MSNBC Countdown w/ KEITH OLBERMANN - Oct. 5, 2009: Dr. Paul Hochfeld of Mad As Hell Doctors interviewed.
OLBERMANN: About the phalanx of physicians, I'm joined now by Dr. Paul Hochfeld, an emergency medical physician from Corvalis in Oregon and a member of Mad As Hell Doctors. His organization was not invited to the event today at the White House, but Dr. Hochfeld believed his group should be represented, so he showed up anyway and was able to talk himself inside.
First of all, what exactly is or are Mad As Hell Doctors mad about?
HOCHFELD: Well, we're some Oregon doctors, members of PNHP who are dismayed and distressed at the health care debate that WASN'T going on in Washington. There was a debate between a failed individual mandate with or without a wounded public plan.
But what I'm really mad about, and what we're mostly mad about, is not health care. What we're mad about is that our legislatures were really complicit with the industry, the insurance industry, in manipulating public policy so that it is more about profits than public good. And that's what we're seeing with this health care bill that's coming out of Congress right now, or appears at least to be making it to the floor of Congress. It's this individual mandate, and it really is incremental change that isn't going to shift the power of the industry in this sick care non-system we've got.
OLBERMANN: This issue of the public option and the idea that it might get in name only or in watered-down form, let alone the idea that the single-payer went out the window months ago before even the debate started or the compromising started. How do you feel about the status of the public option?
HOCFELD: Well, if we had a REAL public option that really competed on a level playing field, it may be a way to move toward having a real health care system. I would call it not watered-down. I would call it wounded.
The public-plan option that we're going to get from this Congress, since it's basically written by the industry using our legislators, is designed to fail. It's designed to attract the sickest, most expensive patients, and that's called adverse selection. And adverse selection is the death knell to any insurance company and the public plan is just another insurance company.
So, after it comes online in 2013 and it starts to fail in 2016, at which point we're spending, what? 20 percent of our GNP on health care? The industry is gonna look at this designed-to-fail public policy and say 'See? the government can't do health care!' And it will just be the wrong lesson. The government CAN do health care. Just look at the VA. They've got excellent results, great patient satisfaction, very cost effective. Now, is it adequately funded? No, but it produces a tremendous amount of health for the amount of money they're spending, and that's the whole point.
We need to have a health care system that's designed and operated to get the most health for our health care dollars. Right now we're wasting 20 percent of all dollars servicing an industry that adds nothing to the quality of the product, which is supposed to be health.
President Obama himself said ... on national television, if you want true universal access, you're going to have to have single payer, and I think that's true. The only way we're ever going to have true universal access, which is a moral imperative, is to get some savings in the system, 20 percent right off the top, and now we can cover everybody.
And now we'll have a system so we can deal with all of the other drivers on cost, which include some of the physician behaviors, because of the perverse incentives that encourage us to do more and more and more and more.
OLBERMANN: Last point. We know the doctors were not there, the ones on camera there were basically not speaking on camera - they were, more or less, props for that imagery from the Rose Garden this morning - were any of you or were you collectively able to talk to the President about this?
HOCHFELD: None of us talked to the President, as near as I can tell, but
I talked to as many of those physicians as I possibly could, and ... virtually everybody, the vast majority of the physicians that I spoke to, and I must have talked to at least a couple of dozen of them, want what I want, and understand what I understand, which is that our health care system is profoundly broken, that we're wasting a tremendous amount of money servicing the insurance industry, and that single-payer is actually the best solution to this problem.The difference between them and me is they think we're only going to get incremental change from this Congress, and I don't think incremental change is going to change the balance of power. I think we need real change and
I think this is the civil rights issue of our generation and we need to start every discussion with 'access to appropriate health care is a human right.'FULL SEGMENT (WITH WHITE HOUSE FOOTAGE, POLL INFO AND HOWARD FINEMAN INTERVIEW) IS HERE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNEhDc-36rs
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
