An army of 50,000 highly motivated citizens condemning health care reform

Who are all of those outspoken citizens attending the town hall meetings where health care reform is ostensibly being discussed? The Raw Story reports that 50,000 of them are not simply concerned citizens:

A spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s trade group, admitted in an article published Monday that as many as 50,000 industry employees are involved in an effort to fight back against aggressive healthcare reform . . . “The health-insurance industry is sending thousands of its employees to town-hall meetings and other forums during Congress’s August recess to try to counter a tide of criticism directed at the insurers . . . Employees of the health insurers have also been given talking points . . .
Question: Who is more motivated to show up and speak up at public meetings concerning health care? A) Ordinary citizens or B) Employees of health care insurers who are being PAID to show up and who are being provided talking points? The obvious answer is B), and they are contaminating discussions from coast to coast. The bottom line is that what is going on is not honest spirited debate out at town halls. Rather, what we are being subjected to is corrupted debate, to match the corrupted debate inside of Congress, where six highly paid health care lobbyists are assigned to each member of Congress, as reported by the LA Times:
Every one of those 534 members of Congress now has six (6!) lobbyists working on them -- and that's just for healthcare. A total of 3,300 lobbyists have registered to drive the sizzling healthcare issue in Washington -- three times the brigade of lobbyists representing the entire defense industry.
It makes you want to throw up your hands (and sometimes, just throw up), thinking that we are sending sheep to the wolves whenever we hope that regular folks would be able to make as much focused noise on the topic of health care reform (and especially health care insurance reform) against financially motivated and highly-trained armies who are not attending these meetings to do anything other than advocate the pre-determined positions of their employer corporations and to prevent any meaningful discussion. Based on what I am reading and hearing, the presence of these highly vocal and highly biased participants is all the worse because they aren't identifying themselves as such at public hearings. In most things, we ask people of bias to identify themselves, because we should downplay the positions of biased people, because they are less trustworthy. They should be impeached for their positions of biased, the way we impeach biased witnesses in courtrooms. But there is no practical way to identify these financially motivated people at town hall meetings. They are presenting themselves are neutral ordinary citizens when they are anything but. For me, this "health care" debate is increasingly turning into a question of how (or whether) we are able to have any meaningful national discussion where one of the sides is financially powerful. This is especially a concern where investigative reporting is disappearing (but thank you, LA Times).

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Another ill-informed conservative argument on health care reform

Caroline Baum, a columnist for Bloomberg News, had this to say in an August 12 column about health care reform:

Take the issue of a public option. How can the private insurance industry survive with a not-for-profit government plan charging a pittance?
Ms. Baum has overlooked some basic facts that would undermine this claim. Namely, in America, there are public universities competing with private universities, public hospitals competing with private hospitals, public libraries competing with private bookstores, and a public post office competing with private package delivery companies. To cite an even more obvious example, there are already public, not-for-profit government plans like Medicare competing with private insurers. Even in Europe, where most countries already offer universal public health coverage, private insurers still operate. In none of these instances has the public alternative put private competitors out of business. Why on earth would this suddenly change if the U.S. Congress created a public health insurance option?

Continue ReadingAnother ill-informed conservative argument on health care reform

Did Obama fall for Big Pharma sales hype?

