If Right-Wingers Get Their Way, 22,000 Americans Will Continue to Be Killed by Lack of Health Care Each Year
By Mark Ames
August 13, 2009 | Alternet.org
The right-wing anti-Obama-care movement is OK with killing off tens of thousands of Americans each year.
That's what this is all about: The right-wingers and their corporate sponsors are protecting a medieval and violent health care system that kills more Americans each year than all the Americans who have died in the war on terror since 2001, including the 3,000 victims of 9/11, and the 5,000-plus U.S. service members who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Every two months, the American health care industry is party to the slaughter of more Americans than al-Qaida managed to kill. Osama bin Laden must look at the Tea Baggers, FreedomWorks, health-industry billionaires like Rick Scott and the rest, and think, "If only I could kill as many Americans as they do! These guys are pros!"
They need to answer for this -- they need to explain why they are trying to protect a system that kills 22,000 Americans per year -- a figure based on a landmark report by the prestigious Institute of Medicine.
In fact, 22,000 is a conservative figure -- one of the authors of that report thinks the real figure in 2006 alone was 27,000 Americans killed from our health care system, perhaps as high as 40,000. But I'll stick to the conservative casualty number of 22,000, which is horrific enough.
If you believe in making health care available to every American, there's no reason to be skittish about talking about it on these terms. The right wing sure as hell isn't: in fact, its whole argument against health care reform is a hypothetical, future-tense dystopia of Americans murdered by their government, a fiction invented by hired marketing whizzes.
It's winning the "debate" based on a lie that hasn't even happened, whereas in this present-tense reality we all inhabit now, one American dies every 24 minutes because of this health care system.
It's time we protect ourselves and those we love, and that means stopping this slaughterhouse and saving Americans.
That's why health care reform isn't the place for wonkish debate and complicated rational arguments -- this is a battle to protect ourselves from people who are fine with their fellow citizens dying in horrible pain, not a debate-club tournament.
The right-wing thugs crashing Obama-care town hall meetings don't seem to mind being party to the mass murder of Americans, because they hate our freedoms.
For example, the freedom to elect a president whom they disagree with, or whose skin color they find repulsive. These goons hate Americans so much that they're willing to get violent -- actually, that's almost redundant, because it's like saying, "They're willing to get violent in order to kill 22,000 of us."
But that's how it is: They're attacking anyone who threatens to pull the plug on a health-care monster that's responsible for slaughtering some 200,000 Americans this decade.
If you go back to the first successful campaign to destroy first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care program in 1993, then the total number of Americans killed is well over 300,000 -- that's more than the 292,000 Americans who died fighting Fascism in World War II. Let me repeat: Since 1993, more Americans have been killed by our health care system than were killed on the battlefield in World War II.
It's no coincidence that the same rat who led America into the disastrous war in Iraq -- pundit Bill Kristol -- is the same one who led the fight against health care reform in 1993 and 2009.
Kristol has more American blood on his hands than a thousand Benedict Arnolds -- he was party to the slaughter of more than 4,000 Americans in Iraq and the death of America's geopolitical power. And with health care, Kristol has been one of the health care junta's prime ideologues, resulting in deaths of a few hundred thousand Americans here at home. Not that he's hiding it. Kristol himself wrote recently, "This is no time to pull punches. Go for the kill."
Let's take Kristol at his word -- he sees Americans trying get the sort of health care he has, and his response is to "Go for the kill." And that's exactly what they're doing: killing us.
So let's stop pretending that the health care battle is a "debate," because it's not.
It's a fight, a struggle to the death, to avoid death and suffering. The right wing understood this long ago, and that's why its winning -- again. The right-wingers are fighting for a system that kills Americans for their personal profit. And like colonial overlords, they're now unleashing hired thugs to attack anyone who threatens their riches.
