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(Claude Pepper - D-Florida - Governor Harold Stassen - R-Minnesota - The relentless jangle of The Bogey Man)

Note: This is a repost from July 2 - with the Healthcare Bill trudging through the Senate, I thought I would put this up as a reminder this thing has a history and it goes way back.

The never ending debate in a National Health plan and another dig in the archives for some perspective. Seems the one thing the debates had in common (the ones I've come up with from 1947, 1949, 1951, 1961) is the fear factor, trotted out almost verbatim by spokespeople for the AMA - all following the dreaded bogey man. It seems this overriding fear was the biggest factor in sinking any useful legislation in health care. And always the fear card is played by the Republicans. This debate features Senator Claude Pepper (D-Florida) and former Governor Harold Stassen (R-Minn.) from the program "American Forum Of The Air" on January 29, 1950.

Harold Stassen: (regarding the British National Healthcare system) “Please tell our friends in America, never, never, never adopt this program.”

It's interesting to note that one of the arguments made against the British system of Health care was the reported "dramatic rise in gravesites" after it was enacted in 1943, eluding to the notion that British National Health care became inept. Trouble was, there was that little thing called World War 2 that seemed to escape the radar and that all this sudden rise in dead people came not from a flawed health system, but rather bullets and shrapnel.

In the argument against a decent National Health care plan - reality doesn't seem to play much of a role.

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(Abraham Ribicoff - Secretary of Health, Education And Welfare in 1961 - also Hand Holder, Paranoia Assuager, Debunker)

In 1961, JFK introduced a bill that would provide medical assistance to the Aged. It later became known as Medicare and would later pass in 1965 during the Johnson Administration. As is always the case, the mere mention of anything connection with a government aid program where Healthcare is concerned is immediately tossed into the realm of Socialized Medicine. And in 1961 it was no different.

Newly appointed Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Abraham Ribioff was confronted by a dizzying array of skepticism from the Insurance and Pharmaceutical industries who instantly labeled any kind of Healthcare reform as Socialized Medicine. As is evidenced by this exchange between Ribicoff and Meet The Press co-founder Lawrence Spivak:

Lawrence Spivak: “ Mister Secretary, as you know the AMA and others have charged that the Medical Bill for the Aged under Social Security is an opening wedge to Socialized Medicine. Now if you thought there was a chance that the bill might be an opening wedge to Socialized Medicine, would you still be for it?”

Abraham Ribicoff: “ Well, it’s not an opening wedge to Socialized Medicine, I’m for the bill.

Spivak: “No, I’m asking if you thought that it was an opening wedge . . .

Ribicoff: “I would be against it . . .I would be against the bill if it were Socialized Medicine. . . “

Spivak: “If it opened the door to Socialized Medicine?”

Ribicoff: “It doesn’t open the door to Socialized Medicine”

Spivak: “Would you tell us what makes you so sure that it doesn’t?”

Ribicoff: “Because you and I and every other American, Mister Spivak has the right to choose his own doctor. There is nothing in this bill that has anything to do with doctors. This bill takes care of the health needs to the people of America, our aged over sixty-five, and basically takes care of their hospital bills, their nursing home bills and their visits to the home for home care. The bill specifically provides that each and every American has the right to choose his own doctor and his own hospital.”

The bill wound up being defeated, owing to a Congress recess and an overheated paranoia campaign (sound familiar?). But the Medicare Bill did finally pass in 1965.

The eerie sense of Deja-vu is everywhere.

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November 11, 2009 CNN

The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research.

The nation's largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997 that marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, the most restrictive category, which also includes heroin and LSD.

In changing its policy, the group said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug.

From the LA Times read more...

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Keith has the run down on United Health Group's Stephen Hemsley who's leading the charge against health care/insurance reform and who was recently sending employees armed with talking points to attend protests and town halls. First up, his campaign donations from OpenSecrets: United Health Group Contributions to Federal Candidates:

House
Total to Democrats: $138,700
Total to Republicans: $100,500

Senate
Total to Democrats: $71,500
Total to Republicans: $58,300

Next we have the lawsuit they settled just one week before President Obama took office. Health insurer accused of overcharging millions:

One of the nation’s largest health insurers has agreed to pay $50 million in a settlement announced today after being accused of overcharging millions of Americans for health care.

The New York attorney general’s office launched an investigation after receiving hundreds of complaints about Oxford Insurance and its parent company, UnitedHealth Group, which claims to rely on “independent research from across the health care industry” to determine reimbursement rates. In actuality though, it relies on Ingenix, a research firm owned by UnitedHealth Group.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo says Ingenix has been manipulating the numbers so insurance companies pay less. In a just-released report, he contends that Americans have been “under-reimbursed to the tune of at least hundreds of millions of dollars.” Although UnitedHealth Group and Oxford Insurance were the only entities investigated, other major insurers use Ingenix, including Aetna, CIGNA and WellPoint/Empire BlueCross BlueShield.

Continue reading »

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("Those pills are 25 bucks a-PIECE?")

(I originally posted this in February and am reposting it now in its complete form, as opposed to the excerpt which I ran in February. It's a nice companion piece to the post I did earlier this week, and further evidence our friends at the AMA have been doing this a long-long time.)