Did you hear that Obama has been cutting some secret deals with Big Pharma after his campaign filled with promises that health care reform would be a big open book? I don't quite know what to think of this. Maybe Obama is leading Pharma on, and he's gonna stab them in the back at the last minute. That ploy has the advantage of freezing the Pharma advertising money in place for now. This is important because Pharma has enough advertising money to destroy what's left of health care reform. So three cheers for the possibility that Obama is a shrewd guy who is keeping his enemies close to keep them at bay, at least for now. I'd give that about a 2% chance of being the case. What I'm assuming is that Obama knows that the system is so utterly corrupted by legalized bribery (campaign contributions) that Congress is incapable of giving us real health care reform. That's why Obama is unwilling to promote the single payer system that most Americans want. In this more likely scenario, Obama has already given up on any meaningful health care reform. Instead, he's working hard to spin the illusion of health care reform, and the final plan will actually be a few trinkets and whistles. Maybe the government will subsidize dentists to give out candy to their patients. Maybe it will be nothing at all, but all of the Congressional Leaders will nonetheless pose and smile with their 3,000 page health care reform bill that no one will have actually read and for good reason. As many progressives are arguing, with increasing volume these days, why not take the profit out of health care insurance? Why not essentially expand medicare to all Americans? The experts I trust say that single payor is the only legitimate reform. Everything else is throwing tax money at a corrupt and inefficient system. I wasn't a big fan of single payor until I started learning how many other countries are making it work. The benefits are many (In addition to the obvious improvement that sick people won't be thrown on the street, employed people won't be locked into terrible jobs just for the insurance). Really, why should we have for-profit health insurance any more than we might have for-profit fire departments and for-profit libraries? Except that we have a for-profit Congress and a for-profit military (e.g., Blackwater and all those private soldiers earning $100,000 to be in Afghanistan). It's getting downright un-American to be duped into doing something because it's RIGHT. But I'm still obsessing about the deal Obama cut with Pharma. We heard how Pharma would save Americans $80 Billion over the next 10 years. Did you see what the written deal is: It's "up to $80 Billion." pharma-memo Now what is Obama thinking? When I see that a store is offering "up to" 80% off, I know (because I'm not a total idiot) that this means the store might be offering 2 items at 10% off and everything else at 0% off. That's the meaning of "up to." Signing an agreement with "up to" is stupid, truly idiotic. My question (which I raised in the beginning of this post) is "Who is the one being stupid?" I'll be watching for some happy 11th hour excitement when Obama tells Pharma to fuck off, that we're enacting single payor and that for its loyalty and naivete, Pharma will be rewarded with tax breaks of "up to" 100%, which means negative 37%. Take that, assholes. That's what you get for trying to cut secret deals with my President. If only. Epilogue: For those of you who are pissed that Obama is a communist, note that Blue Cross just tried to raised its rates by 56% in Michigan.

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Rep. Anthony Weiner: Why do we need health insurers at all?

New York Representative Anthony Weiner is my new hero. It's clearly time for a single payor system and it appears that progressives are finally getting the courage to speak up for it. There is no rationality in a system that syphons health care dollars off as profits to big insurance corporations. Kudos to Rachel Maddow for prominently featuring this issue.

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What IS that new health care system that we are arguing about?

I've been wondering about this for months. What IS the new health care system that we are arguing about? How can I know if I'm for it or against it until I know what it is? That was one of the topics Bill Moyers discussed with his guests, Trudy Lieberman, director of the health and medical reporting program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and Marcia Angell, senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

TRUDY LIEBERMAN: [Barack Obama] has essentially advocated is throwing more money into the current system. He's treating the symptom and he's not treating the underlying cause of our problem. Our problem is that we spend two and a half times as much per person on health care as other advanced countries, the average of other advanced countries. And we don't get our money's worth. So, now he says, okay, this is a terribly inefficient, wasteful system. Let's throw some money into it . . . Into the same system. That's his problem. The other problem, in the press conference, was that he was trying to mobilize public support for a bill, and we don't know what that bill is.
Here's a big problem with the current system:
MARCIA ANGELL: Well, that goes to the cause of the problem. We are the only advanced country in the world that has chosen to leave health care to the tender mercies of a panoply of for-profit businesses, whose purpose is to maximize income and not to provide health. And that's exactly what they do.
Angell then strongly states that the system that Obama is apparently pushing doesn't change this sad situation, even though 2/3 of Americans prefer the Canadian-style single payor system. Is Obama going to change health care for the better? Angell says she's not optimistic:
But what I would say this time around, and now I am going to be very pessimistic, Bill. This time around, I don't think it's going to happen because of the power the pharmaceutical and insurance lobbies. I don't think it's going to happen. But I would rather see Obama go down fighting for something coherent and practical that the public could mobilize behind, than go down fighting for this amorphous plan that tries to keep these private insurance industry in place . . . Well, he will have to fight . . . I think he'll go down. I don't think he's grasped the nettle. And I don't think that even the best of the proposals that he is considering are going to be effective. And I worry about even the public option, because the power of the insurance industry is so great that I believe that they would use their clout in Congress to hobble the public option in some way.
What's the only solution? Angell says it forcefully:
I think we have to go for a single payer system. You could institute that gradually. You could do it state by state. You could do it decade by decade. You could improve Medicare. That is, make it nonprofit. But extend it down to age 55 and age 45 and age 35. It would give the private insurance industry a chance to go into hurricanes, earthquakes or something. To get out of the health business. It could be done gradually. I think that has to be done. And it's the only thing that can be done.
As always, Bill Moyers and his guests give you details and arguments that you won't find in most news sources.

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