denials. No murder by spreadsheet.

Let's contrast that to the consensus plan.

PAY-TO-PLAYer Healthcare Reform:
(aka Mandate and Subsidize)

1. Force every American to buy a defective financial product from big insurance (which are basically Wall Street firms)

2. Add more toothless, hard to enforce regulations for the insurers, increasing complexity and costs.

3. Allow insurers to continue to offer "affordable" Pinto plans that leave you vulnerable to bankruptcy, deny claims, find new ways to screw over small community hospitals, deny care to patients, tie up doctors in red tape, etc.

4. Shovel trillions of tax payer dollar subsidies to the hugely profitable big insurers.

The consensus plan is another bail out for the Financial Sector and it is a SCANDAL that this has been foisted upon the Democratic party by Wall Street and it is a scandal that so many "Good" Democrats just went along with this for the sake of "unity".

So now you see why Baucus had to avoid these comparisons by taking single payer off the table and having the Baucus 8 arrested.

 -- Christopher Blair

A front in the national health care battle has opened in New York City, where a major hospital chain and one of the nation’s largest insurance companies are locked in a struggle over control of treatment and costs that could have broad ramifications for millions of people with private health insurance.

The fight is between Continuum Health Partners, a consortium of five New York hospitals, including Beth Israel Medical Center and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, both major teaching hospitals, and UnitedHealthcare.

The prestigious hospitals and the major health insurer have been in bitter contract negotiations, not just over rates but also over UnitedHealthcare’s demand that the hospitals notify the insurance company within 24 hours after a patient’s admission. If a hospital failed to do so, UnitedHealthcare would cut its reimbursements for the patient by half.

UnitedHealthcare says the proposed rule is meant to improve the quality of care and cut costs by allowing insurance case managers to jump in right away. The hospitals say that having their reimbursement cut in half is too much to pay for a clerical error, and that the revenue drain would ultimately hurt their patients.

The dispute signals a “ratcheting up” of a long tradition of insurers trying to cut costs, said Jeffrey Rubin, an economics professor at Rutgers University.