Guest editorial by Ernest A. Canning
Last week, in his address to a joint session of Congress, President Obama correctly noted:
We are the only advanced democracy on Earth…that allows such hardships for millions of its people….In just a two year period, one in every three Americans goes without health care coverage at some point. And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage…
But the problem that plagues the health care system is not just a problem of the uninsured. Those who do have insurance have never had less security and stability than they do today…More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won’t pay the full cost of care. It happens every day.
That was the easy part. Anyone who has paid attention understands that the core problem lies in the profit motives of the private insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
Thus, the President’s diagnosis of the U.S. health care system was accurate, but did he prescribe “change we can believe in?”…
U.S. Health Care System: Corrupt, Dysfunctional, Deadly
As I observed previously, the U.S. health care system is not merely corrupt and dysfunctional but deadly. 47 million Americans have no health insurance; 18,000 die each year (according to the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine) simply because they cannot afford to pay for health care insurance. Countless more, as revealed by the sworn Congressional testimony of Dr. Linda Pino, replayed by Michael Moore in Sicko! and as now acknowledged by Obama, die unnecessary deaths when insurance companies come up with creative means to deny vital procedures.
These basic facts make an honest defense of the status quo virtually impossible, on all but the most base political grounds. Insurance company CEOs and their Wall Street investors can’t very well claim that their obscene profits have a greater social value than the very lives of so many of our citizens, so they turn to lies (death panels) and scare tactics (government takeovers, socialism) delivered by uninformed wing-nuts — lies and scare tactics that are amplified by the corporate-owned media which presents this tiny but obnoxiously vocal group as if it reflected the true concerns of the American public at large.
And as I noted in both an initial article and in a follow-up, the wing-nut assault on one of the oldest forms of American democracy — the town hall meeting — provided the ideal cover for the subtle, reportedly backroom-betrayal by Obama, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) and the health insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists they privately met and conferred with.
Right Diagnosis; Wrong Prescription
Appearing on Democracy Now (video below), Dr. Quentin Young, one time physician for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the national coordinator for Physicians for a National Health Program, gave Obama “an A-plus for his diagnosis. He gets a D-minus for his treatment.”
Young, whom, as noted in my initial piece, “Single-Payer and the ‘Democracy Deficit,'” said that his long-time personal friend, Barack Obama, had been “dishonest” on the topic of single-payer health care. He was especially troubled that Obama could acknowledge that private insurers are the problem yet come up with a solution that “enhances the insurer presence” by compelling everyone to buy insurance, with expensive subsidies flowing to the carriers — at a cost of $900 billion over ten years, per the President.
Per the Congressional Budget Office, the cost would be $1 trillion, and 36 million Americans would still be uninsured at the end of those ten years.
Per Dr. Young, the single-payer system embodied in the H.R. 676 “Medicare for All Act”, would not only provide full, universal coverage but would save $400 billion/year.
What ‘Legitimate Service’?
America needs private carriers for health care like a local businessman needs the Mafia for protection.
The disconnect between the diagnosis and the prescription was demonstrated when Obama, during his speech, relied upon the congressional testimony of former CIGNA PR executive turned whistle blower, Wendell Potter.
The President said:
Just what “legitimate service” do private carriers provide? Or, as asked repeatedly by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) when he confronted former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, “Why [do] we have a private plan?….What is the value? What are they providing?” The question, never answered, left Scarborough speechless.
Weiner’s question squarely frames the true issue. As the President himself conceded during his address, the U.S. is the only advanced nation that “allows such hardships for millions of people.” Is it coincidental that the U.S. is the only one of those countries which has a multi-payer system that places profits before people? Is it a coincidence that, while their systems vary from a Medicare-for-all like system in Canada and France to a VA-like system in the UK where the physicians are government employees, all provide publicly funded universal coverage?
As noted in “Single-Payer and the ‘Democracy Deficit,'” per capita cost of health care in the U.S. is nearly double that of single-payer countries, yet the U.S. ranks 37th in health care delivery. Administrative costs in single-payer countries range from 1% to 2%. In the U.S., private carriers siphon off 31% of health care dollars.
Spurious Assault on Single-Payer Plan
During his Sept. 9 address, the President stated:
I have to say that there are arguments to be made for both approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have. Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch.
This attack on a system — single-payer — that former Illinois State Senator Barack Obama once championed and which, during a July 22, 2009 news conference, the President conceded was the “only” system that could provide universal coverage, was both sly and disingenuous.
