The drive for single payer
A bitter debate over President Barack Obama's health care proposal is
taking place across the US with various interest groups pushing their
agenda and intensifying their lobby in Washington DC. On one spectrum
are those pushing for universal health care under the single payer
system.
After several weeks of protests at Senate hearings and health care
events by single payer advocates (visit singlepayeraction.org), six
physicians from Oregon, with 191 years of combined real-world medical
experience, are crossing the country in a 27-foot Winnebago making stops
in nearly 30 cities, to debate, educate and advance full medicare for
all. Everybody in, nobody out.
Calling themselves "Mad as Hell Doctors," these physicians are
already drawing crowds and expect thousands to turn out at each city
that they visit, culminating in a large arrival demonstration in front
of the White House around October 1. (Visit www.madashelldoctors.com)
They have written President Barack Obama asking for a meeting "to
discuss the future of health care as well as the moral, social, and
fiscal imperative of enacting a single-payer system for America at this
moment in our history."
The White House turned them down flat, not even leaving the door open
for reconsideration. Mr. Obama has met countless times with the CEOs of
large corporations, whose greed and callousness causes so much of this
crisis. Though he believes in single payer "if we started from scratch,"
he has yet to meet with any single payer delegation.
The White House has shown that it lacks smarts. The formless,
waffling Obama health insurance proposal is being shattered by the
Republican cluster of Limbaugh-driven lies and the Blue Dog renegades in
the Democratic Party, who are busy cashing mounds of campaign checks
from the so-called health business. By ignoring and excluding the
majority-supported single payer approach, the White House stifles any
kind of insurance reform worthy of the name.
Publicized lies are translating into fears among people who should be
supporting full medicare for all. FactCheck.org reports that "a
notorious analysis of the House health care bill contains 48 claims.
Twenty-six of them are false, and the rest are mostly misleading. Only
four are true. For example, false are claims that the bill includes an
order for end-of-life plans or health care for illegal aliens or
assertions that 'your health care will be rationed.'"
So wild are the falsehoods, fueled by runaway internet traffic, that
the Republican National Committee implied in a fundraising letter that
Democrats may structure the overhaul in a way to deny medical treatment
to Republicans!
As with war, truth is the first casualty when it comes to the health
care debate. The Democratically-controlled Congress, on its return after
Labor Day, needs a wide-ranging personal, evidence-based series of
public House and Senate hearings to again publicize the compelling story
of avoidable suffering, fraud, waste, egregious profiteering and top
executive self-enrichment - all subsidized by taxpayers.
Take the enormous and shocking information researched by Harvard
Professor Malcolm Sparrow - an applied mathematician whose knowledge of
health care billing schemes and regulatory deficiencies is without peer.
Mr. Sparrow is no arm-chair commentator. He has dug deeply into the
enormously comprehensive frauds on medicare and consumers.
He has found payments for medical services ordered by deceased
doctors or huge payments in treatments for deceased patients - many gone
for years. Highlighting the widespread fraud on medicare by criminal
behavior, he argues that these actions should be treated as "a crime
problem" not just a "claims-processing problem." Without criminal
prosecutions, there is no deterrent stopping this massive robbery.
How massive? Read these words in recent testimony by Professor
Sparrow: The units of measure for losses due to health care fraud and
abuse in this country are hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
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