You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: 155

PLAYS: 10

(Then - as now, only there's an Albatross in the living room)

(Note: This is a repost from July 7th in answer to several inquiries as to just how long this thing has been going on.)

Continuing the history of Public Healthcare, I ran across this panel discussion and Q&A from December 4,1941, featuring Dr. SS. Goldwater, City Hospital commissioner for New York, Margaret Bourke-White, the photographer/social chronicler. Howard Cumley from the Association of Manufacturers, and Eleanor Roosevelt, first Lady.

The panel, from the radio program "America's Town Hall of The Air" centered mostly on the state of health of most Americans. Seems we were a rather flabby bunch in 1941, judging from the large number of rejects from the Draft Board (remember, this is 3 days before Pearl Harbor and the start of our involvement in World War 2). But the subject was also health care for everyone, regardless of ability to pay.

The first half of the program (a little over 30 minutes) is given over to statements by the panel, but the second half is a question and answer period from members of the audience.

Goldwater skirts the issue, not saying if he is for a Universal Healthcare plan or not. Bourke-White is a little more forthcoming (at around 40 minutes):

Question: Do you feel Socialized Medicine would benefit the American public?

Bourke-White: Yes, I feel it would. I know there are many objections, sometimes from private physicians who don't wish to lose their practice. Sometimes from private hospitals who don't wish to lose their clients. But I see no reason why some form, at least from Medical Insurance or Hospitalization Insurance can't be put into effect. And people who can afford to go to their own physician, people who can afford to go to their own hospitals, still can continue to do so. The people who can't possibly afford treatment or perhaps could afford it at one time, can still be taken care of.

Roosevelt is staunchly for some form of Universal Healthcare, but in lieu of the fact that war was literally days away, it was an idea that had to be shelved until it was over.

By then of course, the albatross had grown.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: 980

PLAYS: 472

(Out of control then - out of control now)

Note: This is a repost from July - but this issue hasn't changed, nor has the argument, nor has the paranoia.

As I continue my trek back in the annals of time for the seeming eternal Health care debate, I thought I would add this one to the mix. President Clinton's address regarding his health care plan from September 22, 1993. It is also followed by a rebuttal from Gov. Carrol Campbell, Sen. Connie Mack III and Rep. Nancy Johnson, all staunch opponents of the proposal and all waving fear cards. Johnson, it should be noted, received major financial support from Pfizer and Bayer Pharmaceuticals for her 2000 re-election bid. They also happen to have corporate headquarters in her home state of Connecticut. Fancy that.

Excerpt from the address of September 22, 1993:

Under our plan, every American would receive a health care security card that will guarantee a comprehensive package of benefits over the course of an entire lifetime, roughly comparable to the benefit package offered by most Fortune 500 companies. This health care security card will offer this package of benefits in a way that can never be taken away. So let us agree on this: Whatever else we disagree on, before this Congress finishes its work next year, you will pass and I will sign legislation to guarantee this security to every citizen of this country.

With this card, if you lose your job or you switch jobs, you're covered. If you leave your job to start a small business, you're covered. If you're an early retiree, you're covered. If someone in your family has unfortunately had an illness that qualifies as a preexisting condition, you're still covered. If you get sick or a member of your family gets sick, even if it's a life-threatening illness, you're covered. And if an insurance company tries to drop you for any reason, you will still be covered, because that will be illegal. This card will give comprehensive coverage. It will cover people for hospital care, doctor visits, emergency and lab services, diagnostic services like Pap smears and mammograms and cholesterol tests, substance abuse, and mental health treatment.

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (82)

PLAYS: (174)

Wow. Imagine that. Someone on Fox News attacking a child, a funeral, Howard Dean, and universal health care in one fell swoop. Bravo Laura.

Transcript:

INGRAHAM: But tell me why you think it's okay for people to be up there on Capitol Hill saying do it for Teddy? Why is that okay?

