[CitizensTruth] The Government can ...

[Chuck Minne]

When "Public Options" Serve the Public - and When They Don't
Thursday 03 September 2009
by: Lawrence S. Wittner 
  

Dr. Wittner points out that there is a successful "public option" in place for fire and police protection. (Photo: Thomas Hawk / Flickr) 
  

    Currently, there is nothing more controversial in President Barack Obama's health care reform proposal than the "public option." Much of the controversy, of course, has been generated by private insurance companies, determined to safeguard their hefty profits, and by Republican politicians, eager to destroy anything that might redound to the benefit of the Democrats. Even so, a little clear thinking on the subject of public programs might illuminate their advantages and disadvantages.
 
    In fact, there are numerous "public options" in American life, with many of them rooted deep in the nation's history. In the area of education, there are public schools; in recreation, public parks; in travel, public roads; in fire-fighting, public fire departments; in law enforcement, public police forces; in culture, public libraries; in transportation, public bus and train lines; in mail delivery, the post office; in sanitation, public water supply plumbing, and sewers; in energy, public power; in old-age security, Social Security; in nutrition, public school lunch programs. Where did the notion ever come from that public programs were somehow "un-American"?
 

Continued at:  http://www.truthout.org/090309A?n
 
Kucinich is for Single Payer, but he has also proposed letting the states go single payer if the Feds do not. His Health Care ideas are here:
 
http://kucinich.us/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2806
 
 "The hotly-debated HR3200, the so-called "health care reform" bill, is nothing less than corporate welfare in the guise of social welfare and reform. It is a convoluted mess. The real debate which we should be having is not occurring. 

"Removing the "public option" from a public bill paid for by public money is not in the public interest. What is left is a "private option" paid for with public money. Why should public money be spent on a private option which does not guarantee 100% coverage nor have any cost controls? A true public option would provide 30% savings immediately which would then cover the 1/3rd of the population who presently have no healthcare. 

"Unfortunately, under HR3200, the Government is choosing winners and losers in the private sector; proposing to spend public funds on subsidizing insurance companies who make money not providing health care. This process wil insure only one thing - the expansion of profits. Gone is the debate over cost. 

"As a result of current negotiations, the Medicare Part D rip-off will continue for another decade, further fleecing senior citizens. Drug importation has been dropped, so no inexpensive drugs can be accessed from other nations. 

"Instead we are told the pharmaceutical companies will accept a 2% cut in the growth rate of their profits - this they call cost control! "
 
An older Kucinich page of DK info is here:

http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dennis_Kucinich_Health_Care.htm


  
Excerpted from: The Independent UK 
  
Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."  
A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue – but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off.   
It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly – while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.   
These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".   
This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed – as one Republican congressman put it – that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them. 
 

--- On Thu, 9/3/09, Mike Kirk <mjkirk12 at yahoo.com> wrote:


From: Mike Kirk <mjkirk12 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ...
To: "Hal Snyder" <hal at drxyzzy.org>
Cc: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net
Date: Thursday, September 3, 2009, 4:47 PM






Hal,

My primary opposition is sending more money to Washington - they seem to re-allocate it for other purposes (war, bailouts, foreign aid to dictators, pork projects) that I disagree with. 

If the states were to manage the healthcare option, then I would be more likely to support it - as the funds would have less chance for misuse.

Some needed changes that could be achieved through legislation:
   - Laws requiring all health insurance to be non-profit only
   - Laws to prevent exclusion based on pre-existing conditions
   - Financially reward providers and patients (tax deductions) for taking early preventative healthcare measures to lower costs of catastrophic care.

This might help to improve the problems with the current system - they are probably already there in some form.

But, the three best doctors I know of are:   Dr. Diet,  Dr. Quiet and Dr. Merryman.   :-)

Regards,
-Mike

P.S.  Peter Schiff on cosmetic surgery.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uMh7MwLOpc  Start at time: 05:30 min





From: Hal Snyder <hal at drxyzzy.org>
To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net
Sent: Thursday, September 3, 2009 2:05:58 PM
Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ...

Thanks, Mike. 


Back at you:


Why We Need Government-Run Universal Socialized Health Insurance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jng4TnKqy6A


The topic is health insurance, but it could just as easily be public works, gearing up for sustainable energy, healing and protecting the environment, relocalizing our economy, dealing with peak oil/soil/water etc.


I think there are good reasons people shift toward either libertarian or liberal (or you could say anarchist vs. socialist to be inflammatory) poles.



On Sep 3, 2009, at 1:33 PM, Mike Kirk wrote:




Funny (but true) parody song:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO2eh6f5Go0
-----Inline Attachment Follows-----


_______________________________________________
CitizensTruth mailing list
CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth
website: http://citizenstruth.info



      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/citizenstruth/attachments/20090903/9a56cefb/attachment-0001.html>