First, where Obama imposes an ideological label, suggesting that only the Left seeks a “single-payer” system, a Feb. 2009 New York Times/CBS News poll [PDF] revealed that 59% of all Americans favored a national health care system. Similarly, a Feb. 2009 Grove Insight Opinion Research poll [PDF] found that 60% of all Americans favor Medicare for All, the single-payer concept embodied in H.R. 676.
Either 60% of Americans are part of the ideological Left, or the President had dishonestly chosen to label “single-payer” as “Left” as a precursor to his claim that “single-payer” amounted to a “radical change.”
More troubling is the slight-of-hand where Obama attempts to equate “single-payer” as an extreme solution at one end of the political spectrum as a counterweight to the hard-right proposal that would make a bad situation worse by eliminating employer-based coverage without any option to obtain publicly funded insurance.
An argument can be made for both? What possible argument could be made for what would amount to sacrificing the health and very lives of our citizens to the ideological Gods of market capitalism? We’re already losing 18,000 lives/year to the current system with employer-funded coverage. How many more would die if this radical-right proposal were adopted?
Dr. Young described the President’s suggestion that a single-payer system would be disruptive as “fallacious”. “We have Medicare,” he pointed out, “which is a highly prized benefit to seniors and people who are disabled. It was installed in one year without any problem at all.”
The President’s claim that replacing the current system with a single-payer system would be disruptive is contrary to everything “we know about health care finance,” Dr. Young added.
The best rebuttal to the President’s suggestion, that we should “build on” the current corrupt system because it employs some of our friends and neighbors, can be found in the “cash for clunkers” program. If you had a rusty, old, gas-guzzling jalopy, would it make sense to spend more than the cost for a fuel efficient new car to replace the engine, transmission, wheels, upholstery and a new paint job simply because you had that old clunker for so long?
The adjusters now employed by the insurance industry could go to work in a government run system. The only losers would be the CEOs and their Wall Street investors who would be separated from their blood money. And, by replacing the employer-based private insurance system with a government-funded single-payer system, American manufacturers would be in a better position to compete in the global market place.
‘Single-payer is Not Politically Feasible’?
You hear it even from some of the most progressive members of Congress. We can’t have single-payer. It’s not politically feasible.
The topic was taken up by Noam Chomsky in Failed States (2007), addressing the corporate media’s coverage of a Bush-Kerry debate in 2004:
The comment is interesting. A large majority of the population supports extensive government intervention…An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that “over 2/3 of all Americans thought the government should guarantee ‘everyone’ the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply’; a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 80 percent regard universal health care as ‘more important than holding down taxes’; polls reported in Business Week found that “67% of Americans think it’s a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens…” By the late 1980s, more than 70 percent of Americans “thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,” while 40 percent “thought it already was.”…
The facts sometimes acknowledged, with an interesting twist. The rare allusions to public support for guaranteed health care describe the idea as lacking “political support,” or “politically impossible” because of “tangled politics.” These are polite ways of saying that the pharmaceutical and financial industries and other private powers are strongly opposed. The will of the public is banned from the political arena.
More recently, reflecting on the Goldman-Sachs-connected Wall Street tycoons placed in key positions inside the Obama administration, Chomsky observed that the President chose these economic advisers because “his constituency is basically the financial institutions.”
One day after the President’s speech last week, Obama’s “constituency” revealed how it felt about ObamaCare as shares in UnitedHealth, WellPoint and CIGNA rose between one to four percent.
In “Nader was Right: Liberals are Going Nowhere with Obama,” Chris Hedges observed at TruthDig:
With so many dying so as to enrich a privileged few, single-payer could well represent the moral imperative of our time.
So I leave all progressives with these questions: Do we quietly accept the conventional wisdom that a single-payer system is not feasible? Do we again cave in to the corporate sector of the Democratic Party and permit passage of a pseudo-reform that leaves us worse off than we are now? Or do we draw a line in the sand and say, “on this we will not budge. Our health, our very lives, are not commodities”? Should progressives find a way to unite and aggressively target corporate Democrats, looking to replace them with true progressives who will put people before profits, or fall back into the traditional choice of the lesser evil?
Progressives may not, at present, have the votes needed in the Senate to pass single-payer in this Congress, but they do have enough votes in the House to block a $900 billion give-away that was essentially drafted by the insurance lobby and their chief Congressional tool, Sen. Baucus. Does it make any sense to call a piece of crap “reform” and pretend that passage of a bill, any bill, is an accomplishment?