SKINNER: Well, I'll tell you why. You said are they using this -- Ted Kennedy's death? Ted Kennedy himself called it, health care, the cause of his life. Okay. So it's not using it, Laura.

And here's what really bothered me during this debate over the weekend on the radio. And we were all talking about it is that you had these moving eulogies by Orrin Hatch at obviously the services, but McCain, and Mitch McConnell saying, and even FOX News, the coverage said lion of -- liberal lion crossed party lines. Everybody said how wonderful and how he crossed party lines.

Now that he's gone, they can't see how health care can get passed because he's not there to do it. That's like using him as an excuse to bury health care reform along with him. You're eulogizing him and saying he went to your mother's funeral.

INGRAHAM: Well.

SKINNER: You loved him, but you can't do what it is he's done his whole career.

INGRAHAM: Right.

SKINNER: .not a single one of his dear friends can do what he's done.

INGRAHAM: But that's - right. That's not quite accurate though because over the last several months clearly, the Democrats haven't been saying let's do it for Teddy. Let's do it for Senator Kennedy. He's struggling for his life. And let's fight for it. I didn't hear that a lot over the last several months.

So only after his death, and after the polls show that the public basically doesn't want this whole Obama care thing, do they think okay, the whole rebranding, the first two times around hasn't worked. So now we're going to try this. And let me just play -- we have a sound bite of one of the prayers at the mass on Saturday. This is the funeral mass. And this was one of the Kennedy grand kids during the prayers. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: For what my grandpa called the cause of his life, as he said so often, in every part of this land that every American will have decent quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege. We pray to the Lord.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Nancy do you think that that adorable little boy came up with that on his own? It mean, it sounds like it's right out of Howard Dean's speech or something. Come on, this was politicizing the funeral.

SKINNER: But you know what? I've been -- I was there, Laura, at the convention when Ted Kennedy actually gave his last speech. And he was bed- ridden before he even gave that speech. So I'm telling you, he said this is the cause of my life. Everybody - 1960s.

INGRAHAM: Who cares?

SKINNER: .I've been working on this.

INGRAHAM: Nancy, who cares? Who cares that it's the cause of his life? It's a sixth of our economy.

SKINNER: It's not just.

INGRAHAM: It's not a tribute to one man. This is our future.

SKINNER: Right.

INGRAHAM: This is our liberty and our freedom at stake.

SKINNER: That's why he worked on it.

INGRAHAM: It's not about Ted Kennedy.

SKINNER: What the calls are for, Laura, is for bipartisanship. If he crossed the line -- for Nixon, he got Nixon's cancer institute passed. And Nixon didn't want his name on.

INGRAHAM: Right, we're going back to Nixon for the bipartisanship.

SKINNER: He's done no child left behind. He's done lots of things. It's not about ted Kennedy. This is the thing. If we're going to look at a compromise on health care, which that's what everybody is talking about now. The far left wants single pair universal. That's gone. The far right wants the status quo. Well, these people are saying.

INGRAHAM: Far right?

SKINNER: (INAUDIBLE) for the American people.

INGRAHAM: Yeah. How about 55 percent of the country? Far right? I mean, I don't think that's necessarily working now when you look at these polls. It's broad based opposition. But Nancy, we appreciate it very much.

All I know is months ago it was conventional wisdom in D.C. that the Democrats couldn't take the House, that candidates shouldn't talk about the war, and that the best way to try to win 15 seats was to throw all your money into about 18 of them, and hope for the best. In the end, that's not how it played out.

- Duncan Black, better known as Atrios, in November 2006.

Who boosted Howard Dean into the chairman's spot at the DNC, bringing his successful 50-state policy to fruition in last year's presidential race? The netroots did. And in 2006, who showed Rahm Emanuel that yes, we really could take control of Congress? We did.

Whose fundraising pushed the Democrats over the top in the 2008 Senate races? Ours did. Whose activist base drove the publicity, turnout and dollars in last year's presidential primaries and general election?

Duh.