In case anyone thought the whole concept of Universal Health Care was something cooked up in the 1990's, I'm here to tell you it just ain't so.

Nope, it's been with us forever and attempts to introduce a Universal Health Care program go back to the days just post World War 2. Over sixty years of wrangling, cajoling, hand-wringing and warnings of dire consequences. And strangely, nothing has changed.

In 1945 a proposal known as the Wagner/Murray/Dingell Bill was introduced, establishing a system of Universal Health care for all Americans, regardless of financial status. And almost immediately the forces of paranoia, propaganda and dire consequences roared into place.

A lot of this came via the AMA, whose President was the dubious Dr. Morris Fishbein, the most vocal opponent of Universal Health Care and had the membership of the AMA to tap into.

This clip, from a 1948 CBS Radio program called "In My Opinion", features Senator James E. Murray (D-Montana) who co-authored the bill in question. His vocal opponent was Representative A.L. Miller (R-Nebraska) whose paranoiac doomsday rant belied the fact that he was, prior to his stint in Congress, a practicing surgeon and a member of the AMA.

Do I hear conflict of interest? Do I hear a certain breach of ethics?

Who ever said Politics was ethical? It's politics, fer chrissake!

Miller - "I saw physicians on clean surgical cases without surgical masks or rubber gloves. They were chattering like magpies over the open abdomen"

Murray - "But I do want to talk to Americas doctors. To the doctors through the country who are busy treating the sick, to the practicing doctor who usually hears of health insurance over from the Political Doctors, who are obstructing an intelligent, practical program."

The fear just doesn't stop, and it didn't stop in 1961. Before he was governor, Ronald Reagan was busy stirring up fears of Socialized Medicine, terrifying people into believing any sort of Public Health Care was a direct product of communism and government meddling.

And so, when the Medicare debate began during its first incarnation in 1961 (the bill was defeated owing to just these scare tactics and the influence of the Dixiecrats - the precursor to our Blue Dogs), people like Ronald Reagan flocked to the cause of the Insurance lobby, big Pharma and the AMA with the sole intent of scaring the living crap out of every human being within the United States.

And so the fear in 1961, as now is a misguided attempt at keeping the status quo pure by stamping out any thought an alternative may exist.

Ain't it all grand?

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("Um . . I know this is a bad time but . . . .you're not covered.")

Note: This is a re-post from June.

The endless debate on Health Care. Every time the subject is brought up, screams of "Socialized Medicine" pop up - and somewhere, the ones doing the loudest screaming appear to come from the American Medical Association. Curious, that.

Case in point - this rather historic debate between Walter Reuther (yes, that Walter Reuther) and Dr. Edward R. Annis from the AMA from February 23, 1961. The gist of the debate centered around the Kerr-Mills bill, which had been introduced as an alternative health care plan.

Reuther: “And what bothers me, instead of being against all these things, instead of calling everything socialism, why don’t you sit down with other people and see if we can’t together find a practical mechanism?”

Annis: “Mister Reuther. . . .

Reuther: “Now the Kerr bill will not do the job, because only nine states come under the Kerr Bill. In the state of Kentucky they only provide, under the Kerr bill, three days of hospitalization. Now what happens at the end of that? Well, the person is either thrown on the indignity of the Public Charity or they’re pushed off to some poor farm. This is 1961. I think that’s not a rational sensible way to meet this problem."

The case for some kind of universal Health Care has been going on since somewhere after the Stone Age. Reuther, a staunch union man, makes the case for Universal Health Care. While Annis, a man with somewhat suspicious motives, is adamantly against it. Although he doesn't come right out and say as much, his argument is peppered with the buzzword "Socialized Medicine" and it's clear where his loyalties lie.

Needless to say, he was no supporter of Medicare when it came to light in 1964 and became law in 1965. He was also no supporter of the warning on cigarette packs saying it would be bad for business if people stopped smoking. But that's another story.

There is an interesting postscript at the end of this broadcast. CBS began a series of "Letters To CBS" and Smith reads some of the letters that poured in after the first hour of the debate from two weeks earlier. One writer, a doctor who chose to remain anonymous, supplied a copy of a letter allegedly circulated by the AMA to doctors, urging letters of condemnation of CBS and the concept of Universal Health Care as a step towards Socialism.

Even then, the fear card was being played for all it was worth.

This came as a shock to me and I'm still not sure what to make of it.
Jonathan Cohn: AMA Endorses House Bill.

Via Health Care for America Now: The American Medical Association just sent a letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel, endorsing the health reform proposal put forward by three House committees.

This is unexpected. Or, at least, I wasn't expecting it. Recent signals from the AMA suggested they were reluctant to embrace reform, in no small part because they believed a public insurance option would underpay them. But the AMA letter contains no caveats. It is a straightforward endorsement.

