"Dear President Obama, FUCK the AMA!" Who's with me?!?!?

[stlsaxman]

I want you, Mr. President, to stand before the American Medical Assn. today and let them know a "Public Option" is NOT optional. Declare it's inevitability and that the AMA can either accept it or STFU!

[grannie4peace]

1. super scare tactics- i'm with you !!!

[90-percent]

2. Why

Why would the AMA support hyper expensive FOR PROFIT health insurance?

My perspective is that BIG INSURANCE is sucking ALL THE MONEY in the system so as to make obscene profits, including Doctor's compensations for insurance claims.

So the Doctors have to dick around with insurance companies to eventually get paid, and they get ensnared in this system that makes more profit by providing less care.

IT seems like the AMA is more concerned with BIG INSURANCE needs for obscene profits over the interests of THEIR own members - assuming the AMA is a professional guild that serves the needs of DOCTORS?

Who does the AMA represent, anyway?

-90% Jimmy

PS USA health costs are 12.9% of GDP. In socialized medicine Europe, the same costs are 6.5% of GDP. The 6.4% difference is the premium Americans pay for FOR PROFIT health care! Health Care for profit, in this context, seems downright Un-american, don't it?

PPS - kick ass OP, Dom!

[stlsaxman]

7. thanks- i just heard, on NPR (ugh) that the AMA is on the verge of insignificance, anyways.

hopefully Obama will feel more empowered to stick it to 'em.

[Diamonique]

14. The AMA is run by doctors who own or hold stock in

the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies.

[quantass]

3. Yea..i think its a little obvious the AMA is an impossible push.

Poor America...the people want change and the public option but the small individuals who benefit daily from cushy kick-backs from the medical lobbyists wont allow it. They really gotta ban this paying off sentators and congress people because nothing will ever get done.

[John Q. Citizen]

8. Actually the people want single payer. I know. I went to my Obama Organizing for America

meeting.

The people want single payer.

If Obama, the Senate, The Congress, The Union heads, The Move on leaders, and the DFA leaders would allow single payer on the table, then the people would stand up and demand change.

Instead we are sitting around hoping the leaders do the right thing, maybe. Since they are managing everything and all.

[stlsaxman]

18. well i want Single-Payer, too... "camels noses" and all-

where we're going is how we get there.

[John Q. Citizen]

20. when you want pizza do you order soup? You are what you eat.

[patrice]

4. Dear President Obama, please be OUR President. We want a Public Option that prepares the way

for Single Payer HEALTH Care, not Socialism for Insurance Companies who sell Sick "Care".

[John Q. Citizen]

12. The way to get single payer is to demand single payer. Black people didn't get civil

rights by demanding separate but equal. They demanded full civil rights.

Rosa Parks didn't demand the right to sit in the middle of the bus, as an incremental step so as not to offend too many people to much, you know a stepping stone to the front of the bus. she demanded the right to sit at the front of the bus.

Women didn't win suffrage by demanding an enhanced advisory role to their husbands, fathers and bothers on who they should vote for. They demanded full suffrage.

In my opinion the public/private option is a joke, and the joke is on us.

[patrice]

13. I have been wondering about this. It seems if we let the PO go through, it will be

considered enough reform and that will be the end of it.

[John Q. Citizen]

16. everywhere a public private option has been tried it's failed because it's too expensive.

Single payer is where the savingare, not a kinder and gentler multi-payer with subsidies for private insurance companies.

Then people say, see, the government can't manage even half way, how could they ever manage all the way?

[patrice]

21. In a Public:Private combo, Providers would have to maintain Private payment processing mechanisms in

addition to the Public Insurance, so costs will not be cut enough to make enough of a difference to expand the markets and services covered.

[HamdenRice]

17. Actually, African Americans got civil rights by demanding "separate but equal" for years

The strategy of Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston was to litigate cases across the south pointing out that separate facilities were not equal. The idea was that by forcing southern states to live up to separate but equal, by equalizing facilities, like state university law schools, they would make it terribly expensive, while successively pointing out how impractical it was.