So what have we accomplished? The war goes on and we've even expanded our presence in Afghanistan. The Bush-era encroachments on civil liberties have not only been embraced by a Democratic president, the Democratic Congress gives him their blessing. And with the goal of universal healthcare within tantalizing reach, we have Blue Dog Democrats - Democrats! trying to obstruct it.

Enough of kicking the Blue Dogs. What can we do to be more effective? Where did we go wrong?

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1728)

PLAYS: (13740)

Well what do you know. It looks like there may be some problems with Sen. Mitch McConnell's favorite Canadian health care horror story. h/t The Political Carnival

33.7 million Canadians are not Shona Holmes:

To my American friends: I sincerely hope you’re not taken in by the GOP propaganda featuring Canadian Shona Holmes trashing our system of universal healthcare. The problem is both that Ms. Holmes and her Republican masters misrepresented her condition and that the tactic itself is reprehensible. The GOP can’t produce any logical argument against a system that is entrenched in every Western society except yours, so they resort to fear-mongering and lies, claiming that one Canadian’s skewed view trumps the experiences and beliefs of the rest of us.

Continue reading.....

From The Ottawa Citizen:

Holmes has become the darling of conservatives and the stop-public-health-care movement in the United States. She's testified before Congress, been on Fox TV as well as CNN, and her story is retold on hundreds of right wing blogs. She's now doing a nasty TV ad for Patients United Now, a Republican-led group opposed to Obama's reforms. You can see the ad at www.patientsunitednow.com. The group is spending almost $2 million on it to target politicians in Washington.

For a person living with cancer, the idea that someone's care could be unreasonably delayed is truly scary. It also doesn't reflect the experience I've had or the experiences that have been shared with me by so many other patients. Even CNN interviewed Doug Wright, a more typical patient in Toronto who is receiving very speedy treatment for his cancer.

Still, I found Holmes tale both compelling and troubling. So I decided to check a little further. On the Mayo Clinic's website, Shona Holmes is a success story. But it's somewhat different story than all the headlines might have implied. Holmes' "brain tumour" was actually a Rathke's Cleft Cyst on her pituitary gland. To quote an American source, the John Wayne Cancer Center, "Rathke's Cleft Cysts are not true tumors or neoplasms; instead they are benign cysts."

There's no doubt Holmes had a problem that needed treatment, and she was given appointments with the appropriate specialists in Ontario. She chose not to wait the few months to see them. But it's a far cry from the life-or-death picture portrayed by Holmes on the TV ads or by McConnell in his attacks.

This is pretty big news, guys. Remember, the Massachusetts plan is the model they want to use for national reform - and already it's beginning to crack under the economic strain.

This is what happens with "bipartisan," market-friendly compromise: Band-aid solutions that can't handle a massive load. And it's exactly why we need single-payer universal healthcare: because it's the only plan cheap enough to stay solvent through tough times.

Overseers of Massachusetts’ trailblazing healthcare program made their first cuts yesterday, trimming $115 million, or 12 percent, from Commonwealth Care, which subsidizes premiums for needy residents and is the centerpiece of the 2006 law.

The board of the Connector Authority made the cuts as officials confronted two side effects of the recession: the state budget crisis and a surge in enrollment by the recently unemployed.

The largest share of the savings will come from slowing enrollment. An estimated 18,000 poor residents who qualify for full subsidies, but who forget to designate a health plan, will no longer be automatically assigned a plan and enrolled and thus could face delays in getting care.

The board also eliminated dental coverage for the poorest residents enrolled in Commonwealth Care, roughly 92,000 people who currently are the only ones in the program who receive that care. Regulators said that would save $10 million. Dental coverage was retained in the budget approved by lawmakers last week, and now it falls to the governor to decide its fate.

Also hanging in the balance is the health insurance status of 28,000 legal immigrants whose Commonwealth Care coverage was dropped in the budget lawmakers approved for the fiscal year that begins July 1. Governor Deval Patrick has until Monday to decide whether to veto any of that budget, which set aside $116 million less for Commonwealth Care than he proposed.