“Change we can believe in” will be realized only when the same super-majority of the American people who desire that change acquire the wisdom and the courage to collectively say “no” to the corporate, profit-driven agenda. The “democracy deficit” can only be closed when the American people see through the deceptions of the corporate media and the expensive political advertising that only corporate money can buy.
The 9/10/09 ‘Democracy Now!’ interview with Dr. Quentin Young, one time physician for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the national coordinator for Physicians for a National Health Program, follows below…
UPDATE 09/15/09: Today, I received an email in which Rep. Dennis Kucnich (D-OH) makes the following predictions:
2. The White House will refer to the President’s speech last week where he spoke favorably of the public option.
3. The Senate will kill the competitive public option in favor of non-competitive “co-ops”. Senate leaders like Kent Conrad have said the votes to pass a public option were never there in the Senate.
4. The bill will come to a House-Senate Conference Committee without the public option.
5. House Democrats will be told to support the conference report on the legislation to support the President.
6. The bill will pass, not with a “public option” but with a private mandate requiring 30 million uninsured to buy private health insurance (if one doesn’t already have it). If you are broke, you may get a subsidy. If you are not broke, you will get a fine if you do not purchase insurance.
Of course, when it comes to step #5, House Democrats, like Mr. Kucinich, will be in a position to choose between supporting the President and supporting the American people. Between now and step #5, the super-majority must come together and insist that if there is no public option, there is no bill.
Polls reveal that 76% of all Americans want a public option. What we need, and right soon, is a well-organized march of millions on the streets of Washington D.C.
Throughout the summer the wing-nuts, and their allies in the corporate media, have had their say. It is time for the 76% of the American people who support a public option to make their presence known. Otherwise, the Kucinich prediction will soon become a sad and deadly reality.
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Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968).
Dumb article, single payer healthcare isn’t feasible and wouldn’t solve any of the problems of the HMO systems. Government healthcare providers in canada and England do indeed cancel surgeries just like the evil HMO’s, that isn’t hype, its a fact. There are also extremely long waits for care where people will continue to die as proven by the fact that 1 third of people in Australia continue to have private insurance as well as government insurance to prevent from waiting in long lines, hardly saving anyone money. Also, the national health service in England is currently skirting a 7 billion pound deficit for the current year, and those benevolent caring English doctors now don’t want to treat fat people, smokers, or anyone else with a preventable condition in order to break even.
I don’t like the HMO system, but Single payer is a government ponzi scheme just like social security and medicare, both of which will be bankrupt long before I can ever use either fund. Anyone who cares about honest reform would disband HMO’s and would allow people to deduct money from there income tax into medical savings accounts, giving people control over there own healthcare while curbing excessive government spending in the process.
Also, a moral imperative isn’t a logical argument for universal healthcare. What’s moral to you may not be moral to me. If I don’t like abortion because the bible says it’s wrong, you probably wouldn’t take me seriously, thus you can’t push universal healthcare on everyone just because you think it’s the right thing to do.
I’ve been seeing it coming for many weeks, actually months now.
The healthcare bill is going to be just another giant corporation bailout/feeding-frenzy.
Obama and the dems are just as owned by the corporate masters as the republicans are.
It truly is time for ‘change’. This administration was not it.
You’re right, Eric. There’s no moral imperative to help the sick or poor or keep people alive in your bible.
I don’t know where these Liberals got the idea that our Constitution mandates the government should help provide for the general welfare of citizens. Crazy Libs!
Why should the government bother to keep your wife from dying of breast cancer just because she can’t afford to pay for the treatment herself? That’s her problem. If she was worth keeping alive, she’d have enough money to afford the treatment. Everyone knows that. If she doesn’t, well, clearly she deserves to die as painful a death possible, and you deserve to become homeless trying to pay for any treatment for her.
Very impressive moral compass ya got there, chief.
Comments like Eric’s reflect the success of corporate power and the myth making of right wing think tanks.
The comments he makes in comparing the multi-payer, profit-driven U.S. health care system to the single-payer system are replete with disinformation.
An excellent article debunking the many myths is John P. Geyman’s MYTHS AND MEMES ABOUT SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH INSURANCE IN THE UNITED STATES: A REBUTTAL TO CONSERVATIVE CLAIMS [PDF]
For example, Eric repeats the right-wing canard that people have to wait longer in single-payer systems for health care. Geyman’s factual analysis includes a chart which reveals that “access to health care in the US is worse even for those with above average income.”