Only after years and years of winning lawsuits that did not challenge Plessy, and that established the "equality" requirement, did they directly challenge "separate" in Brown.

The South Africans used a very similar strategy. The litigated cases under the then-obscure residency rules for a long time before they directly challenged the pass laws.

[John Q. Citizen]

19. That wasn't demanding seperate but equal, it was demanding adherance to the rule of law.

Are suggesting we get single payer by litigating?

Or are you suggesting that in the 1960's black's should have been demanding separate but equal, and pushing congress to pass a comprehensive separate but equal bill?

We've had public/private for 50 years, since Medicare and Medicade were passed in the 1960's.

It's time to demand full civil rights to medical care.

[HamdenRice]

22. I'm simply pointing out what historically happened.

For reasons that escape me, civil rights historical analogies have proliferated on DU.

Unfortunately, the amount of historically accurate information posted on DU about what actually happened during the civil rights era could fill an encyclopedia's first fourth of the first paragraph of the first page of volume "Q."

[John Q. Citizen]

23. But to construe demanding adherance to the rule of law as demanding

separate-but-equal isn't pointing out what happened. It's mis-interpreting what historically happened.

It's true that there were black segregationists. But Thurgood Marshall wasn't one of them.

edit to add-
If single payer advocates who believe that health care is a right, not a privilege litigate against hospitals to force them to treat indigent emergency cases as is required by law, would you try to construe that to claim that they were advocating for a multi-payer public private system?

[HamdenRice]

25. You can make any rational argument against gradualism in health care reform you like

and I'd be glad to consider it on its merits. What you should not do, however, is re-write history and denigrate Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston my obfuscating their strategy. No one said that they were segregationists.

But to characterize them as opponents of strategic gradualism is to destroy their legacy, which is wrong and frankly insulting to their memory.

What's next? Arguing that Martin Luther King's ideology caused him to take to the hills of Alabama to organize an armed insurgency?

Why the pervasive need to insult the memory of the civil rights movement on DU by re-writing its history?

If you want to make a case against gradualism in health care reform, then talk about health care reform. There is no need to insult the memory of civil rights leaders to score cheap rhetorical points.

[Fire1]

27. Thank you HamdenRice. To equate every fuckin issue

these days with the civil rights movement is 'OVERLY SIMPLISTIC' and LUDICROUS, at best! It only exemplifies vast ignorance.

[HamdenRice]

28. I wouldn't mind it if (1) they got their facts correct at least and (2) made sensible ANALOGIES

instead of broad brush equations based on fundamentally factually wrong assertions of fact. There's another one like this in the Health Forum that completely mis-states Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat.

WTF is going on? It's like open season on African American history and historical figures or something.

[Fire1]

30. Well, I mind because again, these analogies are more often

than not, overly simplistic on it's face, as well as totally inaccurate. I resent it and I'm sick of it.

[John Q. Citizen]

33. Are you calling Dr King 'OVERLY SIMPLISTIC' and LUDICROUS, at best! It only exemplifies vast

ignorance. Or are you speaking of yourself?
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

"A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. (bold added for Fire1's" edification)

From Dr. Martin Luther King's Speech Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence
Delivered 4 April 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City


When we break silence on issues of social justice, why does it bother you so much?

[Fire1]

34. Skip post. You can't read.

[John Q. Citizen]

37. Does it bother you that Dr. King sees social justice as a civil rights issue?

I can read, better than you can read apparently.:rofl:

[Fire1]

38. Call it what you will to make your point. I don't really care. n/t

[John Q. Citizen]

40. That sounds honest enough. n/t

[VespertineIconoclast]

31. Very eloquently and precisely stated.

Beautifully presented info in your posts. :thumbsup:

I too don't like the sort of rewriting of the civil rights movement history done by some on DU. Not everything can be made into an analogy to compare with it. I agree with you that if other reform issues want to be discussed it's perfectly fine, but on their own merits. However, to parallel such issues to the civil rights movement is disingenuous because there is a HUGE history surrounding the movement and many important steps are either glossed over or ignored by some here at DU.