Robert Reich was out beating the drum yesterday, speaking on "This Week" and posting this piece in Salon:

If you want to save universal healthcare, you must do several things, and soon:

1. Go to the nation. You're not only a powerful orator; you're also capable of motivating, energizing, and mobilizing the American public. You must go on the road -- building public support by forcefully making the case for universal health care everywhere around the country. The latest Wall Street Journal poll shows that three out of four Americans want universal healthcare. But the vast majority don't know what's happening on the Hill, don't know how much money the medical-industrial lobbies are spending to defeat it, and have no idea how much demagoguery they're about to be exposed to. You must tell them. And don't be reluctant to take on those vested interests directly. Name names. They've decided to fight you. You must fight them.

This is the president's biggest weakness. Please, more drama, Obama!

2. Be LBJ. So far, Lyndon Johnson has been the only president to defeat the American Medical Association and the rest of the medical-industrial complex. He got Medicare and Medicaid despite their cries of "socialized medicine" because he knocked heads on the Hill. He told Congress exactly what he wanted, cajoled and threatened those who resisted, and counted noses every hour until he had the votes he needed. When you're not on the road, you have to be twisting congressional arms and drawing a line in the sand. Be tough.

3. Forget the Republicans. Forget bipartisanship. Universal healthcare can pass with 51 votes. You can get 51 votes if you give up on trying to persuade a handful of Republicans to cross over. Eight years ago George W. Bush passed his huge tax cut, mostly for the wealthy, by wrapping it in an all-or-nothing reconciliation measure and daring Democrats to vote against it. You should do the same with healthcare.

4. Insist on a real public option. It's the linchpin of universal healthcare. It's one thing to give up on single payer, and say that a public option is the best feasible alternative. But further compromise would essentially gut any healthcare plan. Don't accept Kent Conrad's ersatz public option masquerading as a "healthcare cooperative." Cooperatives won't have the authority, scale, or leverage to negotiate low prices and keep private insurers honest.

5. Demand that taxes be raised on the wealthy to ensure that all Americans get affordable healthcare. Not even a real public option will hold down costs enough to make healthcare affordable to most American families in years to come. So you'll need to tax the wealthy. Don't back down on your original proposal to limit their deductions. And support a cap on how much employee-provided healthcare can be provided tax free. Yes, you opposed this during your campaign. But you have no choice but to reverse yourself on this. These are the only two big pots of money.

6. Put everything else on hold. As important as they are, your other agenda items -- financial reform, home mortgage mitigation, cap-and-trade legislation -- pale in significance relative to universal healthcare. By pushing everything at once, you take the public's mind off the biggest goal, diffuses your energies, blur your public message, and fuel the demagogues who say you're trying to take over the private sector. You have to win this.

In this small world, Dr. George Tiller's long-time lawyer, Dan Monnat, has been one of my closest friends for over 40 years.  Tiller's murder was American Taliban terrorism, period. We already know the identities of the killer's accomplices, and it isn't only media wingmutts and Christianist frauds that encourage violence. Our own David Neiwert has been writing about these "Eliminationists" for years. Time to stand up to cowards and extremists

Prairie Weather: Oops...maybe we'd better rethink universal healthcare

BAGnewsNotes: Sunday news show roundup

Mercury Rising: Some Good News

Discourse.net: Stark foreclosure data for 2009

Michael Hiltzik in the LA Times. Go read it, it's a real eye-opener:

The genius of modern marketing is pouring old material into new packaging. Over the years this has given us yogurt in tubes, prechopped salad greens in cellophane bags and, most recently, the health insurance industry's new image as a friend of reform.

In December, the industry's trade group, AHIP (for America's Health Insurance Plans) revealed that it had experienced an epiphany and decided for the first time to support the principle of universal healthcare -- insuring everyone in America, regardless of health condition.

It described its change of heart as the product of three years of sedulous soul-searching by AHIP's board of directors, who claimed to have "traveled the country and engaged in conversations about healthcare reform with people from all walks of life."