Canadians have experienced a significant improvement in access since single-payer went into effect nationally as compared to initially only at the Province level.
There has been problems with overcrowding in emergency rooms in the U.S. and Canada, but the problem is especially acute in the U.S.
A typical extension of the Canadian access problem is the canard that Canadians find it necessary to travel to the U.S. to get needed care.
The list goes on, and on, but, sadly, the knowledge base of people like Eric are, at best, the product of the corporate owned media, at worst, the Fox Propaganda Network.
Having been spoon fed so much B.S., they simply don’t have a clue how to react to an article, such as mine. The inconvenient truth contained in this article does not fit into Eric’s disinformation bubble. Ergo, in Eric’s mind, it is my article which is “stupid,” and not he.
OT
Hey Disillusioned, I feel like this battle has taken our eye off of this battle…
Can WE (as a people of one conscience)get someone in CONedgress to sponser a bill that states:
The United States of America will never again start and pursue a war without Congressional Declaration of WAR which includes economic dominance/war against a people(economic take over) by ourselves and with other countries. And in the event war is ever declared again, that war is to be fought with only our trained military, by a draft if necessary. I’m certain they are as ashamed of what we have devolved into,(if they are more than a sexually or otherwise corruptaproveable compromised puppet) as I am, when they stop to weigh the totality of their actions against eternalty. Hopefully, a handful of good legislators will word it a little better than me, and push it to the forefront!
Ernest, wow, very well written piece. The “democracy deficit ” you mention reminds me of when congress was getting calls/emails 1000 to one against telecom immunity (for illegal spying)
but that overwhelming consensus of ALL their constituents meant exactly zero. They ignored completely the wishes of those who elected them and gave the huge corporations what the huge corporations demanded. Sad
It can be reversed but i’m afraid it will take folks doing the tea-bagging to have their wife, kids, parents and favorite pro wrestler all suffer same fate Brad mentions.
I think, Camusrebel, that Chomsky said it best:
“The will of the public is banned from the political arena.”
I was amazed to hear on Ron Reagan Jr’s show today that 8 states and DC allow insurance companies to treat domestic abuse as a pre-existing condition. Not only this, but an amendment was proposed in 2006 to outlaw this practice, and 10 Republican senators voted against it, effectively killing the measure.
Compassionate conservatism no doubt.
I dunno Eric, maybe I’d rather have everyone covered with the offchance that someone doesn’t get an elective surgery when they want it, or the guy with the ass cyst gets a deferment (again) while the 15 year old girl who needs a liver transplant gets it. That shows one of your cards – we have a classist system in this country. Poor people are far more likely to have substandard care, if any. I think what it comes down to is that some people feel they are entitled to be first in line for everything, and if accomodating the poor means extending their wait for services a day (or even an hour)…
let them eat cake, right?
We know how that one turned out. (It’d be fine by me, btw)
Brad (#3) —
LOL! These “Christians” are mentioned in the 25th chapter of Matthew:
Note that these are on His left, not stage left, ie., He is facing them, so they are on the right side of the crowd.
Canning, Esq. (#4) —
These talking points are getting so tiresome, about Canadians crossing the border to get health care, and so easily refuted. Paul Krugman refers to a very rigorous study published at Health Affairs, called Phantoms In The Snow: Canadians’ Use Of Health Care Services In The United States which summarizes itself in this sentence:
Excellent article of yours, by the way:
“America needs private carriers for health care like . . . ” like it needs private bankers loaning us our own money at a discount, and telling us how much to inflate the currency by.
Ancient (#5) —
The only power we can have over the Deep State is our numbers, and that only in our resources, upon which they feed. By denying blood supply to this health insurance cancer, we will significantly limit their free hand in other areas. I’m convinced that John Perkins’ new book coming out Nov. 10, in which he promises to offer real hope based on intelligent witholding of our cash from the corporations, has real potential. His interview with Alex Jones recently convinced me he is onto something of great value.
Until we get more power than we have now, the legislators will go on being owned by them from whom they must beg $20,000 a day to stay in office.
“The adjusters now employed by the insurance industry could go to work in a government run system”
Good post but please be careful not to fall into the right-wing framing of language.
Do we refer to “Government run” police?
No
Do we refer to public libraries as being “government run”?
Of course not.
Do we refer to fire departments are being “government run”?