It's the oldest and most serious battle of all: the battle for life and death, between misery and happiness -- all of which are scarce resources. When you look at this stripped of the silly civics-class sheen that too many progressives adhere to, then the right wing's vicious tactics aren't at all shocking, but rather, obvious.
Since the dawn of time, man has murdered, terrorized and plundered in order to live longer and healthier. That's all that's going on -- but in this fight, one side showed up to the battlefield ready for blood, and the other side -- the majority of Americans who voted for Obama, or the 76 percent of Americans who support a public option plan -- showed up armed with debate points and sneers.
No wonder we've all but lost.
And we'll remain stuck in this retro-Middle Ages nightmare, in which health care CEOs earn billions and golf in luxury until they're well over 100 years old, while 52 million Americans have no health care coverage at all.
It's a transfer not only of this nation's wealth but of American blood and vital organs -- transferred from the bodies of tens of millions of Americans and into the richest 1 percent's longevity, just like the way Grandpa in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre stayed alive by eating the flesh and blood of gullible Americans.
The stats prove that we are ruled by cannibals: the gap between the lifespan of America's wealthiest and its poorest has doubled since 1980. Overall the lifespan of the average American has plummeted from its No. 13 world ranking in 1960 to No. 42 today, lower than Costa Rica's.
Usually, you only find this sort of plummeting longevity ranking in countries occupied and exploited by brutal colonial powers that could give a damn how many natives die under their watch. The Congo under Belgium's King Leopold saw lifespans plummet while a handful of royal outsiders looted the country as quickly as they could.
America is the new Congo: we're subject to a handful of King Leopold billionaire colonialists, like the veiny-headed freak Rick Scott, looting the wealth and murdering tens of thousands, employing embittered natives as thug collaborators to keep the local population from demanding better conditions for ourselves.
Scott is literally a Texas Chainsaw Massacre character -- the one-time business partner of former President George W. Bush in the Texas Rangers scam, Scott made millions for himself in the 1990s by creating a health care monster called Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp., which defrauded American taxpayers out of billions through false Medicare bills.
It paid the largest corporate fraud fines in history -- $1.7 billion -- and squeezed even more money by downsizing staff to the point where "babies were attended as infrequently as every three hours. Once, the only nurse caring for seven ill infants was so busy she failed to hear an alarm when a baby stopped breathing. A parent dashed to the baby and stimulated breathing, the state report said." [New York Times, 5/11/97]
Scott should not be allowed to walk free. By any standard I know of, he is a traitor who profits off the deaths of Americans, and he should be tried for his crimes against this country. All of his hundreds of millions of dollars are blood profits extracted from American corpses.
Rick Scott should be tarred and feathered, shipped off to Guantanamo until he gives up all of his blood money, and then strapped into a space capsule and fired off into deep space to ensure that this monster never harms another American again. That's in a just world.
But in our Congo-America reality, Scott is a respectable oligarch, all over the airwaves and Washington as the leader of the Conservatives for Patient's Rights group, back in the health care clinic business, fighting to keep his loot and that of his fellow health care billionaires, at the expense of tens of thousands of American lives.
And guess what? He's winning. He's winning because he's willing to see Americans die in order to enrich himself.
The colonized peoples of Africa, India, China and elsewhere had to fight to overthrow the vampires that ruled them and killed them. It's time we understood that these people hate us, and America for them is merely a slaughterhouse whose profits fund their pat lives.
Until we understand what's at stake as much as they do, we'll never have a chance in hell of saving ourselves.
Why has health-care reform stalled in Congress? Democrats, after all, control both Houses, and President Obama, whose popularity remains high, has made universal health care his No. 1 priority. What's more, an overwhelming majority of the public wants it. In the most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 76% of respondents said it was important that Americans have a choice between a public and private health-insurance plan. In last week's New York Times/CBSNews poll, 85% said they wanted major health-care reforms.