As a connoisseur of health insurance lobbying practices, however, I withheld judgment until I could scan the fine print. What I found by reading AHIP’s 16-page policy brochure was that its position hadn't changed at all. Its version of "reform" comprises the same wish list that the industry has been pushing for decades.

Briefly, the industry wants the government to assume the cost of treating the sickest, and therefore most expensive, Americans. It wants the government to clamp down hard on doctors' and hospitals' fees. And it wants permission to offer stripped-down, low-benefit policies freed from pesky state regulations limiting their premiums.

As for universal coverage, which is the goal of many reformers (if not yet the Obama administration), the industry will accept a government mandate to take on all customers, as long as all Americans are required by law to buy coverage.

[...] The insurance industry understands that at this moment, with the political establishment thinking reform, it pays to make nice. In a speech not long ago, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who has sponsored a bill that would unlink health coverage from employment but leave a role for insurance companies, warned the industry against trying to scuttle reform as it did under Clinton.

"I told them, if you do what you did then, you may hold off reform for a bit, but you will hasten the day when there's a government-run healthcare system," Wyden said.

The warning may have inspired AHIP Chief Executive Karen Ignagni to tell the Obama summit: "You have our commitment to play, to contribute and to help pass healthcare reform this year." (On the coy and noncommittal scale, this statement rates a 10.0.)

Ignagni can afford to be gracious because no specific reform plan is yet on the table. But veterans of the last reform battle warn that the moment concrete proposals appear, the insurance industry will deploy in force to kill anything that threatens its profitability and freedom of movement, such as an expansion of public insurance programs or tighter federal regulations.

No one should take the summit's atmosphere of good fellowship as a harbinger of what lies ahead. "Everybody's very 'Kumbaya' right now," observes Jonathan Oberlander, a healthcare reform expert at the University of North Carolina.

The insurers think government intervention is fine if it applies to customers they don't want. The way they put it in their reform plan is that we need a system that "spreads costs for high-risk individuals across a broader base" -- the base consisting of all taxpayers, that is.

Who are these "high-risk" individuals, by the way? At an AHIP convention last year, I heard a prominent industry consultant describe the customers the industry is desperate to dump on taxpayers as those with multiple chronic diseases, like diabetes sufferers with asthma or cancer patients with heart problems. He called these people "clinical train wrecks." (Nice way for someone connected with the "caring professions" to talk, isn't it?)

AHIP's commitment to an improved healthcare system is skin-deep. It endorses the quest for lower costs, more efficiency, and the fair and impartial resolution of claims disputes. Achieving these ends always has been within the industry's power, but it never seems to make any progress toward them.

Krugman's right - the time is right to push for universal health care. I mean, I've been unemployed since July, have several pressing medical problems, and have been paying through the nose for COBRA. (The money's about to run out.) There's a new COBRA subsidy - but I got laid off one month too early to be eligible. Oh well!

Sure would be nice if President Obama saw this as a priority!'

Krugman says:

Let’s talk about the magnitude of the looming health care disaster.

Just about all economic forecasts, including those of the Obama administration’s own economists, say that we’re in for a prolonged period of very high unemployment. And high unemployment means a sharp rise in the number of Americans without health insurance.

After the economy slumped at the beginning of this decade, five million people joined the ranks of the uninsured — and that was with the unemployment rate peaking at only 6.3 percent. This time the Obama administration says that even with its stimulus plan, unemployment will reach 8 percent, and that it will stay above 6 percent until 2012. Many independent forecasts are even more pessimistic.

Why, then, aren’t we hearing more about ensuring health care access?

Now, it’s possible that those of us who care about this issue are reading too much into the administration’s silence. But let me address three arguments that I suspect Mr. Obama is hearing against moving on health care, and explain why they’re wrong.

First, some people are arguing that a major expansion of health care access would just be too expensive right now, given the vast sums we’re about to spend trying to rescue the economy.