Nope.
So it makes no sense to use the phrase “government run” (which is calculated by the right to scare people) to refer to a public or publicly administered universal choose-your-own-doctor plan of Medicare For All (or Medicare Plus for All as an improved version
The phrase “ObamaCare”is another trap too many on the left have stepped right into, and have chosen to adopt another of the right-wing’s phrases.
This is a mistake on many levels.
There’s criticism and there’s personal attacks and demonization.
Criticism is, of course, legitimate and indeed NECESSARY for the Left to have.
Making it a personal attack by the phrase “ObamaCare” really gives currency to personal-hatred that the Right hopes to foment (that turns into pictures of Obama as Hitler in the more extreme right wing circles and to less extreme forms, but still toxic, in mainstream Right circles)
So this is a loser on principled grounds (the left should stick to criticism not personal attacks; indeed no matter how many times the lie is repeated that the left “hated Bush” so much in fact for 99% of us/them it was about strongly disagreeing with or even “hating” his policies and the effects of those policies)
It’s a loser on pragmatic grounds: it gives more energy to the Right’s personalized-attacks against “foreign born” and “Funny name” and “evil leftist-extremist” Obama the man
It’s also a loser on a third ground, namely it’s inaccurate; it’s more accurately the Obama-Congress plan since he is not repeating Bill Clinton’s mistake and letting Congress play a huge role in shaping the bill…
But the first two reasons are the real reasons why the left, including Mr. Canning, I respectfully submit, should stop using the term “ObamaCare” and in the future be vigilant against any other phrases or terms which fall into the right-wing framings and inaccuracies outlined above.
Ed, while I respect your observations, I think you’ve taken George Lakoff too literally.
Lakoff’s Don’t think of an elephant is a polemic intended to utilize framing for the purpose of getting Democrats elected.
Here, to paraphrase Brad Friedman, the issue is not Left or Right framing. It’s about right and wrong.
I chose ObamaCare not to aid the Right but to underscore what I see as a $900 billion scam being advanced by a President who fraudulently promised “change we can believe in” when he intended, all along, to sell out the American people to the health care insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies.
I would respectfully suggest you take the time to read my earlier piece “Wing-Nut Mobs Provide Cover for Obama/Baucus Health Care Betrayal†and watch the video containing Ralph Nader’s assessment.
In responding to the President’s Aug. 16 New York Times editorial in which he said : “In the end, this isn’t about politics. This is about people’s lives and livelihoods,” I wrote:
While I would concede that my politics are significantly left of center, when I write for this blog, I do so not as a politician or even as an attorney but as a citizen-journalist.
As Bill Moyers, who has been referred to as the conscience of American journalism, observed in Moyers on America:
“Powerful people” would include the President of the United States irrespective of whether he is a Democrat or a Republican.
And so, I wrote a piece calling out ObamaCare as a scam because that’s the way I see it.
With respect to your second comment, Ed, I am not reluctant to refer to “government-run” or even to “democratic socialism.”
I will not run away from what is good and right simply because the ideologues of the Fox News Network have sought to smear it.
The answer is not to scurry around, trying to find some other word but to meet the right-wing canard head-on.
Consider, for example, Jim Hightower’s immensely successful assault, in Thieves in High Places, on the right-wing myth that governments should be run like private corporations.
The examples you cite, police and fire departments, are ideal examples for debunking the myth that the public interest is better served by private, for profit, corporations than it is when it is “government-run.”
In a truly democratic society, we are the government! So “government-run” translates into a system subject to democratic control.
Another example would be the disastrous experimentation with the hiring of private mercenaries like Blackwater to replace functions that should be carried out a “government-run” military. This has produced an explosion of expense and lack of accountability.
Instead of running away from the truth — that a democratically run “government” system is far superior to authoritarian, privately owned systems — your method of framing amounts to a concession to the lie — that private corporations are somehow better.
On a much broader scale, Republicans have resurrected the myth that unregulated “free markets” are somehow related to “freedom” when, in reality, these “so-called” free markets create enormous wealth disparity, destroy the environment and, by translation of wealth into power via control of the media and politicians on the corporate dole, unregulated capitalism destroys democracy. Indeed, as we are painfully learning for the second time since 1930, in the end, unregulated free market capitalism destroys the economy as well.
Instead of running from the word “socialism,” progressives should be expounding on its virtues, for, in truth, there can be no meaningful political democracy without a measure of economic democracy.