Why Nothing less than SINGLE PAYER UNIVERSAL COVERAGE is acceptable

[nosmokes]

Whistleblower tells of America's hidden nightmare for its sick poor
[br />
When an insurance firm boss saw a field hospital for the poor in Virginia, he knew he had to speak out. Here, he tells Paul Harris of his fears for Obama's bid to bring about radical change

[leftofthedial]

1. the chance for health care reform died when Obama buried single payer.

the public optionis synonymous with "bait and switch," and even that has been compromised into meaninglessness, IF the conservocrats ever even vote on it.

[obliviously]

2. The plan they have now is worse than nothing!

[Laelth]

13. Hear, hear! n/t

:dem:

-Laelth

[sharesunited]

3. The public option must be one of continuous open enrollment, unlimited by age or income.

Otherwise, I agree with you, it is a sham. If it does not have the power to steal healthy insureds, it cannot have the desired competitive effect.

[defendandprotect]

4. MEDICARE FOR ALL -- why fool with anything else-- ??? Remove age limits --!!!

[dflprincess]

5. The full text of HR 676 is posted in this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6152675

Compare it to the 1,000+ pages of the con job the House is trying to foist on us.

[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Donnachaidh]

7. I'll bet Canada, or any of the other countries with universal healthcare

aren't such penny-pinching tightwads.

If we HAD universal healthcare for ALL, rather than scum-sucking for profit insurance and HMO's, we wouldn't be having these petty arguments about *furiners* - legal or otherwise.

Perhaps Mexico should close it's borders to all the seniors going down there to buy the drugs that they CAN'T afford in the USA, thanks to the Republicans giving Big Pharma Medicare part D.

[chollybocker]

11. Nice strawman, clc.

Only Canadian citizens, for example, get a Medicare card for access to health care services. Citizens of other countries and illegal aliens - no such luck. Stop making things up.

[babylonsister]

8. So many lies, so little time.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6155658&mesg_id=6155658

digby: Building The Mandate


http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/building-mandate...

Building The Mandate
digby

snip//

...As Teddy Kennedy says, the most important thing is to get a public plan by hook or crook and then expand it. But I would love to know why this fellow and others like him believe that, all things being equal (the same presidential campaign, the same economic conditions) single payer could have been sold more effectively than a public plan. If the medical industrial complex pulled out all the stops with this far less radical change --- and managed to successfully erode support for reform already --- is it reasonable to think they would have been stunned into paralysis if Obama had introduced a real government run program?

...

I just don't understand why anyone thinks there was any kind of mandate for such a plan --- or that there has been any kind of grassroots, bottom-up effort to build one over the past 16 years when the Clinton plan crashed on many of the same shoals the current one is heading toward. There was certainly no demand for this during the last presidential campaign, despite the fact that the crisis was well known and plans were discussed constantly.

This reform debate has been going on for 60 years now and every time an attempt to do it fails, liberals purse their lips and say the plan wasn't sweeping enough. We say that no reform is better than reform that continues to allow insurance companies to exist anyway and comfort ourselves with the notion that single payer will be inevitable the next time. And then the politicians suffer from their political failure and get wary of tackling the issue again --- and we go back to complaining among ourselves for another 20 years until another president gets an opening for reform and the same thing happens.

This person actually seems to believe that if the current legislation crashes and burns that all the politicians have to do is brush themselves off and go back to the drawing board and we'll get a single payer plan in 2010. That is a fantasy. It does not work that way and anyone who has observed politics in this country for more than five minutes knows this. The politicians will learn their lesson about failed reform --- again --- and that will be that.

At this point the situation is so grave that taking another 20 years to build that single payer mandate is an untenable position. The economics as well as the moral necessity argue for doing whatever is possible. But, if you nonetheless believe that it's better to have no reform at all then go ahead and agitate for this plan to fail. Maybe this time, in 20 years things will be so horrible that they won't be able to avoid enacting single payer. Heck, maybe we can come back to it in only eight years this time -- if Republicans don't come back to power that is.

But if you take that position, I would certainly hope that at the very least, if this push fails, everyone who has been holding out for single payer will not sit around and congratulate themselves on their victory but instead immediately devote their lives with single minded focus for as long as it takes to building that mandate for single payer because that's what it's going to take. Otherwise, it simply won't happen.

[Johonny]

15. thanks

I agree.

[Odin2005]

9. Trying to get single payer in a single shot is political suicide.

It would be dead on arrival because of the combined power of the GOP and the Blue Dogs no matter how hard Obama pushed it and because there are a lot of people in the mushy middle of the political bell curve that instinctively recoil at anything that gets labeled "socialist". Once the public option destroys GOP propaganda about "government health care" THEN getting single payer is feasible. That's the problem with the Kucinich-types, grandstanding and gestures are one thing, getting thins done is something else entirely..

[ThomCat]

10. This article mentions that just 3 major insurance companies alone

canceled 20,000 policies of sick people while they were filing claims in order to save money over 4 years. That is 20,000 people who probably died because they were denied access to health care.

These three insurance companies told people who were sick and needed expensive health care, we don't care that you paid us for access to health care. We don't care that it is our job to pay for your health care. We don't care that you are the most desperately needy right now, and the most desperately vulnerable. Our profits come first. So you need to die so that we can make our Wall Street numbers.

:cry:

Never forget what all of this really means. It means life and death for the people who get cheated by these greedy corporate executives.

[Wednesdays]

12. K&R

:kick:

[SpartanDem]

14. Wha about the countries that have universal coverage, but not single payer

is their their health care unacceptable?

[nosmokes]

16. They spend substantially more money than those w / single payer and it's

not true universal coverage.