But research sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund shows that achieving universal coverage with a plan similar to Mr. Obama’s campaign proposals would add “only” about $104 billion to federal spending in 2010 — not a small sum, of course, but not large compared with, say, the tax cuts in the Obama stimulus plan.

It’s true that the cost of universal health care will be a continuing expense, reaching far into the future. But that has always been true, and Mr. Obama has always claimed that his health care plan was affordable. The temporary expenses of his stimulus plan shouldn’t change that calculation.

Second, some people in Mr. Obama’s circle may be arguing that health care reform isn’t a priority right now, in the face of economic crisis.

But helping families purchase health insurance as part of a universal coverage plan would be at least as effective a way of boosting the economy as the tax breaks that make up roughly a third of the stimulus plan — and it would have the added benefit of directly helping families get through the crisis, ending one of the major sources of Americans’ current anxiety.

Finally — and this is, I suspect, the real reason for the administration’s health care silence — there’s the political argument that this is a bad time to be pushing fundamental health care reform, because the nation’s attention is focused on the economic crisis. But if history is any guide, this argument is precisely wrong.

[...] One more thing. There’s a populist rage building in this country, as Americans see bankers getting huge bailouts while ordinary citizens suffer.

I agree with administration officials who argue that these financial bailouts are necessary (though I have problems with the specifics). But I also agree with Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who argues that — as a matter of political necessity as well as social justice — aid to bankers has to be linked to a strengthening of the social safety net, so that Americans can see that the government is ready to help everyone, not just the rich and powerful.

The bottom line, then, is that this is no time to let campaign promises of guaranteed health care be quietly forgotten. It is, instead, a time to put the push for universal care front and center. Health care now!

This is a subject close to my heart, since I've spent at least half of the past decade as a member of the uninsured class. Right now, I'm unemployed again and paying COBRA out of reader donations - donations which run out next month, with no job in sight. Oh well!

When Obama announced Tom Daschle as his health czar, my heart sank. After all, Daschle worked for a law firm whose lobbying arm represented the insurance industry, and that didn't bode well for actual reform. Instead, it seems to point toward corporate-friendly incrementalism.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are focused enough to produce legislation which actually solves this massive problem. But voters will certainly have to stay vocal if they want to make their own interests the priority in this national healthcare debate:

Karen Goroncy, a home health aide in Washington, Pa., has taken care of people for 25 years but can't afford health insurance to take care of herself.

A reader has promised to buy Goroncy insurance after she was profiled this fall in The Inquirer, and she hopes to have hernia surgery in the New Year.

But short of the generosity of readers - not a good national solution - Goroncy and millions like her are awaiting the sweeping health reform now being considered by President-elect Barack Obama.

Obama's plan, which has not been formally announced, could mark the biggest change in health care in 40 years. A central goal will be to cover 50 million Americans who don't have insurance. It is conceivable that all Americans will be required by law to have health insurance.

A principal architect of Obama's reform - Tom Daschle, nominated to become secretary of the Health and Human Services Department - has written at length about creating a powerful new board that would control health-care spending much like the Federal Reserve Board influences the nation's monetary policy.

Senator McCain sits down with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register and gets stumped by one of the best questions I've heard asked of him so far this campaign.

"Throughout your adult life, am I right, as a veteran and a member of Congress and now someone over sixty five, throughout your adult life have you been covered by a taxpayer-financed health care plan?

Think of the brilliance of this question: McCain has received "government-run" health care his entire life, and I'm sure he's never had a single complaint. If "government-run" health care is so inefficient and wasteful, how has it served him so effectively for over thirty years? If it's good enough for him, why isn't it good enough for the 40 million Americans who desperately need it and are forced to live without it? I'm always amazed at how successful the Republicans are at convincing voters they don't want something that clearly works well, and something that they themselves have no problem taking advantage of.

Flipping through a few of the other clips I can't help but notice that McCain is becoming increasingly hostile. Check them out and tell me I'm wrong.