And that makes it a pretty big deal. No, the AMA is not as powerful, nor as representative of the medical community, as it once was. But an unqualified endorsement for the most liberal plan out there has large symbolic value, given the role AMA played in killing health care reform for most of the 20th Century...read on

Howie Klein writes:

Yesterday the dependably conservative AMA came out in favor of the House compromise on health care reform. It doesn't include single payer but the robust public option it does include seems like the best deal working families can expect from a political system as corrupted by corporate money as ours is. In a letter to Charlie Rangel, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the AMA's Michael Maves pledged to work with the House leadership to help build support for the bill with the public. (Presumably that would mean combatting Republican and Blue Dog efforts to diminish the 70-80% support for the public option already showing up in all polling on the subject.)

Just as shocking is that a bunch of freshman Democrats have written a letter to Nancy Pelosi against raising taxes to help pay for the bill.

Twenty-one freshman Democratic House members have signed a letter opposing their leadership's plan to raise taxes to finance a healthcare overhaul.

Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) circulated the letter, saying that the income surtax on the wealthy would place an undue burden on small businesses, some of which pay taxes in the same way as an individual. The letter had 22 signers, all freshmen except for Rep. Paul Hodes (D-N.H.), who is in his second term.

“Especially in a recession, we need to make sure not to kill the goose that will lay the golden eggs of our recovery,” the letter said. “We are concerned that this will discourage entrepreneurial activity.”

Polis voted against the plan at the Education and Labor Committee markup Friday as a protest against the tax. But the letter itself did not threaten that its signers would vote against the bill. Instead, it asks for a different source of money to be found, and says more cost savings should be found so that less money is needed.

What the heck is this? Why is Jared Polis on board? Here's his press release attacking the funding of the House plan. Please contact him here:

Washington, DC Office 501 Cannon House O. B., Washington, DC 20515
p. 202.225.2161

f. 202.226.7840 Frisco Office West Main Professional Building, 101 West Main Street, Suite #101D, P.O. Box 1453, Frisco, CO 80443

p. 970.668.3240

f. 970.668.9830Boulder Office, 4770 Baseline Rd, #220, Boulder, CO 80303
p. 303.484.9596

f. 303.568.9007

Thornton Office, 1200 East 78th Avenue, Suite #105, Thornton, CO 80229

p.303.287.4159 f. 303.287.4385
His press contact is Lara Cottingham at lara.cottingham@mail.house.gov

Jared's also on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jaredpolis

Tell Jared Polis to stop blocking health care reform.

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(Still the awkward silence and "not in my neighborhood")

In June of 1989, Montreal hosted the 5th annual International Conference on AIDS. A public awareness was painfully slow in coming, as was any medical breakthrough. Stigmas were well in place - it was still by and large considered a "gay disease" - treatment was at the "guinea pig" stage and it was still a struggle to get useful support.

The interesting correlation between this and the current state of Health Care is where the AMA had placed itself in the AIDS question. Crocodile tears of "oh how horrible" and much ersatz hand-wringing, but the true issue came out when a spokesman for the AMA declared "who is going to pay for this?"

And again, the price tag for human life is to be negotiated.

This piece, part of the CBS Radio Newsmark series first aired on June 11, 1989.

Just try to remember: The AMA only represents a mere percentage of doctors. More doctors want single payer than don't. In the meantime, more on the proposed reform from Kathleen Sebelius:

As debate gets under way over Obama's initiative to revamp health care, Republican opposition has centered on one of the key pillars of the president's proposal: the so-called public option — a publicly funded insurance plan that would likely compete against private insurers.

A public health insurance plan, Sebelius said, will put pressure on private insurers to keep costs competitive. "And that's a good thing," she says. "I think that's a good thing for the American public. Medicare right now has lower overhead costs than private insurers."

Republicans argue that upward of 100 million Americans would opt out of private insurance in favor of a public plan if such a plan were available. That figure comes from a study by the Lewin Group, a consulting group owned by Ingenix, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, but it is a selective representation of the study's findings.

Big surprise there, huh!

"The whole idea of the public option has been difficult, in part, because some of the opposition has described it as a potential for a, you know, draconian scenario that was never part of the discussion in the first place," Sebelius says. "So, disabusing people of what is not going to happen is often difficult, because there's no tangible way to do that."

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(Emergencies are the same, but the arm and the leg are different.)

While I'm digging up material on Medicare (back to 1964), I ran across this documentary from NBC Radio and their monthly Second Sunday series, outlining the state of Health Care in the U.S. from August 11, 1968.

Try not to scream too loudly when you hear the cost of the average doctor visit in 1951, or in 1968 for that matter.

But listening to this, I was made painfully aware of just how broken our system of health care is and just how much damage has been done and ultimately, how long it will take to fix it - even if the current pending Health Care reform makes it into law.

Consider the system was falling apart in 1968 by many accounts. It is unrecognizable today. The culprits are well entrenched and changing a system that worked perfectly fine for them then will take a miracle to undo now. In 1968 the system of Health Insurance as we know it today really took hold in the 1950's. Doctors still made house calls, the AMA was gaining more ground (and even then was viewed with a certain amount of suspicion).

It is almost shocking to see how a system the average American citizen depends on could become so corrupted over such a long period of time. Even more shocking to realize any kind of useful change is being met with such organized resistance so deeply entrenched and with such deep pockets.

Or maybe not.