So why the stall? Mainly because Congress can't decide how to pay for it. The hardest blow came last week when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the trial-balloon bill emerging from the Senate Health Committee would cost a whopping $1 trillion over 10 years and would cover only a fraction of Americans currently without health care. According to the CBO, another tentative bill, this one coming out of the Senate Finance Committee, would cost even more -- $1.6 trillion.
That spells political trouble. Republicans who never batted an eye over George W. Bush's wild spending habits have become born-again fiscal hawks. Blue Dog Democrats are nervous about mounting deficits. Even the president admits that the flow of red ink in future budgets keeps him up at night.
No one wants to raise taxes or even be accused of thinking about the subject. But honest politicians have to admit that universal health care will require additional revenues. The likeliest sources are limits on certain tax deductions and a cap on tax-free employer-provided health care. Would the public go along? The most intriguing finding in last week's New York Times/CBS poll was that most respondents said they would be willing to pay higher taxes to ensure everyone had health insurance.
But before we even get to this point, it's important to recognize that those terrifying CBO cost projections significantly overstate the costs. They did not include potential cost savings from the lynchpin of health-care cost containment: a so-called public option that would give people who don't get health care from their employer the choice of a public insurance plan. Why? For the simple reason that the Senate committees hadn't yet agreed on a public option. Yet without a public option, the other parties that comprise America's non-system of health care -- private insurers, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and medical suppliers -- have little or no incentive to supply high-quality care at a lower cost than they do now.
Which is precisely why the public option has become such a lightening rod. The American Medical Association is dead-set against it, Big Pharma rejects it out of hand, and the biggest insurance companies won't consider it. No other issue in the current health-care debate is as fiercely opposed by the medical establishment and their lobbies now swarming over Capitol Hill. Of course, they don't want it. A public option would squeeze their profits and force them to undertake major reforms. That's the whole point.
Critics say the public option is really a Trojan horse for a government takeover of all of health insurance. But nothing could be further from the truth. It's an option. No one has to choose it. Individuals and families will merely be invited to compare costs and outcomes. Presumably they will choose the public plan only if it offers them and their families the best deal -- more and better health care for less.
Private insurers say a public option would have an unfair advantage in achieving this goal. Being the one public plan, it will have large economies of scale that will enable it to negotiate more favorable terms with pharmaceutical companies and other providers. But why, exactly, is this unfair? Isn't the whole point of cost containment to provide the public with health care on more favorable terms? If the public plan negotiates better terms -- thereby demonstrating that drug companies and other providers can meet them -- private plans could seek similar deals.
But, say the critics, the public plan starts off with an unfair advantage because it's likely to have lower administrative costs. That may be true -- Medicare's administrative costs per enrollee are a small fraction of typical private insurance costs -- but here again, why exactly is this unfair? Isn't one of the goals of health-care cost containment to lower administrative costs? If the public option pushes private plans to trim their bureaucracies and become more efficient, that's fine.
Critics complain that a public plan has an inherent advantage over private plans because the public won't have to show profits. But plenty of private plans are already not-for-profit. And if nonprofit plans can offer high-quality health care more cheaply than for-profit plans, why should for-profit plans be coddled? The public plan would merely force profit-making private plans to take whatever steps were necessary to become more competitive. Once again, that's a plus.
Critics charge that the public plan will be subsidized by the government. Here they have their facts wrong. Under every plan that's being discussed on Capitol Hill, subsidies go to individuals and families who need them in order to afford health care, not to a public plan. Individuals and families use the subsidies to shop for the best care they can find. They're free to choose the public plan, but that's only one option. They could take their subsidy and buy a private plan just as easily. Legislation should also make crystal clear that the public plan, for its part, may not dip into general revenues to cover its costs. It must pay for itself. And any government entity that oversees the health-insurance pool or acts as referee in setting ground rules for all plans must not favor the public plan.