[John Q. Citizen]

32. You wrote that African Americans demanded "separate but equal " for years. Then you

pointed to Thurgood Marshal to bolster that argument. I pointed out that, No, Thurgood Marshall did not demand "separate but equal" for years.

I stand by that.

I reject your assertion that:

A. I attempted to rewrite history and denigrate Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston and
B. That I characterized them as opponents of strategic gradualism.

I did neither. And for you to assert that i did is intellectually dishonest, or you misread what I wrote.

I will concede that i badly mangled the geography (but not the spirit) of the incident that led to the arrest of Rosa Parks, and that catalyzed the end of gradualism and the beginning of direct action in the black civil rights movement in America. I would also like to say that I appreciate your knowledge of the history of the civil rights movement and that I learned a couple facts from you.

But I disagree that invoking the spirit and the lessons of the civil rights movement in th ecurrent struggle for social justice denigrates that earlier movement. And i disagree that it is wrong for people to compare contemporary struggles for social justice with former struggles for social justice. MLK did just that.

In Mrs Parks own words:

"I worked on numerous cases with the NAACP," Mrs. Parks recalled, "but we did not get the publicity. There were cases of flogging, peonage, murder, and rape. We didn't seem to have too many successes. It was more a matter of trying to challenge the powers that be, and to let it be known that we did not wish to continue being second-class citizens."

What is Rosa saying if it isn't that, (to paraphrase) 'Incrementalism wasn't getting us any where?'

It's true that others in the movement disagreed and thought that gradualism was still the best path. But history proved them mistaken at that point in the movement.

I realize that the civil rights movement is one of your areas of expertise. And I understand how it might grate on you if people invoke the movement and don't get all the details correct. But John Conyers had a pretty close association with Rosa Parks over the years. And he sees single payer health care that puts everyone in and no one out as a civil rights issue. Jessie Jackson coined the phrase Universal Health Care back in his presidential run in 1988, and meant single payer, and he sees it as a civil rights issue as well. Many people see it as a civil rights issue. And that we compare it to the civil rights struggle at mid century is a tribute not an insult.

We have been practicing strategic gradualism for health care justice for the last 50 years, and it's time to follow the example of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and demand what we really want.

[AspenRose]

5. Me me me

:hi:

[donco6]

6. Well, it would be interesting.

I'd love to see it, I truly would.

[stray cat]

9. so doctors can choose whether or not to participate in a program

so they could easily refuse to take clients form a public option as is their right not to take insurance from some patients.

[WinkyDink]

10. Doctors already can refuse patients without any reason other than "Sorry, filled up."

[vaberella]

11. I thought Obama already said publicly that Public Option is not optional?

Do people pay attention? Even Nancy Pelosi said as much.

[stlsaxman]

15. Not so much "do people pay attention" as "do PACs like AMA pay attention?"

Some groups hear it yet refuse to "listen".

[Teaser]

24. nah, most of them doctors is ugly and have saggy skin

not my game.

[KansDem]

26. Include me in!

I'm tired of parasitic corporations...

[rucky]

29. It would mean alot more coming from actual AMA members.

This reminds me of the AARP debacle.

[avaistheone1]

35. I would like Obama to meet with Physicians for a National Health Plan

like he has with the AMA - and at least level the playing field.

Physicians for a National Health Plan is leading the fight for reform with single-payer national health insurance.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

36. Wouldn't that leave President Obama, you know, feeling "dirty"?

}(

[Wednesdays]

39. K&R

:kick:

[John Q. Citizen]

41. The AMA represents about 15% of currently practicing physicians, most of them old men.

[donheld]

42. K & R