Finally, critics say that because of its breadth and national reach, the public plan will be able to collect and analyze patient information on a large scale to discover the best ways to improve care. The public plan might even allow clinicians who form accountable-care organizations to keep a portion of the savings they generate. Those opposed to a public option ask how private plans can ever compete with all this. The answer is they can and should. It's the only way we have a prayer of taming health-care costs. But here's some good news for the private plans. The information gleaned by the public plan about best practices will be made available to the private plans as they try to achieve the same or better outputs.
As a practical matter, the choice people make between private plans and a public one is likely to function as a check on both. Such competition will encourage private plans to do better -- offering more value at less cost. At the same time, it will encourage the public plan to be as flexible as possible. In this way, private and public plans will offer one another benchmarks of what's possible and desirable.
Mr. Obama says he wants a public plan. But the strength of the opposition to it, along with his own commitment to making the emerging bill "bipartisan," is leading toward some oddball compromises. One would substitute nonprofit health insurance cooperatives for a public plan. But such cooperatives would lack the scale and authority to negotiate lower rates with drug companies and other providers, collect wide data on outcomes, or effect major change in the system.
Another emerging compromise is to hold off on a public option altogether unless or until private insurers fail to meet some targets for expanding coverage and lowering health-care costs years from now. But without a public option from the start, private insurers won't have the incentives or system-wide model they need to reach these targets. And in politics, years from now usually means never.
To get health care moving again in Congress, the president will have to be clear about how to deal with its costs and whether and how a public plan is to be included as an option. The two are intimately related. Enough talk. He should come out swinging for the public option.
If Medicare for Everyone is So Bad, Why Does Every Nation Who Has It Keep It?
By Dave Lindorff
August 10, 2009 | Buzzflash.com
Questions Should You Find Yourself at a microphone at a 'Town Meeting':
1. If Canada's single-payer system is so God-awful, why have repeated Conservative governments at the provincial and national level in Canada never touched it? Canada is a democracy. If Canadians don't like their health care system, why haven't they gotten rid of it in 35 years? Since the system there is run by the separate provinces, many of which are very politically conservative, why has not one province ever tried to get rid of single-payer?
[By the same token, why haven't Britain, France, Sweden, Japan, or a host of other democracies gotten rid of their "ineffective" "socialist" health care systems? – J]
2. Why is rationing by income, as we do it here, better than rationing by need, as they do it in Canada?
3. Wouldn't single-payer mean that companies could no longer threaten working people with the loss of their health insurance? Why is this a bad idea?
4. The bigger the insurance pool, the better. So doesn't having a national pool, as with single-payer, make the most sense?
5. Why should we be allowing politicians who are taking money from the medical industry to write the new health care legislation?
6. How can the Congress be developing a health system reform scheme and not even invite experts from Canada down to explain their successful system?
[And Germany, and the UK, France, Sweden – a bunch of countries which have slightly different systems. It would be great to hear it from the horse's mouth. – J]
7. If Medicare--a single-payer system here in America--is so popular with the elderly, how come it's no good for the rest of us?
[Here's a question nobody dares to ask: Are older conservatives so scared of losing some of their Medicare coverage, that they will oppose health reform for the rest of us on the hypocritical grounds that more government-funded health care (for others, not for them) would be "socialism?" – J]
8. Isn't it true that Medicare currently finances the most costly patient group--the elderly and infirm--so that extending it to the rest of the population--most of whom are young and healthy--would be much cheaper, per person?
9. The AMA, the Pharmaceutical Industry, and the Insurance Industry all bitterly opposed Medicare in 1964-5 when it was being debated in Congress and passed into law, with the right, led by Ronald Reagan, calling it creeping socialism. It became a life-saver for the elderly and didn't turn the US into a soviet republic. Why should we give a tinker's damn what those same three industry groups and the Republican right think of expanding single-payer now?
10. The executives of Canadian subsidiaries of US companies all support Canada's single-payer system, and even lobby collectively to have it expanded and better funded. Why does Congress listen to the executives of the parent companies here at home, and not invite those Canadian execs down to explain why they like single-payer?
